Browsing by Author "Marshall, Graham R."

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Alleviating Poverty by Linking Smallholders with Agribusiness: Roles of Social Capital and Common Property
(2006) Marshall, Graham R.; Patrick, I.W.; Muktasam, A.; Ambarawati, I.G.A.A.
"Recent decades have witnessed a marked acceleration of agro- industrialisation processes in much of the developing world. This is opening up new opportunities for smallholders, even in isolated areas, to escape poverty by trading in the resulting new markets. There is, however, increasing recognition of the constraints faced by poor smallholders in becoming competitive within such markets. There has also been deepening awareness of the knowledge gaps impeding the design of institutional arrangements capable of surmounting these constraints. The concept of 'social capital' has found itself at the centre of efforts to address these knowledge gaps. "The focus in this paper is on examining what is known about: the challenges of ensuring that the poor share equitably in the benefits of market liberalisation; the extent to which these challenges involve social capital issues; and how such social capital issues might be addressed most effectively. Included in the review is a summary of findings relevant to these issues from recent research in Indonesia - concerned with contract farming and micro-finance delivery, respectively - involving two of the present authors. A proposal for further research involving all four authors is also presented. The research aim is to evaluate the role that social capital plays in Bali and Lombok (eastern Indonesia) in reducing rural poverty by helping smallholders access market opportunities arising from trade liberalisation. A particular focus would be on understanding of the conditions under which social capital in the form of common property institutions helps smallholders to access such opportunities."
Community-based Regional Delivery of Natural Resource Management: Building System-wide Capacities to Motivate Voluntary Farmer Adoption of Conservation Practices
(2008) Marshall, Graham R.
"Since the 1980s, community-based natural resource management (NRM) in rural areas of Australia has evolved from its origins with small groups of farmers to the present situation, under the regional delivery model, where regional bodies are expected to foster community ownership and voluntary cooperation from the large and diverse populations inhabiting their regions. This scaling up of expectations regarding community-based approaches has brought with it substantial challenges. "The research discussed in this report examines the potential of nested multi-level systems of community-based NRM to help address these challenges. On the basis of case studies in three NRM regions in Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia, respectively the report identifies eight guidelines for leaders and decision-makers at all levels of the regional delivery model to apply in adaptively designing community-based approaches capable of motivating farmers cooperation and thereby sustaining the natural resources under their management."
Crafting Cooperation in the Commons: An Economic Analysis of Prospects for Collaborative Environmental Governance
(2001) Marshall, Graham R.
"A collaborative vision for agri-environmental governance whereby collaboration among stakeholders in addressing problems supposedly leads them to cooperate more in implementing solutions emerged in the 1980's. This vision was prompted by mounting dissatisfaction with the progressive vision upon which such governance had been founded, a vision that had resulted in compartmentalised, paternalistic governance. It was based on a modern worldview regarding social behaviour as mechanistic and concerns about scientific progress as irrational. Accomplishments to date in pursuit of this collaborative vision through the favoured vehicle of integrated catchment management (ICM) have mostly been disappointing. While governments remain outwardly optimistic that administrative refinements to ICM programs will ultimately deliver success in this pursuit, others argue that systemic cultural changes are required. Prominent among the latter's concerns is the complacency with which leaders have addressed the challenge of translating the vision into practice."
Designing Robust Common Property Regimes for Collaboration Towards Rural Sustainability
(Earthscan, 2007) Brunckhorst, David; Marshall, Graham R.
"The 'outback' of Australia represents a large part of the continent, and is characterised in large part by rangelands -- arid and semi-arid landscapes with occasional monsoon-like rains and low productivity soils used primarily for grazing. These social-ecological systems can be differentiated as particular biocultural or landscape region, such as the northern savanna. Despite the sometimes large distances between neighbours, these are interdependent systems with external influences, including those of distant governments. In understanding, facilitating, or possibly re-designing institutional arrangements for collective action and resource governance in the outback, knowledge by local people of the design characteristics of robust community-scale institutions will be important. Appropriate business structures might offer a supportive framework for collective decisions that facilitate adaptive management enhancing sustainability and endurance. "After summarising the characteristics of enduring common property regimes, we draw on three projects we have been closely involved with to describe how legal entities or corporate structures might be employed to enhance robustness of the institutional arrangements. All are Australian grazing systems, one in the Mallee rangelands and Riverland in South Australia, and two on the relatively richer soils of the New England Tablelands of New South Wales. Each example involves the development of a form of common property regime for collective decision-making, action and governance of landholder groups and/or communities. Facilitating and supporting (but not stifling) this institutional development through legal entities or corporate structures can contribute robustness. Balancing individual versus collective rationale, and risk management of internal and external stresses enhances robust capabilities. Some corporate structures or combinations of entities might, in different ways, be useful in the development and evolution of robust institutional arrangements for collective use and governance of various resources across multiple scales of ownership. "Anderies and co-authors differentiated resilience, which arises from spontaneous self-organising processes within a system (such as an ecosystem or a social network), from robustness that arises in addition from conscious efforts to increase a system's capacity to adapt to internal and external stresses. The more we understand how to facilitate robustness in linked social-ecological systems, the better equipped we become to design institutional arrangements capable of enhancing the resilience of those ecosystems we depend on (Anderies et al., 2004). The on-ground experiments discussed in this chapter seek particularly to understand how groups of farmers can move towards sustainable natural resource management and enterprise development by crafting institutional arrangements enabling them to manage their combined resources cooperatively. Such arrangements can contribute both resilience and robustness. In building robustness, we are particularly interested here in how to take advantage of opportunities the existing suite of business structures (supported by a state's legal system) might contribute to robustness of common property regimes."
From Culture to Cooperation: Insights from an Australian Program of Collaborative Environmental Governance
(2001) Marshall, Graham R.
"A collaborative vision for environmental governance in Australia whereby collaboration among stakeholders in addressing problems supposedly leads them to cooperate more in implementing solutions emerged in the 1980s. However, accomplishments to date in pursuit of this vision through the favoured organisational vehicle of integrated catchment management have mostly been disappointing. Moreover, the lack of a coherent theory of how collaboration increases cooperativeness has limited the learning that has arisen from the pursuit efforts that have been made. It is proposed in this paper that recent developments in the new-institutional theory of collective action can satisfy this need for theory. An overview of the relevant developments is presented before proceeding to explore how this theory accords with actual experiences within a particular case of collaborative environmental governance. The case involves the Land and Water Management Planning Program in NSWs central-Murray region (centred on Deniliquin) that has continued as a community-government partnership since its establishment in 1991. The applicability of the theory to this setting is explored through qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with thirty key informants. In reporting the findings from the qualitative analysis, particular attention is paid to the effects of informal elements of local culture such as trust, leadership, social capital and social norms that the theory suggests are vital to explaining how collaborative problem-solving can foster cooperative implementation of solutions."
From Words to Deeds: A Study of Collective Action by Irrigators in Enforcing their Commitments to Adopt Conservation Practices
(2002) Marshall, Graham R.
"Collective action in conserving common-pool natural resources involves the problem of enforcing individuals' commitments to cooperate. Historically, many resource-conservation programs have failed to meet their expectations due to the high transaction (including political) costs of government enforcement of compliance by individuals with what they have committed themselves to. One response to this has been devolution of enforcement of this kind from governments to industry-based organisations. This has followed from a belief that firms are usually more prepared to cooperate with industry organisations because of the greater likelihood that their approach to enforcement will accord with their norms and values. This paper reports the findings from a case study that assessed the validity of this belief in a single context. The case involves a group of Australian farmers attempting to overcome their irrigation salinity and waterlogging problems by agreeing inter alia to grant to their jointly-owned company (supplying them with irrigation services) powers to sanction them individually if they fail to comply with a conservation strategy to which they have collectively committed themselves. The study involved qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews as well as quantitative analysis of responses from a survey of 235 farm businesses. It was found that the farmers are more prepared to accept sanctioning from their company than they would be from government. Nevertheless, their longstanding suspicion of authority generally has not been overcome overnight. There remains considerable scope for the company to reduce the transaction costs of its enforcement function by continuing to work at gaining trust from the farmers that this function is necessary and is being carried out in their best interests."
Informal Cooperation in the Commons? Evidence from a Survey of Australian Farmers Facing Irrigation Salinity
(2000) Marshall, Graham R.
"Land and water management plans developed for the four irrigation districts surrounding Deniliquin in the River Murray catchment are said to be at the leading-edge of Australian institutional innovations for integrated resource management. Farmers have been strongly involved in the development of the Plans and in deliberations regarding their implementation. Implementation accountabilities have been devolved to Murray Irrigation Limited, a company wholly owned by its irrigator customers. The plans primarily focus on an emerging tragedy of the commons, with the area's soils are predicted to become increasingly degraded by salinisation unless local cooperation is achieved in limiting watertable recharge. The irrigator-owned company can thus be regarded as a common property regime insofar as its watertable management function is concerned. "The community ownership rhetoric behind these institutional developments seems to signify an attempt to come to terms with the high, often prohibitive, transaction costs typically associated with formal governance of a common-pool resource. The reasoning appears to be that local human and social capital is the key to finding institutional arrangements which realise the potential of local informal capacity for self-organisation and thereby lessen the need for formal governance. "In an effort to go beyond anecdotal evidence of the alleged contribution of the informal in this instance, a face- to-face survey of 235 farm businesses was undertaken. This allowed the influence of various products of social capital, including trust, reciprocity and norms, on both farmer commitment to, and intention to comply with, their district's plan to be tested statistically. Findings are discussed in the paper."
Multi-level Governance and On-farm Adoption of Conservation Practices in Three Australian Regions
(2008) Marshall, Graham R.
"Significant steps have occurred in Australia towards devolving responsibilities for natural resource management (NRM) to community-based regional bodies, especially in motivating farmers to adopt priority conservation practices. A challenge remains in effectively engaging the large populations covered by these bodies. Following previous research indicating the value of nested multi-level (i.e. polycentric) governance in addressing such challenges, this paper examines whether nested systems can confer advantages by strengthening farmers cooperation with the regional delivery model. This examination involved double-censored regression analyses of data from mail-out farmer surveys in three regions. The findings suggest that community-based approaches are capable under the regional delivery model of motivating greater cooperation from farmers than otherwise possible. They highlight the importance of farmers coming to adopt reciprocity strategies in their key relationships under this model. It seems subregional bodies have an advantage over regional bodies in eliciting such behaviour from farmers because the former are better positioned to engage them effectively. This indicates the value of a polycentric approach to community-based NRM within regions, at least where capacities below the regional level justify devolution of significant responsibilities to lower levels in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity."
Nesting, Subsidiarity, and Community-based Environmental Governance beyond the Local Scale
(2008) Marshall, Graham R.
"Community-based approaches to environmental management have become widely adopted over the last two decades. From their origins in grassroots frustrations with governmental inabilities to solve local environmental problems, these approaches are now sponsored frequently by governments as a way of dealing with such problems at much higher spatial levels. However, this 'up-scaling' of community-based approaches has run well ahead of knowledge about how they might work. This article explores how Elinor Ostrom's 'nesting principle' for robust common property governance of large-scale common-pool resources might inform future upscaling efforts. In particular, I consider how the design of nested governance systems for large-scale environmental problems might be guided by the principle of subsidiarity. The challenges of applying this principle are illustrated by Australia's experience in up-scaling community-based natural resource management from local groups comprising 20-30 members to regional bodies representing hundreds of thousands of people. Seven lessons are distilled for fostering community-based environmental governance as a multi-level system of nested enterprises."
Participative Planning and Informal Self-Governance of Agri-Environmental Conflicts: Lessons from a Survey of Australian Farmers Facing Irrigation Salinity
(2000) Marshall, Graham R.
"The purpose of this paper is to contribute to empirical knowledge about the scope for informal governance, and the voluntary cooperation it yields, to reduce the costs of resolving agrienvironmental conflicts. The new-institutional tradition of economic theory that informed the empirical modelling is reviewed in section 2. The case study setting is described in section 3, and the method discussed in section 4. The models estimated are specified in section 5, with the results discussed in section 6. Finally, some concluding comments are offered."
Polycentricity and Adaptive Governance
(2015) Marshall, Graham R.
"The concept of adaptive governance has become increasingly advocated by scholars of social-ecological systems as essential for sustainability as we proceed into a more complex and less predictable world. This concept has become closely associated in this research community with polycentricity and related governance concepts. As the number of scholars identifying these concepts as elements of adaptive governance has increased, however, a number of issues have arisen which could impede clear communication both within the research community, and also between this community and the political, and policy-making and practitioners communities that could incorporate these concepts into their deliberations over how to achieve more adaptive forms of governance. This paper identifies a number of such these issues and proposes how they might be resolved. These proposals are summarised as follows: a governance arrangement should be regarded as polycentric when its constituent decision-making entities exhibit de facto considerable autonomy from one another, regardless of whether the entities are formally independent of one another; polycentricity should be understood generally as an attribute of polycentric governance arrangements rather than more specifically of polycentric governance systems; i.e., it should refer to the degree to which the decision-making entities comprising a governance arrangement exhibit de facto considerable autonomy from one another; a clear distinction needs to maintained between the coherence of a polycentric governance arrangement (where sufficient coherence connotes a polycentric governance system) and its performance, and the subsidiarity principle should be used as a key guide to crafting arrangements that are well-performing as well as coherent."
Polycentricity and Citizenship in Environmental Governance
(Cambridge University Press, 2019) Marshall, Graham R.; Malik, Anas; Thiel, Andreas; Blomquist, William A.; Garrick, D.E.
"This chapter is concerned with relationships between governance arrangements and environmental citizenship, and with the challenges of establishing and sustaining governance conducive to this citizenship. The significance of this concern is illustrated by Australian experiences with governance arrangements seeking to promote citizenship among rural landholders in natural resources conservation. In considering this concern we take our lead from a line of thinking about polycentric governance that was developed by Vincent Ostrom, who drew in turn from de Tocqueville’s early 19th century analysis of the American democratic ‘experiment’. Ostrom identified ‘the way people think and relate to one another’ (pertaining to the meta-constitutional level of analysis in the Institutional Analysis and Development framework) as fundamentally significant for meeting the challenges of achieving polycentric governance capable of promoting citizenship, and also the citizenship required to sustain polycentric governance. Key insights drawn by Ostrom regarding the meta-constitutional conditions required for forms of polycentric governance conducive to citizenship are reviewed in this chapter to suggest areas for continuing research into the viability of self-governing polycentric orders. Progress in empirical investigation of relationships between polycentric governance and environmental citizenship is reviewed. One relationship of this kind is illustrated with reference to attempts at policy reform towards environmental watering in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin."
A Social-Ecological Systems Framework for Food Systems Research: Accommodating Transformation Systems and their Products
(2015) Marshall, Graham R.
"The social-ecological systems (SES) framework was developed to support communication across the multiple disciplines concerned with sustainable provision and/or appropriation of common-pool resources (CPRs). Transformation activities (e.g. processing, distribution, retailing) in which value is added to resource units appropriated from CPRs were assumed in developing the framework to be exogenous to the SES of focal concern. However, provision and appropriation of CPRs are nowadays often closely integrated with the market economy, so significant interdependence exists between many CPR provision/appropriation activities and the activities in which appropriated resource units are transformed into the products ultimately marketed. This paper presents a modified version of the SES framework designed to better account for transformation activities in order to be more suitable for diagnosing those sustainability problems where it is inappropriate to define all such activities as exogenous to the SES of focal concern. The need for such modification was identified in a research project examining the challenges faced by Cambodian cattle-owning smallholders in accessing value chains for premium-priced beef. Hence the immediate focus was on strengthening the SES framework’s value for facilitating a multi-disciplinary diagnostic approach to food system research projects of this kind. The modified SES framework’s potential in this respect was illustrated by a preliminary application that drew on literature reviewed for the Cambodian project. Significant further potential exists in using the modified framework as a foundation from which to develop a version that is suitable for application to SESs in which transformation systems are appropriately represented as endogenous. Maintaining consistency with the standard SES framework will enable communication to occur more effectively between food system researchers and CPR scholars more generally."
Towards Design Principals for Nesting in Australian Watershed Management
(2004) Marshall, Graham R.
"Despite the complexity of watershed management, policy-makers in Australia and other countries have given little systematic attention to the challenge of learning how to organise it effectively. Meanwhile, evidence has emerged that community-based organisational systems with enduring success in addressing complex problems of natural resource management are likely to consist of ‘multiple layers of nested enterprises’. This paper considers the contribution that organisational nesting of this kind could make to improving the performance of watershed management programs, particularly in Australia. After reviewing the theoretical advantages of the organisational nesting concept for complex problems, the focus of the paper shifts to identifying on the basis of a literature review a set of preliminary design principles that, after an appropriate process of ‘ground-truthing’ and refinement, might be used to guide application of the concept to watershed management, at least in Australia. The set identified contains 24 preliminary design principles. This includes 10 structure-related principles organised under four headings (i.e., base-level units, boundaries, rules, and subsidiarity) and 14 process-related principles organised under 12 headings (i.e., catalysing voluntary cooperation, formalising organisational processes, pacing organisational growth, purposefulness, recruiting leadership, learning, participation in decision-making, monitoring and enforcement, conflict resolution, government recognition, deliberative decision-making, and leading by example). The value of this set for actual watershed management programs in Australia is to be explored over the next few years through case studies of three such programs."