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Adapting the IAD Framework to Analyze a Cross-level Decision-making Process of a Mega Project: The Port of Sao Sebastiao, Northern Coast of São Paulo, Brazil
(2014) Feital, Marcela da S.; Brondízio, Eduardo S.; Ferreira, Lúcia da C.
"The approval of infrastructure megaprojects involves negotiation arenas at different levels. From the discussion of long-term goals to the crafting of rules defining the nature and scope of a project, the decision-making process brings together actors with different goals, worldviews, and negotiating powers. This article examines the multiple level arenas associated with the expansion of the seaport in the Northern coast of São Paulo, and its action situations such as its environmental licensing process and public hearings. The environmental licensing process allows us to examine links of different interaction levels among actors from national, state and local contexts. In order to understand local dynamics and explore these article goals, it is important to understand the wider context in which this action situation and its deployment work in. This way, the aim of this article is showing the different action levels related to the decision arena about Sao Sebastiao port's extension, the main components of each level, and the feedback relations among them. This analysis was possible by an adaptation of the Institutional Analysis and Development framework (IAD framework) which enabled the identification of a network of action-situations (national/regional/local), their components and interlinkages."
Between the Local and the International: Sustainability of Brazilian Rainforest Products for the Natural Cosmetics Market
(2014) Veiga, João Paulo Cândia; Zacareli, Murilo Alves
"This working paper provides the preliminary results of the research involving local extractive communities in the Amazon forest. The aim is to assess the impact of the partnership between public and private actors in terms of socioeconomic development and environmental sustainability in a network of stakeholders and local extractives families that manage natural resources--seeds and fruits--as a Common Pool Resource (CPR). In order to achieve that, two field researches have been executed--January and March--within two different regions--Salvaterra and Bragança--in the state of Pará which is located in the North of Brazil. Both quantitative and qualitative data have been collected through surveys conducted among 190 families."
Building and Sustaining Peace and Security in Multiethnic Nigeria
(2014) Okotoni, Olu; Awotokun, Kunle
"Since Independence in 1960, Nigeria has been inundated with series of peace and security challenges, which have risen to an unprecedented level in the last one decade. Some of the major causes among several others include tribal and ethnic affinity and allegiances, bad leadership, prolonged military rule, large scale corruption, institutional failure, poverty, religious bigotry, inequitable distribution of wealth, deplorable conditions of social and infrastructural amenities, unemployment and underemployment, unreliable security agents/institutions and porous border entry points. These have resulted in serious security threats to life and property in various parts of the country. For example, kidnapping for rituals and ransom is very common in the Eastern part of the country; armed robbery in southwestern geopolitical zone; and religious killings in the northern part of the country. The federal, state and local governments as well as nongovernmental organizations have made several efforts to address the problem with little or no results. The paper therefore discusses and analyses the various causes; examines case study episodes; assesses efforts made at addressing the problem and proposes the way forward that can assist in building and sustaining peace and security in the country."
Climate Risk Polycentricity and the IAD Framework
(2014) Abel, Troy D.; Stephan, Mark; Daley, Dorothy
"Climate change is commonly cast as a significant governance challenge demanding national and international actions. Subsequently, political science research tends to focus on the policy and politics of nation-states, their domestic institutions, and/or their interplay in international venues. However, thousands of industrial facilities and hundreds of subnational US governments are active in American climate risk governance. Therefore, we argue that more research should attend to climate governance's subnational policy and politics, their promise, and their performance. In the vacuum of national policies to mitigate and adapt to climate-change, subnational arrangements offer an ideal opportunity to study not only the spontaneity of polycentrism, but whether or not it is leading to better environmental outcomes. This paper integrates polycentric theory and the environmental performance dilemma within the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework to guide the analysis of the multilevel comparative policy setting of U.S. environmental federalism. State and local government initiatives, or lack thereof, on climate change offer a quasi-experimental setting to examine the detailed decision-making and the role of information within polycentric governance arrangements. This paper adapts Ostrom's IAD framework for this task and presents hypotheses to explore: (1) institutional diversity; (2) multilevel institutional nesting; (3) analytic deliberation; and their relation to (4) Greenhouse Gas Emission (GHG) reduction performance. The research design developed in this paper advances theory development and environmental policy analysis with the IAD framework to clarify key conceptual and methodological issues that enables the investigation and diagnosis of the institutions and interactions driving U.S. climate risk governance with both large and small-N studies."
Co-Evolution of Norms and Cooperation
(2014) Jiménez Tovar, Fernando; Lara Rivero, Arturo A.
"Cooperation is profitable from an evolutionary point of view as long as individuals have the right combination of cognitive and emotional faculties that enable them to extract the beliefs and values that are hidden on the behavior of other individuals. The ability of imitating intentions and not only actions has informational and regulatory reasons in social life that can generate cooperative equilibriums. Using simulation models it is possible to study how the process of institutional evolution affects the evolution of cooperation in a group of agents involved in a social dilemma situation. ADICO grammar proposed by Elinor Ostrom (2005) allows us to accurately classify and study the process of institutional evolution between different types of institutional statements. In this paper we use a cellular automata as an idealized version of a complex adaptive system and discuss how a shared strategy (AIC) can evolve to become a norm (ADIC) and what is the impact of this process on the evolution of cooperation in the system. It can be shown that this process of institutional evolution can promote a great diversity of norms from a single shared strategy. It is observed that the process of co-evolution of norms and cooperation produces better outcomes for populations of individuals who develop internal and external delta values compared to cases where no institutional evolution is achieved."
Coalescing Efforts towards a Thrivable World: A Pattern Language for Systemic Change
(2014) Finidori, Hélène
"This presentation examines engagement and the drivers for transformative action, and the conditions under which disparate efforts of all kinds can coalesce to generate systemic change and bring about a new paradigm generative of thrivability, sustainability and equity. Challenging the assumption that open groups of change agents and activists can agree on the representation and materialization of a shared overarching vision, goals and priorities (even on the commons themselves!), it places itself in the context of an ecology for transformative action with its diversity, systems and processes, and examines a variety of forms of engagement under the lens of action logics. Action logics are derived from leadership and psychological development theory, generally used in constructive developmental approaches. They reflect the affective, behavioral and cognitive modalities which drive people's thinking, experience and action. In this presentation, action logics are applied horizontally as a meaning-making framework to understand the nature and processes of engagement and to examine what type of common underlying logic, and in particular of commons logic, could manifest as common ground across action logics. Ultimately it opens up further areas of research and practical applications, and in particular the development of a pattern language and other tools for bringing to awareness the common ground elements that would help 'activate' and leverage agency wherever it can be found (and in particular in the mainstream) in a way that nurtures the commons at all levels and in all its dimensions."
Collective Action in Forums of Collaborative Governance in Sabesp's Clean Stream Program, Programa Córrego Limpo, in São Paulo, Brazil
(2014) Rodrigues, Maira
"This proposal aims to discuss Elinor Ostrom's work in comparison with the Brazilian literature on social participation. For purposes of the discussion, the empirical object is forums of collaborative governance, part of the 'Clean Stream Program', Programa Córrego Limpo, a program initiated by Sabesp, the Sanitation Company of the State of São Paulo, Brazil, with the main goal of cleaning up streams within the city. The forums were implemented in five stream areas in the city and were inspired by Ostrom's Institutional Analysis Framework - IAD, to encourage collaboration between the several actors affected and involved with these streams: the sanitation company Sabesp and the residents and leaders in these areas. The analysis of collective action between State and society, especially civil society, has been elaborated in Brazil from the analytical key of social participation. The principal variables of this literature are institutional design, civil society organization, political will and political culture. The goal of this work is to discuss the comparison possibilities among the categories of these writings with the variables that influence the action arena for Elinor Ostrom. That is, to explore the comparison of the institutional design with the rules that govern the relationships among the actors; and civil society organization, political will and culture, with the attributes of communities where the actors are located. However, Ostrom's third action arena variable, the attributes concerning the physical environment of the community where the action takes place, is not taken into consideration in the Brazilian literature and the initial analysis of the forums indicates that this variable is indeed relevant."
Democracy and Sustainability: How does the Democratic Process Affect Sustainability?
(2014) Myint, Tun; Lambert, Brian J.
"The idea of democracy defined the 20th century as democratic movements spread across the globe. Similarly, one of the defining ideas of the 21st century is the idea of sustainability as the effects of societal development continue to impose ecological changes at the unprecedented rate. In this paper we explore the relationship between democracy and sustainability at the national level. We ask: how does democracy affect sustainability? To answer this question, we develop indices for both democracy and sustainability using national data of 192 countries deposited at the Europa World Yearbook and the World Bank between 1972 and 2005. Then we perform a series of regression analysis to investigate the relationship between democracy and sustainability. The results of the study were illuminating, as it revealed that sustainability was largely falling during the period of study on a per capita basis, yet it was rising on per unit of GDP basis. Of particular noteworthy results were the relatively strong performances of democracies, which tended to perform the best across all groups in terms of per unit GDP figures and also tended to have the highest average sustainability (except for medium income countries) in per capita terms. Our analysis was also revealed that autocracies tended to perform the worst in these measurements, both in per capita and per unit GDP terms. The results of this study show that government type has a discernible impact on the sustainability of a country. On average, democracies tend to outperform autocracies and semi-democracies across the study period."
Description of Social-Ecological Systems Framework Based on Ontology Engineering Theory
(2014) Kumazawa, Terukazu; Matsui, Takanori
"There are a variety of research methods in the field of commons and collective action. By means of these methods various perspectives towards a particular field is provided, but it is difficult to share these perspectives among researchers in different domains smoothly. In addition, it is also difficult for a practitioner to distinguish a difference between the perspectives that researchers have. The social-ecological systems (SESs) framework supports sharing the perspectives by providing the common items. However, in order to facilitate collaboration certainly the method to share mutual difference between perspectives more explicitly is necessary. Ontology engineering, which is one of the base technologies in semantic Web technology, is a method to design some sort of guideline facilitating knowledge-sharing. It enables us to share a mutual difference between perspectives through explicating a definition of a concept. Therefore, this time we aim at describing the framework of SESs by means of an ontology. For this purpose, we first define the concepts reflected by the items in the SESs framework and incorporate these into the ontology dealing with sustainability science. Second, we discuss a variety of semantic relationships between the items in the SESs framework by means of the constructed SS-SESs ontology. Finally, we apply the SS-SES ontology to the particular targets such as water resource management or local community resilience, and discuss how we actually use the SS-SESs ontology in the context of environmental planning and management."
Determinants of Collective Action in the Commons: An Empirical Study of Irrigation in China
(2014) Wang, Yahua; Chen, Chunliang; Tao, Ye
"Irrigation systems have long been used as an important case for studying collective action in the empirical common pool resources (CPRs) literature. Based on a large-scale representative survey of Chinese rural areas, we use econometric analysis to examine the factors that influence collective action in the commons. The novelty of the current study is the introduction of a new ordered collective irrigation measure based on different types of rural irrigation and the subsequent study of labor outflow, a rarely explored but crucial variable in developing countries, and other factors affecting collective irrigation participation. We found that labor outflow had an adverse effect on participation in collective irrigation, and in cases of close proximity to urban centers or towns, widened inequality, and when occurring in hilly areas and areas with historically scarce water resource, the presence of fewer household laborers and poor water endowment tend to reduce the incentives to participate in collective irrigation. These findings remain robust for various equation specifications, taking into account measurement errors on both the dependent and control variables sides, thus contributing some new insights to the existing CPRs literature."
The Development, Composition and Application of the Social-Ecological System Framework
(2014) Bal, Mansee
"The paper presents the development, the composition and the application of the social-ecological systems framework. The paper lays the theoretical and methodological foundation of a research on analysing urban lake systems in India using the social-ecological systems framework. The discussion on urban lake systems in India, however, is kept outside the paper. The social-ecological system framework has a deep intellectual foundation of the philosophy and works of Elinor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom. The chapter begins with a discussion on the works of the Ostroms that led to the development of the social-ecological system framework. The next section is about the SES and includes description of the structure and the component parts of the framework. The final section describes the current applications of the SES and the possible opportunities and challenges of application of the framework with respect to analysing urban lake systems. The paper is a first draft and work in progress and suggestions and comments are highly appreciated."
Extending the Ostrom Perspective in History: Collective Resources in the Kingdom of Naples in the 13th and 18th Centuries
(2014) Bulgarelli, Alessandra
"Historical studies on commons were regarded for a long time as individual cases, local or regional, until the work of Elinor Ostrom provided a solid theoretical approach and allowed the development of comparative projects both in the national and international level. Until then in Italy as in Europe studies focused on the legal aspects of the phenomenon in their broader meaning--such as the establishment of a body of collective goods, its corpus of rules and its conflict--as well as investigating their end which started during the 18th century and continued especially during the liberalization wave of the 19th. In the light of Ostrom results, Garrett Hardin 's thesis concerning the indiscriminate exploitation of the commons has been revised also regarding the past. In reference to some European areas, historians have shown, on the basis of empirical and archival research, the existence of a rules governing the management of the commons capble of regulating and restricting the use of local resources in order to achieve a sustainable management. This paper draws on original archival research focuses on mainland Southern Italy, an area covering over 70,000 km2, regards the period of the XIII-XVIII, and brings together economic, social and institutional aspects of governing the commons there. The examination of the historical evidence reveals the extent to which the conceptual framework developed by Elinor Ostrom can be applied well beyond the original parameters and allows us to recover a rich experience at self- governance where the institutional aspect of endogenous matrix assumes a significant role in economic governance."
Extremist Conflicts, State Failure and Development in Africa: Peace and Governance Options for Citizens
(2014) Olowu, Dele
"This paper reviews the current state of extremist conflicts in different countries of Africa and after analyzing the problem in terms of state failure, provides insights and suggestions based on the work of institutional analysts, including the Ostroms and others like Abraham Kuiper of the Netherlands on how to contain and reverse state failure in the region. The fact that civilian politicians and military authorities have failed to address this problem over the years underscores the need for alternative civic organs to champion the cause of institutional renewal and state resilience. This article targets a group of people whose influence has grown tremendously in Africa: faith based organizations (FBOs), who while being a part of the problem presently may hold the key to transforming the continent. In that sense, they would be playing the historical role which the people of faith have played in the transformation of western societies."
False Rationality and the Tragedy of the Commons: Toward a More Pertinent Approach to Social Dilemmas
(2014) Meyer, Leandro F. F.; Braga, Marcelo José
"In Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future, Edgar Morin points to disjunction, false rationality, reductionism and closed specialization as essential problems that challenge our ability to generate pertinent knowledge in general. The standard theory of social dilemmas offers one of the most striking examples of how pertinent knowledge can be lost amid the rationalizations generated by disciplinary specialization. The latest developments in the study of social dilemmas devote an increasing amount of attention to cognition, belief systems, valuations, and language. However, the developments in this field operate almost entirely under epistemological assumptions that recognize only the instrumental form of rationality and deny that 'value judgments' or 'moral questions' have cognitive content. This standpoint erodes the moral feature of the choice situation and prevents the acknowledgment of the links connecting cognition, inner growth, and moral reasoning. It also deemphasizes the significance of these links to achieving cooperative solutions to many social dilemmas. Concurrently, this standpoint renders mysterious the role of communication and mutual understanding in promoting cooperation in those situations. The presentation brings the epistemological issue to the fore in order to introduce a proposal that enlarges the Institutional Analysis and Development framework by integrating moral cognitivism and Action Logic into it to describe orders of development as discrete meaning making stages. The presentation advances an empirical strategy to test the power of alternative models of human valuation to predict the mixed choices of the participants in social dilemmas experiments under similar institutional conditions, including different uses of communication."
FERMiers Required: Viewing Virtual Environments of Banking and Finance as Watersheds
(2014) Selmier, W. Travis
"This paper conceptualizes financial markets as virtual environments which should be subject to stewardship requirements found in natural environments. As in natural environments, irresponsible self-governance and lax or off-target regulation result in environmental damage and social loss through externalities. The vehicle of watershed governance is proposed as the best-fitting analogy to financial markets governance for seven reasons: 1, scaling the watershed analogy from small to very large fits well with financial markets [community to global]; 2, watersheds and financial markets each consist of a variety of users who 3, tap hydrologic [capital] resources for many different uses; 4, financial markets, like watersheds, are made up of different types of goods, and so 5, better-managed large watersheds are governed through polycentric institutions with a range of public-private governance arrangements; 6, governmental, private sector and mixed agents seek to support and manage [sustainable] exploitation in each; and 7, comparisons of causes and results of environmental degradation between watersheds and financial markets are robust. The paper integrates literature from watershed governance and environmental management with banking and ERM [environmentally responsible management] to lay foundations of this watershed analogy, develop it, then sketch governance principles. Upstream-downstream interlinkage, soil maintenance and degradation, and cross-border riparian negotiations are used to illustrate challenging financial market governance issues. Effectively managing various types of goods and the property rights issues defining those goods types is discussed."
Food Policy and Local Participation: A Case Study of 'Cruzada Nacional Contra el Hambre'
(2014) Gil, Beatriz; Méndez, Obed; Sobrino, Armando
"This essay is an analysis of the first year of implementation of the Cruzada Nacional contra el Hambre (CNCH), main program against hunger in Mexico, in order to provide some ideas to the debate and construction of food policies based on strengthening local governance and active participation of communities protagonists. We remark the usefulness of collective action approach and polycentric governance from the work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom for design, implementation and adjustment of this kind of public policies. The first section of this document describes the state of food security in Mexico, the second and third one analyze the institutional design of CNCH through collective action perspective, finally, the fourth section is a collection of recommendation to improve the CNCH."
Inclusive Growth, Health Foreign Aid and Health Outcomes in Africa
(2014) Ikhide, Sylvanus
"Inclusive growth has been thought of as growth that promotes development, with development understood as comprehensive improvements in multiple dimensions contemplating both living conditions and empowerment. Although what exactly the concept means and how best to measure it has been a subject of much controversy among scholars and development experts, there is a consensus that inclusive growth should reduce poverty and inequality, two of the most prominent ailments that African countries need to grapple with. Unfortunately, efforts aimed at accelerating growth and reducing poverty and inequality in many African countries has not yielded the desired results. No doubt, overall GDP growth rate, driven by surging commodity prices and, perhaps, improvements in economic policy, improved significantly in the period before the global financial crisis averaging about 5.6 per cent a year between 2002 and 2008. Hit by the global financial crisis and steep rise in fuel and food prices, growth declined to about 2.2 per cent in 2009 but immediately recovered at 4.6 per cent in 2010. The uncertainties in North Africa caused growth to dip in 2011 but immediately rebounded in 2012 when a growth rate of 5.0 per cent was recorded. Between 2000 and 2010, six of the ten fastest-growing countries in the world were African-Angola, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Chad and Rwanda. Progress on the MDGs has been rapid and a few of the countries is likely to reach some of the goals by 2015 or immediately after. However, impressive as the recent growth performance may appear, the rates are inadequate and very much below the 7-8 per cent required to halve poverty by 2015."
Individual Level of Globalism and Contribution to Local Public Goods
(2014) Adres, Eitan; Vashdi, Dana R.; Zalmanovitch, Yair
"Globalization processes entail the concerns whether, how, and how far it is feasible to achieve the sort of human cooperation and compliance needed to meet the goals of the state and society such as paying taxes, serving in the armed forces, contributing to social causes, which in other words are understood as contribution to public goods. This quantitative four countries comparative project investigates a new approach to the analysis of globalization and its consequences on contribution to local public goods as an instantiation of national determination and cohesion, in a democratic environment. We propose a new individual-level, bottom-up, approach. This approach claims that while nations may vary in the extent to which they are open to globalization processes, within these nations, people vary in the extent to which they themselves are globalized. We claim that the individual's level of globalism explains some of the variance in the way people resolve the social dilemma of contribution to public goods. In order to assess this process we conducted three economics decision experiments: a public good game, a tax compliance game and a 'real life' experiment of donation to local NGO. We examined the Individual's Level of Globalism (ILG) using a scale we developed and validated, as an explanation for these decisions. The research findings support the hypothesis that on top of the country effect, a more globalized individual has a deficient tax morale, donates less to local NGOs and prefers to adopt the 'free-ride' strategy in a public good game."
Institutions and Adaptation Processes: A Social-Ecological System Approach for the Study of Adaptation to Climate Change
(2014) Epstein, Graham; Sandberg, Audun; Bay-Larsen, Ingrid; Hovelsrud, Grete
"As the international community continues to engage in protracted negotiations over how to implement reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the likelihood that society will face disturbances from extreme events and prolonged warming has increased. There is therefore a need to better understand the process by which adaptation occurs and in particular how the social, ecological and institutional attributes of a system affect important choices along a pathway from environmental disturbance to adaptive outcome. This paper therefore links institutional analysis and the related social-ecological systems framework to the literature on adaptation and robustness to develop an evaluative framework for the study of adaptive processes. This framework allows scholars to investigate how government policies and other attributes of the social-ecological environment affect the ability of actors to resolve a series of adaptation problems they face."
The NORA Knowledge Base of the Commons Abundance Network
(2014) Hoeschele, Wolfgang
"Today, we seem trapped in an economy that offers us no alternatives to a market that values only scarce resources and therefore creates incentives to make things scarce - at the cost of individual freedom, social equity, and environmental sustainability. But alternatives exist; it is of critical importance that knowledge about them is widely disseminated and shared. The Commons Abundance Network, co-founded by the speaker, is building a database called NORA (Needs, Organizational forms, and Resources for Abundance) which allows 'approaches toward abundance' to be searched according to the needs to be met, the types of organizational forms to be adopted, or the resources to be managed sustainably. This provides a framework for the organization of case study material, while also providing a gateway for practitioners to access useful information and contact and collaborate with helpful people and organizations. We thus hope to help build bridges among academics as well as people involved in diverse initiatives on the ground."
Polycentricity and the Meaning of Self-Governance: The Role of the Calculus of Consent in Elinor Ostrom's 'Design Principles'
(2014) Tarko, Vlad
"Why are certain issues addressed by markets, others by politics, and others by courts? Why do hybrid institutions such as independent regulatory agencies, judicial review, and private arbitration courts also exist? Why are certain issues addressed at the local levels, while others at the federal level? This paper explains how to use the calculus of consent model to answer such questions, and argues that the calculus of consent provides the general framework for explaining all institutional diversity. Institutional effciency is dened as the dierence between the de facto decision rule, as it exists thanks to actual institutions, and the optimal calculus of consent rule. To analyze institutional change and political reform, one looks at whether various available collective choice mechanisms can in fact change the de facto decision rule, bringing it closer to the optimal rule."
Reconceptualizing the Role of Security User
(2014) Camp, L. Jean
"The Internet is not the only critical infrastructure that relies on the participation of unorganized and technically inexpert end users. Transportation, health, waste management, and disaster preparedness are other areas where cooperation between unorganized citizens who lack experience with the domain has increased resiliency, reduced social costs, and helped meet shared goals. Theories of community-based production and management of the commons explain this type of cooperation, both offline and online. This essay examines these two complementary approaches to organizing the cybercitizen for cybersecurity. Cybersecurity discourse has reasonably focused on centralized parties and network operators. From domain name registrars to network service providers, solutions are sought through incentives, regulation, and even law enforcement. However great the ability of these centralized entities to implement change, the end user plays a crucial role. The Internet must remain open to enable innovation and diffusion of innovation; thus, the end user will continue to be important. What is the role of the citizen in cybersecurity? What socio-technical characteristics might enable a system that encourages and empowers users to create a secure infrastructure?"
Studying Power with the Social-Ecological System Framework
(2014) Epstein, Graham; Bennett, Abigail; Gruby, Rebecca; Acton, Leslie; Nenadovic, Mateja
"A long-standing divide exists among social scientists regarding power and its effects on the sustainability of social-ecological systems (SESs). In some disciplines, such as political ecology, power is given a place of prominence and seen as having a significant impact on socialecological processes and outcomes. In contrast commons theory, a new institutionalist strand of environmental research, deliberately sidelines power to focus on the relationship between institutions and sustainability. Historically, there has been little constructive interaction between these power-centered and institution-centered approaches. Therefore we apply the SES framework, a tool explicitly designed to confront interdisciplinary puzzles, to ask whether it can be used to bridge the gap between these two traditions of social-ecological research. The chapter outlines a systematic approach to integrate diverse conceptualizations of power with the SES framework and then applies this to study the relationship between power and social-ecological outcomes. The analysis suggests that the SES framework is a promising tool for social science integration, but also that important questions remain concerning the validity of classifications, measurement, and statistical tests. We conclude with a call for greater interdisciplinary attention to questions of power with the SES framework to better understand its normative and positive implications for sustainable and equitable governance of SESs."
Summary of 'Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington School of Political Economy: A Compendium of Key Statements, Collaborations, and Reactions'
(2014) Cole, Daniel H.; McGinnis, Michael D.
"Summary of roundtable discussion of the forthcoming book 'Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington School of Political Economy: A Compendium of Key Statements, Collaborations, and Reactions.'"
The Sustainability of Corruption
(2014) Lambert, Brian J.
"A growing body of scholars and policy makers have become increasingly concerned with the danger that corruption can pose to sustainability efforts as a lack of proper enforcement of the environmental legislation can produce the conditions under which environmental initiatives can easy flounder as the rules and regulations are ignored. This study devises an empirical test of this proposition, using data from the World Bank's World Development Indicators and the World Governance Indicators datasets. The analysis uses a time-series to evaluate the effect of various forms of corruption on sustainability of the nation state and includes an analysis of 121 countries from 1996 to 2010. It finds that states suffering from high levels of corruption in aggregate tend to have lower levels of sustainability. Of the sub-varia on corruption it finds that the rule of law and control of corruption have the strongest effect on sustainability. However, the effect on control of corruption is more troubling as the sign is negative contrary to expectations, presenting an avenue for future research into the effect of corruption on sustainability."
Three Waves of Cooperation: A Millennium of Institutions for Collective Action in European Perspective (Case-study: The Netherlands)
(2014) De Moor, Tine
"Parallel to the downward spiral in which the economy and society have seem to end up over the past few years, a very different evolution seems to be going on: new institutions arise constantly, institutions that we can describe as institutions for collective action, where cooperation and self-regulation form the jumping-off point for daily practice, with citizens taking matters into their own hands to address local problems. These institution emerge from the bottom-up, through the efforts of ordinary citizens filling in needs, throughout Europe. In the Netherlands for example, since 2005, over 300 collectives for energy were founded, aimed both at generating energy and at the collective purchase of energy from companies on the free market. Furthermore, many initiatives were established that provide healthcare - ranging from residential communities for the elderly, elderly care cooperatives, and day care centers, to cooperatives of GPs and physiotherapists. In this paper, it will be demonstrated that this development is in itself not unique but comparable to two 'waves of cooperation' in the past: one to be situation in the early modern period (1200-1600), and one in the period 1880-1920. What is most striking is that all these waves were preceded by periods of intensified market exchange and that today - contrary to what is often claimed - these new institutions should not be considered as 'symptoms' of the current crisis but rather as a reaction to the negative consequences and limitations of the functioning of the market. Notwithstanding the numerous similarities both in institutional design and causes that can be found between the three waves of cooperation, there are also a number of striking differences. The most significant difference is the shorter longevity of institutions of the second wave in comparison to the first. In the paper, the reasons for these and other differences will be explored further, with special attention on institutional design."
Towards a Creativity Commons
(2014) Corneli, Joseph
"A preliminary treatment of a social creativity is presented that aims to be 'mechanism independent' in the sense that it could equally well describe the behavior of simulated societies of computational agents or the embodied behavior of humans engaging in commonsbased peer production. The idea of project-embedded problem solving is used as a connection between these two domains. Mathematical thinking provides an inspiring example, and the methodology that is proposed is an interpretation of the highly heterodox interdisciplinary theory of design patterns."
Towards an Understanding of the Human-Environment System of Mayan Communities: Knowledge, Users, Beliefs and Perception of Groundwater in Yucatan
(2014) Lopez-Maldonado, Yolanda
"Human-Environment Systems emphasises the linkages between environmental (e.g., natural resources) and human systems (e.g., society). The major goal of this project is to methodically investigate Human and Environmental Systems in contemporary Mayan communities in Mexico as a case study, by combining natural and social science approaches. The background of the project is the increasing production of scientific literature addressing the importance of groundwater ecosystems for the provision of services to societies and the rapid change and degradation of the groundwater in the area. Particular emphasis in the Yucatan Peninsula aquifer case will be given to the interactions of communities and institutions related to the use and management of groundwater and to the understanding of feedbacks concerning human induced changes in this ecosystem. Nowadays, the aquifer is threatened by anthropogenic activities including tourism, agriculture and solid waste disposal degrading the capacity of this resource. The aim is to develop a framework to study the dynamic relationships between groundwater and social processes to enhance our understanding of the systems and to develop an empirically ]based simulation model by involving institutions and stakeholders. We will include both biophysical processes and associated human behaviours of local members by considering the decision ]making of actors who influence the ecosystem, their interactions, roles and perceptions. In a broad sense, the use of system analysis and the analysis of traditional Mayan knowledge will be investigated to find solutions for the groundwater problem and to foster regional development in contemporary Mayan society."
Urban Solid Waste are Commons? A Case Study in Rio de Janeiro Region, Brazil
(2014) Pires Negrão, Marcelo
"May the solid urban waste can be considered a common, such as others previously studied by AID? This is the central question we propose to answer in this work, as an introductory part of the doctoral research from the author on the governance of waste management. Recovered by individuals and communities living in precarious conditions while it became feedstock for power generation, solid waste became a secondary resource of great value. At the same time, emerged in the last two decades a strong discourse around urban ecology guiding the action public in the metropolis, intermediate cities and also sectoral policies for waste management. Describing and analyzing the actors, the rules ,the control system and arrangements around the solid wastes from Rio de Janeiro region, Brazil, we propose in this paper an introductory analysis in the IAD Framework, in the complex network of actors and disputes that unfolds behind human waste."

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