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Against the Grain: The Unusual Case of Saskatchewan's Credit Union Deposit Insurance Scheme
(2019) Pigeon, Marc-Andre
"In this paper, I test the proposition that Saskatchewan’s deposit insurance scheme embodied until recently many of the features that Ostrum identified as key to the successful if seemingly improbable management of a common pool natural resource. Drawing on an initial review of archival material, published accounts and official documents, I propose that Saskatchewan’s scheme represents a socially-determined common good along the lines of the arguments found in Perilleux and Nyssens (2017), who show that co-operative financial institutions can be understood as human-made commons. That said, my research suggests that this deposit insurance scheme and its common-pool nature owed at least as much to government actions as it did to the credit unions that operated and mostly governed the scheme. Further, if Saskatchewan’s insurance scheme can be said to have evolved to a point where it more or less conformed to Ostrum’s design principles, then this may have some important implications for anticipating the consequences of what could happen as the deposit insurer gradually unwinds some of these design features, a situation that now seems to be happening."
Analyzing Voluntary 2030 District Energy Programs Using the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework
(2019) Nordman, Erik; Killeen, Robert
"Twenty-two cities across North America have joined the 2030 District energy and water conservation program. Building owners in participating cities voluntarily pledge to reduce building energy use, water use, and transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030. The 2030 Districts range in size and climate, from sprawling and warm Los Angeles to the snowy college town of Ithaca, New York. In the absence of robust climate change regulations, the 2030 Districts’ voluntary, non-regulatory approach is a novel way to reduce resource use and emissions. The program allows each 2030 District to create its own approach to encourage building owners to achieve the goals. However, it is unclear whether participating buildings are actually reducing resource use and emissions. It is also unclear what, if any, methods are most useful in holding the participants accountable for meeting their voluntary goals. Therefore, we explore how Ostrom’s eight design principles apply to the 2030 Districts and how they can enhance District functioning to achieve the 2030 District program goals. These principles are then more formally analyzed using the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework. We explore the applicability of the IAD framework for the 2030 District using Grand Rapids, Michigan as a case study. The case study examines the actors and relationships hypothesized under the IAD framework. This exploratory analysis will guide the development of more detailed future investigations. The analysis will increase understanding of voluntary mechanisms to reduce energy use, water use, and transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions."
Are Groups Less Cooperative than Individuals? Groups as Likely as Individuals to Help an Outgroup if it is Economically Beneficial, but not Under Resource Inequality
(2019) Safarzynska, Karolina; Sylwestrzak, Marta
"Cooperation between groups has been largely ignored in the studies of common pool resources. However, examples of intergroup cooperation taking the form of reciprocal grazing agreements, livestock transfers, or exchanges of harvests are common and well-documented. The question arises over reasons why groups cooperate, with the ethnographic literature suggesting social concerns (reciprocity), redistributive motives (inequality aversion), and economic benefits (risk-sharing) as alternative explanations. We design a common pool resource experiment to examine which of these explanations are more likely, depending on whether individuals or small groups act as decision-makers. The experiment consists of a two-stage game. In the first stage, individuals harvest resources from the common pool of resources. In the second stage, they can send some of their harvests to augment resources in the common pool of the outgroup. Hence, the second stage of our experiment closely relates to trust and gift-exchange games. In the ‘baseline’, group members decide individually on how much of the harvest to donate to the outgroup. In treatments where groups act as decision-makers, subjects vote on how much everyone should donate to the outgroup. One vote is subsequently selected and is binding for everyone in the group. We find that groups as decision makers are less likely to share resources with an outgroup, but if they do, they donate more than individuals. Our experiment reveals a dark side of group voting. When combined with unequal resources, voting increases the probability of resource exhaustion. The relatively less affluent groups overharvest resources in expectation of donations from the outgroup to compensate for their 'bad behavior' (overharvesting)."
Bargaining for American Indian Water Rights
(2019) Sanchez, Leslie; Edwards, Eric; Leonard, Bryan
"When and why do resource users successfully negotiate to create certainty over property rights, and when does this process fail? We examine this question in the context of American Indian reservations’ implicit water rights under a 1908 Supreme Court ruling (Winters v. United States). To legally quantify Winters rights, a reservation must enter into the costly process of either reaching a negotiated settlement agreement with the US government and neighboring water users, or through judicial decree in state court. To date, only 59 of 225 federally recognized reservations in the west have legally defined these rights. We use both the adjudication itself, as well as the results for the tribe in terms of water and direct federal funding secured, to quantify benefits. We show that the likelihood of entering into the adjudication process is increasing in the expected benefits of settlement. However, a costly bargaining process, as measured by the number of users, increases the duration of the adjudication process. Conditional on settlement, we show that the amount of water entitlement per acre of farmland is decreasing over time."
A Beyond-Harvesting Approach to Common-Pool Resources: An Empirical Illustration from Fishing
(2019) Basurto, Xavier; Bennett, Abigail; Lindkvist, Emilie; Schlüter, Maja
"Harvesting has received most theoretical and policy attention towards understanding common-pool resource dilemmas. Yet, pre-harvesting and post-harvesting influence harvesting outcomes as well. Broadening the analytical focus beyond harvesting is needed to imagine new ways of theorizing and governing the commons. Fishing—which is synonymous of harvesting—is a case in point. To illustrate our argument, we analyzed the effect that fishers’ organizational choices and their available alternatives to access fishing means of production have on harvesting and fishers’ well-being—two key outcomes for the realization of the United Nations’ Sustainable Developments Goals. We deploy qualitative interview data and two quantitative longitudinal datasets from Mexican small-scale fisheries, as well as concepts from common-pool resources theory to illustrate the benefits of broadening the scope of inquiry and move towards a fuller understanding of commons dilemmas and beyond a narrow policy attention on harvesting."
Bridging Societal Divides through Governance Design
(2019) Orentlicher, David
"The U.S. system of governance seems to be in crisis. Public trust in the national government has plummeted, partisan conflict and gridlock have intensified, and extremist views are gaining traction. As political dysfunction increases, many observers fault the constitutional structure. Some argue that the constitutional design fails because of the many ways that a political minority can obstruct—or gain control of—the political process. The minority can employ filibusters in the U.S. Senate, field successful nominees in gerrymandered legislative districts, or spend vast amounts of money on candidates or ballot initiatives. The political minority also might suppress voter turnout or send its nominee to the White House by prevailing in the Electoral College. This paper discusses an important alternative view—the problem is not that the minority exercises too much power; rather the governance problem lies in giving too little power to the minority. The U.S. political system has many “winner-take-all” features that fuel partisan conflict. For example, whoever prevails in the battle for the presidency gains one hundred percent of the executive power even if the victor triumphs by the barest of margins. This denies meaningful representation to half of the public in the most important policymaking office in the world, and as a result, it invites levels of competition and conflict that are intense, excessive, and harmful to social welfare. Winner-take-all politics also dominates elections for Congress and a judiciary where major decisions can be decided by a conservative or liberal majority. To address winner-take-all politics, we should look across the Atlantic to countries where governance reflects the perspectives of all, particularly Switzerland, where power is shared across partisan lines, and elected officials from both sides of the political spectrum have a say in the making of governmental policy. If we want to bridge societal divides, we need to ensure that everyone’s voice is represented in the halls of power. Or to put it another way, a system based on winner-take-all politics is a system designed to maximize incentives for partisan conflict. A system built on the sharing of power across partisan lines, on the other hand, is a system designed to maximize incentives for cooperation."
A CIS Framework Analysis of an Amazonian Soybean Frontier in Brazil: Insights for the Policy Analysis of Interconnected Social-ecological Landscapes
(2019) Delaroche, Martin
"This paper explore the role of adjacent action situations in the environmental governance and effectiveness of environmental policy of the Brazilian Amazon."
Collaboration in English Local Government: Mapping Shared Services using Affiliation Network Analysis
(2019) Dixon, Ruth; Elston, Thomas
"Traditionally, joint provision of local public services by multiple councils working collaboratively has not been widely practiced in England. Unlike in Europe and the USA, where scale diseconomies have often prompted inter-local collaboration, English councils have long aspired to be 'self-sufficient.' But it appears no longer. In 2017, almost all local councils (97%) participated in one or more frontline or back-office 'shared service,' involving 338 distinct partnership arrangements. We analyse this new collaborative landscape by performing an exploratory affiliation network analysis on organizational and financial data for all 353 English councils. We examine factors predicting participation in inter-local collaborations, and the characteristics of the service networks that result, focusing on resource, organizational and political considerations. Our results indicate that the question for English local authorities is not 'whether' to collaborate but 'how' and 'with whom.' Partner choice is driven mainly by geographical proximity and similarity in organizational and resource characteristics."
Collective Action and Invasive Species Governance in Southern Arizona
(2019) Lien, Aaron; Baldwin, Elizabeth; Franklin, Kim
"Biological invasions – in which non-native species become established and outcompete native flora and fauna – is one of a number of emergent '21st century' environmental problems whose complex characteristics make it difficult for policy makers and practitioners to develop durable and effective management solutions. Invasive species management shares several characteristics with problems like land use change and the spread of contagions like Ebola and Zika. Their effects are often debilitating for human and ecological communities if left unaddressed, but there is uncertainty regarding the timing and extent of consequences. Changing climatic conditions can exacerbate the challenge of predicting the timing and severity of consequences, making it difficult to rally public support in favor of preventive action (Brenner & Franklin 2017). At the same time, many of these problems share characteristics that make collective action challenging. They tend to span jurisdictions, sectors, and governance levels. As a result, addressing them will generally require individual and collective action by heterogeneous actors who have divergent interests in prevention and mitigation, as well as different resources and capabilities to bring to bear on the problem. The actors who are most affected by a problem may not have the resources needed to mitigate it; and actors who are well-positioned to prevent or mitigate harms may have little reason to do so. Moreover, emergent problems that are new to a given jurisdiction may require cooperation between and among actors who have limited experience with each other, or there may be institutional and organizational barriers to effective cooperation. Under these circumstances, traditional policy instruments and approaches – such as command and control, market-based, or community-based natural resource governance – are unlikely to achieve lasting, positive results. Instead, effective governance likely requires venues for cooperation and coordination that span jurisdictions and sectors, as well as a range of policy instruments that provide diverse actors with relevant incentives, motivation, information, and resources to undertake preventive action – before significant harms occur. In this paper, we ask: how do existing and emerging governance arrangements encourage individual and collective action to manage invasive species? We focus our attention on a particular case – buffelgrass in the Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona. Like other 21st century problems, invasive buffelgrass poses an imminent and significant threat to the region: if left unaddressed, it will outcompete native species, eventually causing an ecological state change that will fundamentally alter the character and function of the region’s ecosystems; increase fire risk; undermine the tourism and outdoor recreation sectors of the southern Arizona economy; and reduce quality of life for citizens in the area. While ecologists and conservation biologists have long warned of the consequences of buffelgrass invasion, and while practitioners in the region have developed forums for information sharing and coordination, the diverse public and private land managers on the front lines of buffelgrass management have yet to undertake sufficient individual and collective action to keep the buffelgrass population in check. Here, we draw on interview data and archival documents to develop an in-depth case study of buffelgrass and buffelgrass management efforts in the region, and use the case to build theory about governance mechanisms that might prompt effective individual and collective action by land managers in the region."
Collective Action in Response to Coastal Degradation? Cultural Multi-Level Selection for Analyzing the Emergence and Dynamics of Community-Based Associations in Ecuador
(2019) Beitl, Christine
"Throughout the 1990s on the Ecuadorian coast, a growing number of local fishing associations began to emerge around sustainability challenges of coastal degradation, mangrove deforestation, and declining catch rates in artisanal fisheries. The spread of shrimp aquaculture provoked mobilizations among advocacy groups and communities experiencing social conflict and displacement from their ancestral fishing grounds within mangrove swamps. Were such forms of collective action an outcome of new social dilemmas associated with rising concerns about environmental degradation and social injustice stirring within the grassroots? How did these concerns become institutionalized in the proliferation of local associations uniting at regional levels within larger networks of “ancestral users of the mangrove”? How and why do such regional alliances encourage new participation among some individuals while disillusioning others? Theories of cultural evolution provide interesting insights about the specific mechanisms by which institutions, cooperative behaviors, and other cultural adaptations emerge and evolve from selective pressures. In this paper, I apply the Cultural Multi-Level Selection framework (Waring et al 2015) to explore these selective pressures in response to dilemmas at different levels of social organization. The paper documents the emergence and spread of over 50 custodias since 2000, which placed over 50,000 hectares of mangroves under the protection and stewardship of nearly 5000 mangrove guardians, thereby providing empirical evidence for understanding the dynamics of governance. The findings suggest that collective action, i.e. the coordinated efforts among individuals, appears to have emerged in response to perceived social dilemmas associated with the rise of shrimp aquaculture on the Ecuadorian coast at the group level; but as alliances across groups emerged at regional scales, such local enthusiasm for collective action may have faded away in some locations. Drawing on interviews with association members, former members and leaders, as well as ethnographic research on mangroves as a social-ecological system in multiple sites throughout the Ecuadorian coast, this paper contributes new empirical insights about the evolution of coastal governance and marine resource management to advance theories of cultural evolution."
The Coloniality of Nature Conservation Law and Implications for Governance
(2019) Kelleher, Jennifer
"Nature conservation can incur a range of human rights concerns. In recent decades, international conservation policy and law has moved to confront these concerns with broad approaches that integrate conservation with development, justice and rights and, most recently, governance. Yet these approaches so far have not engaged fully with what lies at the heart of current nature conservation practices, namely the hard legislative framework that regulates nature conservation in perpetua. This body of law dates back to the mid-nineteenth century, and in fact has retained a remarkably rigid blueprint when it comes to protected areas. To further shed light on this issue, this paper sketches the history of nature conservation law including its emergence in Europe and extension to the colonies. These nature conservation laws are presented as ‘legal transplants’ that retained a distinctive character even when applied in new contexts. This character, here dubbed the ‘coloniality of nature conservation law’, is described via four key themes: (i) epistemologies, ethics and assumptions about people and natural resources; (ii) power, property and protected areas; (iii) the intervention and dominance of positive law, provisions of law and particular legal approaches that subsumed other legal regimes; (iv) the internationalisation and universalisation of these concepts. The implications of this discussion are far reaching, and provide a starting point for achieving fairer and more equitable protected and conserved areas. In particular, it is submitted that this requires re-examining the diversity of knowledge systems; movement towards recognition of the agency of local resource users; the meaningful recognition of plurality of legal systems; and finally acknowledging the legacy of disempowerment and the need for reconciliation and trust building."
Complex Systems, Climate Change, Urban Health and the Human Scale: An Evolutionary Complex Systems Perspective on Urban Health
(2019) Gatzweiler, Franz; Liu, Jieling; Kumar, Manasi
"Deliberations about how to govern complex problems of climate change, urban health and wellbeing, sustainably and yet in accordance with human needs, have often been implicitly biased by well-intended ideas such as being ‘human-scale’ or ‘people-centred’. With increasing urban populations and increasing urban systems interconnectivity, cities as we knew them transform into city regions or clusters and the externalized costs of such growth are increasingly shared with people who become marginalized and detached. We present ‘human-scale’ and ‘people-oriented’ ideas of urban development from an evolutionary systems perspective, as expressions of two types of socio-political organisation with different degrees of self-organisation. We refer to multi-level selection theory to explain the maladies of current urban developments, their negative impacts on people’s health, the environment and the reasons for denial or not being able or willing to act in response to the available knowledge about urban and planetary health problems. Finally, we make recommendations for governance to address the systemic problems of urban health."
The Costs of 'Tenancy In Common': Evidence from Indian Land Allotment
(2019) Dippel, Christian; Frye, Dustin; Leonard, Bryan
"From 1906, the U.S. government’s ‘Indian allotment’ policy re-assigned property rights over tribe-owned lands to individual Native American households in 160-acre parcels. Allotted land was initially kept in ’individual trust’, to later be transferred into ‘fee simple,’ thereby giving full property rights. In 1934, this program was shut down prematurely, trapping millions of acres of land in trust status indefinitely. The descendants of the original allottees of in-trust land have rights to rents earned from the land, but have to agree near-unanimously to any changes in its use, or to its sale. They are exogenously, and almost unalterably, locked into ‘tenancy in common’. We utilize exogenous variation in the legal status of individual 160-acre land parcels to estimate the inefficiencies arising from this tenancy form, using present-day satellite imagery."
The Counter-Associational Revolution: The Rise, Spread & Contagion of Restrictive Civil Society Laws in Democratic States
(2019) Swiney, Chrystie
"Why and to what extent are democratic states, including long-standing, consolidated democratic states, adopting legislation that restricts the ability of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) to operate autonomous from government control? This phenomenon is common and expected in authoritarian countries, but surprising in the context of democracies, which have historically championed and funded an independent civil society. This paper maps the full scope and spread of the so-called 'closing space phenomenon' within the world's strongest democratic states. This phenomenon has been extensively mapped in the context of non-democracies but, until now, not in democracies, which alters the conventional wisdom about why this global trend has gained traction and momentum since the turn of the twenty-first century."
Decentralized Provision of Community-Governed Greenspace in Two Cities: Chicago (IL) and Louisville (KY)
(2019) DeCaro, Daniel A.; Dietsch, Willow S.; Boamah, Emmanuel
"Many cities struggle to provide marginalized neighborhoods adequate greenspace, because of post-industrial economic downturn, disinvestment, and legal, social, and political barriers, which impede public good provision. Cities like Chicago, Illinois and Louisville, Kentucky have responded by decentralizing community greenspace provision and governance to third-party organizations and the communities themselves. Chicago created NeighborSpace, a non-profit land trust, to secure small properties for community self-governance. Louisville assigned the local Cooperative Extension Service this responsibility. We examined these arrangements in terms of proposed design principles for state-reinforced self-governance, bridging the gap between principles of informal self-governance and formal decentralization and democracy in complex, highly regulated city systems. We interviewed key decision makers and stakeholders and collected essential documents (e.g., legislation, agreements) to evaluate these solutions within their social-ecological contexts. NeighborSpace exemplifies each of the design principles, efficiently providing greenspace to marginalized neighborhoods and enabling their community governance. Louisville’s Extension Service lacks several principles, decreasing its effectiveness and efficiency, and preventing community governance. Effective decentralization entails government sponsorship in the form of sufficient and appropriately specified legal authority, responsibility, tangible support and self-sufficiency, and balanced mechanisms for stability and flexibility, among other essential factors for robust self-governance. The current research demonstrates how these principles were achieved in a model program, overcoming common but substantial barriers to public good provision and cooperation faced in many cities."
Deliberative Decision-Making and the Public Good: A Behavioral Lab Experiment in Kenya
(2019) Grillos, Tara
"Over the past twenty years, participation by citizens in government decision making has been promoted all over the world. While there are normative reasons to encourage more inclusive decision-making processes, costly and time-intensive collective decision-making processes are often justified on the grounds that they may also improve collective outcomes. In political theory, deliberative discussion, in particular, is believed to be more transformative than a mere aggregation of individual preferences, potentially changing both the outcomes of the decision process and the value that particiapnts place on those outcomes. If outcomes in question relate to a public good, these effects have the potential to encourage individuals to contribute to that public good despite individual incentives to deviate. One of Ostrom’s original design principles for successful commons management was that those affected by rules participate in decision-making related to them. But these referred to endogenously created institutions, whereas the use of participatory processes in public policy more often involves efforts to engage citizens or stakeholders in externally organized decision-making processes. Despite widespread interest, empirical evidence in support of such co-produced decision-making remains weak. This study uses a behavioral lab experiment in Kenya to examine whether engagement in group decision- making regarding creation of a public good leads to greater contributions to the public good. I find that participation that involves deliberation (but not a simple majority rule) results in better collective outcomes. This effect is achieved primarily through better strategic decision making, which minimizes the costs associated with socially desirable behavior. However, I also find an indirect effect of deliberation, mediated by preference change, on individual effort exerted on behalf of a collective good. This provides rigorous empirical evidence in support of claims by political theorists that deliberation may transform citizens, rather than merely aggregate preferences or coerce agreement."
Design Principles, Common Land, and Collective Violence in Africa
(2019) Oyerinde, Oyebade Kunle
"The conventional wisdom blames colonialism as the root cause of violence in Africa, but at the expense of analytical clarity about the context of collective violence over common land. This article uses qualitative data and Elinor Ostrom’s perspective on governing the commons to analyze collective violence over common land in an African community. It finds that the absence of certain design principles strikes at the root of the violence in the African case. Exploring the less understood intricacies enriches analytical clarity about the conditions that lend themselves to sustaining the commons and gaining the compliance of generation after generation of resource users with property rights institutions for governing the commons."
Determinants of the Sustainability of Intangible Cultural Assets Conservation in South Korea: Focusing on the IAD Framework Under the Rational Choice New Institutionalism
(2019) Kim, Myeongha; Kim, Kwanbo
"The ‘cultural commons’ like intangible cultural assets have been extensively researched. From the viewpoint of public choice, these cultural commons studies of intangible cultural assets have been providing the remedies for effectively governing them. How can we pass down our disappearing intangible cultural assets to descendants in the right direction? The purpose of this paper is to explore the determinants of the sustainability of intangible cultural assets conservation in Korea and suggest policy implications for intangible cultural assets governance. The theoretical underpinnings are the Institutional Analysis and Development framework for visualizing the Rational Choice New Institutionalism with multiple level analyses developed by Professor Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues. Our research model includes three independent variables (rules and institutions of intangible cultural assets governance, physical & community attributes), one intermediate variable (action arena), and one dependent variable (sustainability of intangible cultural assets conservation). To test seven hypotheses, questionnaire survey was conducted. Our major empirical findings by the AMOS statistical package and detailed policy implications are as follows. Firstly, the rules and institutions, physical & community attributes, and action arena of intangible cultural assets governance have affected in a configurational way the sustainability of intangible cultural assets conservation through action arena interaction. Secondly, the rules and institutions have most directly influenced the sustainable conservation of intangible cultural assets. However, current Korean formal laws and policies of intangible cultural assets have many issues such as the designation and discharge of national intangible cultural assets, recognition of possessors, and operation of Cultural Properties Committee due to diverse laws, overlapping policies, and local rules. Therefore, collective and constitutional rules should be re-designed. At the collective choice level, the current Korean intangible cultural assets related Laws and Acts should be revised for effective intangible cultural assets governance. Finally, at the constitution choice level, basic principles should be institutionalized in the Korean Constitution to preserve sustainable intangible cultural assets along with high evaluation of the future value of intangible cultural assets."
Diagnosing Social Dilemmas
(2019) Bruns, Bryan
"Prisoner's Dilemma is only one of several possible social dilemmas where individual incentives can lead away from cooperation that would make everyone better off. Two-person two-move (2x2) games provide elementary models of the social dilemmas that have played a central role in thinking about problems of collective action. Diagnosing which kind of social dilemma may be present is important since different incentive structures pose different challenges for collective action and may require different solutions. This paper uses the Robinson-Goforth topology of payoff swaps in 2x2 games to analyze the diversity of social dilemmas; identify key questions that can distinguish between different problems of collective action even in the presence of limited information about outcomes; and discuss implications for diagnosis and potential solutions. A diagnostic flow chart provides key questions for distinguishing between social dilemmas."
The Eco-Techno Spectrum as a Frame for Interdisciplinary Urban Nature Governance Research
(2019) Matsler, Marissa
"Green infrastructure (GI) development – or the explicit management of greenspaces to provide services – is increasing in US municipalities. However, despite technical optimism regarding benefits provided by GI, governance challenges create significant barriers to effective GI implementation and maintenance. This stems in part from the contested definition of GI as stakeholders place varied, oft-conflicting demands on the concept. This means GI consists of a mishmash of disparate facilities, from large-scale natural areas (at the wildland interface) to small-scale engineered bioswales (throughout the urban-to-rural gradient), all of which are designed, implemented, and maintained by organizations with different, sometimes conflicting, goals and missions. To make sense of GI management, I organize this variety along the Eco-Techno Spectrum, arranging facilities according to the proportion of biological components to human-made technological components. On the ‘eco’ end of the spectrum are remnant forests and floodplains where most components are biological; on the ‘techno’ end of the spectrum are engineered green roofs and permeable pavement where components are primarily human-made technologies. This spectrum allows for the combination of ecological and engineering data, which are usually siloed. Importantly, the Eco-Techno Spectrum provides a platform on which to analyze governance concerns. Across the spectrum, GI facilities are subject to different performance metrics, jurisdictions, asset classes, etc. While relatively simple, the Eco-Techno Spectrum is a powerful heuristic because it captures this socio-political diversity and links it to ecological and technical data in a single framework. Here, I show the Eco-Techno Spectrum’s utility to an interdisciplinary examination of urban governance."
Economic Governance and the Paradox of the Informal Economy: How Institutional Entrepreneurs exploit Robust Action in a Polycentric System
(2019) Paviera, Carmelo; McDermott, Gerald; Woodward, Rick
"During more than half a century studies have regarded formality and informality as two fully separate constructs. Early work of Ostrom started to address the importance of management of common property regimes and shed light on informal arrangements. Social science literature views informal market as temporary and focus on the transition towards formality. This struggle to explain the persistence of informality comes down to what scholars characterize as a fundamental paradox of informality –reconcile growth of informality with stability. This paradox creates two problems for conventional approaches. First, much of the work on the emergence of informality is based on the Durkheimian understanding of trust and market governance. Second, the dominant approach views from law and economics, can’t conceive the of growth informality because of the necessity of the formal protection of property right. This article attempts to resolve this paradox. We highlight the importance of creating an authority structure that builds power and legitimacy through ties to government institutions in the formal sector. We build on Ostrom’s concept of polycentricity to understand how informal self-regulation may emerge and adapt, but then can destabilize as key initial rules are violated. We embrace the comparative capitalism understanding of institutions as configurations of rules and resources. Third, in building on the concept of robust action, we identify the strategies that market makers use to bring stability when Ostrom’s rules are violated. To build and illustrate our approach, we enact a four months ethnographic study of La Salada, the largest informal, illicit market in Latin America."
The Emergence of a New Legally Binding Agreement for a Marine Complex System: Are We Going Beyond Panaceas?
(2019) Gonçalves, Leandra R.; Webster, D.G.; Kim, Rakhyun E.
"Many warn against the use of panaceas, or overly simple 'solutions' applied to a wide array of complex problems without regard for effectiveness or negative side effects. Scholars developed several diagnostic approaches to avoid panaceas by allowing people to tailor institutions to complex social-ecological systems at the local and international levels of analysis. However, panaceas still persist and are, in fact, pervasive in environmental governance at all levels of analysis. In this paper, we examine how interactions between two main components of the panacea mindset, power disconnects and problem narratives, are affecting UN negotiations for a new treaty regarding biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ). We find that combating panaceas requires a better understanding of conflicting hierarchies of institutions that limit the effectiveness of institutional design. Our research indicates that the negotiated outcome will not reflect the best institutional design for the conservation of biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction, but rather the best institutional design for the benefit of powerful states. This implies that institutional diagnostics must account for these type of barriers, which can only be removed through system-wide political and economic transitions, to ensure effective design rather than the creation of expedient panaceas."
Emerging Collective Action to Resolve Sustainability Trade-offs in Polycentric Governance Systems: Evidence from Trift, Switzerland
(2019) Kellner, Elke; Oberlack, Christoph
"Recent scholarship on polycentric governance has called for increased attention of processes of cooperation, competition and coercion in order to better explain the varying performance of polycentric governance systems. This need is particularly acute in situations with strong trade-offs between sustainability goals (e.g. environment vs. economic development) and competing claims on natural resources (e.g. renewable energy infrastructures in landscapes deserving protection). This paper presents an analysis how processes of cooperation, competition and coercion influence the emergence of collective action in the face of sustainability trade-offs. We analysed polycentric governance processes around a planned hydropower dam in the Trift area in the Swiss Alps between 2008 and 2017 as an exemplary case study. The data are from 24 semi-structured interviews, participatory observation, transect walks and analysis of policy documents, laws, meeting minutes and media news. The results show that the planned construction of the Trift reservoir is expected to create trade-offs among sustainability goals, as evidenced through positive expected impacts on eight targets of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and adverse expected impacts on seven other SDG targets. These sustainability trade-offs correspond to diverse actor claims on natural resource held. Despite this difficult starting point, collective action emerged during a five-year process. We trace the detailed processes of cooperation, competition and coercion that account for this emerging collective action in the face of sustainability trade-offs. We find that the combination of a participatory process with separate spaces for knowledge creation and engagement with local mayors was directly instrumental in building collective action. Preparations for the popular vote on the Swiss national energy strategy and learnings from earlier experiences with hydropower projects as well as with former participatory processes were processes that indirectly facilitated emerging collective action in this unlikely situation. We conclude by showing that situations of sustainability trade-offs imply important new directions in the study of collective action by broadening the set of evaluative criteria and by focusing on interdependent processes of cooperation, competition and coercion in polycentric systems."
The Emerging Polycentricity of Subnational Climate Adaptation in the United States
(2019) Kauneckis, Derek
"Climate change is a global issue with highly localized impacts. In the face of national inaction subnational government have taken the lead on climate change policy. While effective mitigation efforts requires large-scale national coordination, some subnational governments have begun to enact adaptation policies to address climate risks within their jurisdictions and to coordinate across jurisdictions. Understanding how cooperation occurs across jurisdictional boundaries is one of the key challenges to designing effective climate policies. Using a national dataset on subnational government climate policy activities, this paper examines what influences whether a subnational government agency has enacted a climate adaptation action. It initially focuses on characteristics of subnational jurisdiction themselves that facilitate or hinder local action. This includes population density, political party vote share, exposure to risk from sea level rise, and intensity of state-level climate planning effort. The model then examines the influence of participation within either a formal or informal climate policy network and the scale of the political jurisdictions that network partners operate. Using a classic definition of political jurisdictions within a federal system this includes partners whose activities are focused on the local urban scale, county, state and national. The final model examines patterns of cross jurisdictional cooperation and whether a network includes members who are explicitly engaged in county-to-county cooperation within or across state boundaries and network partners who are organized to facilitate interstate cooperation. The paper concludes with a discussion of the nature of polycentric governance in climate adaptation policy and the importance of the results for understanding inter-jurisdictional cooperation on climate issues."
Empirical Evidence of Collective Forest Management in Nature Reserve in China: An Application of Ostrom’s SES Framework
(2019) Xie, Yi; Wen, Yali
"Nature reserve (NR) are complex social and ecological system (SES) (Cumming & Allen, 2017). In China, many collective forests (CF) owned by villagers are contained in nature reserves, but this often occurs at the expense of villagers’ traditional right. The paper aims to carry out a dynamic diagnosis of three cases of NRs management based on Ostrom’s SES conceptual framework. The results indicate that the outcomes of CF Management are determined jointly by the interaction at all levels of governance based on the characteristics of CF resource system, CF resource units, actors in the context of specific local social, economic and political setting. Compared to the conflicted NR, the strongly harmonious NR is featured by less valued CF resources in the NR, fewer dependence of the villagers on the CF resources, stronger environmental awareness of the villagers and slower increase of new actors, capable governance dominated by the NR administration and self-organization of villagers and well economic compensation and regulation, beneficial outsider circumstance, and effective and diversified interaction. Different public policies, including the ecosystem service payment, are recommended for improving management of CF in nature reserves."
Environmental Governance: Broadening Ontological Spaces for a More Livable World
(2019) German, Laura
"This paper and panel aim to make a novel contribution to the environmental governance scholarship by drawing on recent anthropological scholarship on ontology to ask, 'What do environmental governance concepts render visible, and in what ways do these concepts hinder our ability to envision the world otherwise?' and 'In what ways might more plural ontological engagements open spaces for new ways of relating with the living and nonliving world?' We argue that environmental governance tends to be framed in apolitical, ahistorical and technocratic-scientific terms; is largely unproblematized in much theory and practice; and carries a host of embedded normative assumptions (such as the human-nature dichotomy, environment-as-resource, and nature-as-problem fit for outside intervention) that should be a starting point of any contemporary dialogue on environmental governance."
Fixing Urban Planning with Ostrom: Strategies for Existing Cities to Adopt Polycentric, Bottom-up Regulation of Land Use
(2019) Myers, John
"Urban planning reform proposals have generally failed to provide bottom-up rules that, given local geography and politics, can overcome political opposition to change and allow Coasean bargaining while sufficiently capturing externalities. I suggest four strategies to fill that gap in the literature. Recent research on the commons has rarely addressed deficiencies in regulation of new urban construction, and yet multiple studies estimate that such deficiencies cause large impairments of productivity and welfare. Many places face transitional gains traps where homeowners and others block any move to a more efficient system. I argue that allowing bottom-up approval of better uses of land may reverse the current Olsonian problems by allowing the formation of groups with strong incentives and the means to lobby for such changes. It can be seen as a tactic from Riker’s heresthetic: splitting the blocking homeowner-voter majority by allowing former objectors to defect from the regulatory cartel and benefit from more intensive land use. One example is the recent law in New Zealand, allowing a landowner to waive the protective setback rule binding a specific adjoining property. In England, a recent change now permits a parish to approve development on its own green belt, albeit subject to tight constraints. Ellickson’s suggestion of allowing a vote by individuals on a single stretch of street (‘face block’) to upzone that stretch is a third approach that has not yet been tried in practice. Analogously, a fourth rule could allow upzoning by vote of the residents of a city block, subject to restrictions on altering external façades of the block and to angled maximum height planes to preserve light to other blocks."
Fluid Ecologies and Plural Ontologies: Breaking Apart Biodiversity to Reimagine Conservation
(2019) DuPuy, Walker; Lear, Kristen; Foster, Katie
"Biodiversity conservation has a long history and primary place in environmental governance practice. Its role in shaping governance regimes and prioritizing particular species and places makes it critical to interrogate and ask the question of what such efforts make visible, and likewise invisible, for environmental governance. Drawing on literature from conservation practice, ecological science, critical scholarship, and ontologically-attuned ethnographies, we examine the roots of the biodiversity concept and its dominant framings and enactments; what is rendered visible and invisible across these fields; how an ontological perspective and approach might conceive of biodiversity otherwise; and what this might mean for the pursuit of environmental governance. While biodiversity conservation still largely emphasizes charismatic, and now so-called umbrella, species, and places a primacy on ecological science and Western knowledge systems, there is increasing attention to the need to respect and engage other knowledges; recognize the political effects of conservation efforts; and see biodiversity as intertwined within larger landscape scale and human-inclusive and -synergistic ecological relationships. We build on this history and work to ask how different ontologies conceive biodiversity and complicate human-animal and human-nature dichotomies, how ontological thinking can open new ways of relating to and with the world, and what a conservation governance concept that takes such fluidities, hybridities, and plural ontologies seriously might look like."
Foreign Aid or Foreign Agents? The Rise of Legislative Restrictions on Foreign Funding to NGOs in Democracies and Developing Countries
(2019) Reddy, Michelle
"This study investigates the rise of legislative restrictions on foreign funding to NGOs, a global trend occurring not only in aid-dependent, non-democratic regimes but also more recently in developed economies and democracies. Given the difficulty of large N analysis to differentiate between these various cases, I create a dataset of 65 countries with legislative restrictions and differentiate between developed and developing economies, as well as consolidated and transitioning democracies. I use panel data, polynomial interpolation, and logistic regression to examine predictors of foreign funding restrictions, in particular, foreign aid, natural resource extraction, conflict risk, and regime type. By collapsing the wide variety of cases into regime type, and within regime type, differentiating between resource-rich countries as well as countries prone to global risk in terms of national and subnational power, my framework accounts for the rise of legislative restrictions across diverse political and economic contexts, and pays close attention to the paradox of the rise of foreign funding restrictions in developing country democracies. Overall, the presence of the extractive industry is highly significant across regime types and even in democracies in particular as the majority of countries with restrictions are resource-rich."
The Frontier Forest as a Specific Type of Social-Ecological System: A Comparative Study of Brazil and the US
(2019) Delaroche, Martin; Cole, Daniel H.
"Deforestation appears to be ubiquitous in the history of human settlement and development. If so, then we might expect deforestation to have common causes across human societies, i.e., to represent an identifiable type of social-ecological system that poses common problems for collective action. As such, the concept of the 'frontier' becomes useful for distinguishing between states or stages of development. Some scholars have gone so far as to suggest a general theory of 'forest transition,' according to which deforestation is a common feature of early development, which eventually slows and reverses, so long as appropriate institutions are created. This paper contributes to that literature by comparing the social-ecological circumstances of twentieth-century deforestation in Brazil’s 'forest frontiers' and deforestation in US 'forest frontiers' from the colonial era into the second half of the nineteenth century. After comparing and contrasting the two cases, we posit as a hypothesis (to be subject to further testing) that 'frontier' conditions represent a distinctive type of social-ecological system, which can be described using a combined IAD-SES analysis comprised of a set of fairly consistent variables that typically are not found in forests after frontiers have closed."
The Future of Local Governance for Appropriately Adapting the Ride-Sharing Platform: Case Study of Seoul, New York, and Maryland
(2019) Kim, Jonglip; Hwang, Junseok
"Ride-sharing platforms have challenged existing public vehicle for hire governance in two aspects: jurisdiction issues and internalization of regulatory functions into the firm. In this study, we looked at three types of governance that manage local vehicles for hire: hierarchy, market and network. However, it is hard to say that any of the three types hierarchical, market or network are always better. In this research, public goods provision and regulatory management governance in Seoul in Korea and New York City and Maryland in the U.S. were compared, respectively, with examples of hierarchical, market and network governance. To analyze this, Institutional analysis and development framework was used. This framework analyzes institutions by three levels of action, collective choice and constitutional choice, in which the vehicle for hire governance is divided into four tiers according to the authority that accepts and delivers information. This disaggregation allows to compare how the actors communicate and accept information at each level in each governance. In conclusion, hierarchical and market governance have the same structure, with regulatory bodies or entities monopolizing the collective choice process, but they have different regulatory actors. However, in network governance, regulators and stakeholders discuss collective choice equally. Stakeholders who wish to intervene in regulatory hearing can participate at any time. Therefore, in the process of regulating the ride-sharing service, network governance has a well-accepted system of innovation information and public needs. On the other hand, hierarchies and markets do not explicitly have a system of effective acceptance of various information."
Governance of Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology Projects: A Common-Pool Resource View
(2019) Howell, Bronwyn E.; Potgieter, Petrus H.
"In this paper, we utilise Elinor Ostrom's Institutional Analysis for Development framework to explore the economic, technological, political, social and psychological contexts in which distributed ledger systems operate in order to understand their broad governance arrangements as polycentric systems operating simultaneously at many different levels of interaction. Somewhat ironically given the purported motivations of decentralisation and revolutionary changes purported for the blockchain technology compared to established firms and governments, it appears that most DLS applications substitute centralised control by one set of stakeholders with centralised control by a different set of stakeholders. We describe the features of DLs that render them candidates as common-pool resources and use the IAD framework to explore their governance arrangements and discusses the implications of this analysis for the viability of some specific DLS applications. We provide a comprehensive overview of the use of distributed ledgers (referring mainly to Bitcoin and Ethereum) and examine the rights roles and incentives of stake-holders, including miners, ordinary coin holders as well as other application users. This includes the role of payments as incentives in proof-of-work and proof-of-style systems."
Governing Biodiversity through Public-Private Institutional Arrangements: The Case of the Union for Ethical BioTrade in the Brazilian Amazon
(2019) Zacareli, Murilo Alves
This working paper is originally a chapter from a doctoral dissertation from the Institute of International Relations at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. The main goal is to contribute to the literature that discusses transnational environmental regulation and governance by analyzing the Union for Ethical BioTrade (UEBT) as a global governor and/or a standard-setter in biodiversity governance. In order to achieve this, interviews were conducted during UEBT’s 2018 “Beauty of Sourcing with Respect Conference” in Paris, France. Besides, documents available online were analyzed so that the case study could be done. The major contribution to the literature in international relations and political science is done through the introduction of new terms that help understand how non-state actors are capable of leading governance processes in a context of delegation of functional roles from the Convention on Biological Diversity to UEBT."
Governing Medical Knowledge Commons
(2019) Strandburg, Katherine J.; Frischmann, Brett M.; Madison, Michael J.
"This paper presents three excerpts from the edited volume, Governing Medical Knowledge Commons: Knowledge Commons and the Road to Medical Commons, The Knowledge Commons Framework and Governing Knowledge Commons: An Appraisal. These excerpts introduce the Governing Knowledge Commons framework, which is adapted from the IAD framework to account for the unique characteristics of knowledge as a resource. Most importantly, knowledge is often not only managed and shared, but also created, through cumulative social processes. Moreover, knowledge ordinarily has multiple non-rivalrous socially beneficial uses. Because of its unique characteristics, knowledge production and use may encounter a variety of social dilemmas and commons governance of knowledge often presents complex challenges. The nonrivalrous and cumulative nature of knowledge also means, however, that solutions to the challenges of knowledge commons governance are particularly valuable to society. In the medical arena, the benefits of commons governance -- and the waste imposed by private property -- are particularly apparent. The book from which these excerpts are taken presents case study analysis of various examples of medical knowledge commons governance. The concluding excerpt begins to draw lessons from those studies. The presentation will reflect upon those lessons in light of more recent studies of knowledge commons governance."
Governing the Internet of Everything
(2019) Shackelford, Scott J.
"Since the term was first coined in the late 1990s, the 'Internet of Things' has promised a smart, interconnected world enabling your toaster to text you when your breakfast is ready, and your sweatshirt to give you status updates during your workout. This rise of “smart products” such as Internet-enabled refrigerators and self-driving cars holds the promise to revolutionize business and society. But the smart wave will not stop with stuff, with related trends such as the Internet of Bodies now coming into vogue. It seems that, if anything, humanity is headed toward an Internet of Everything. Yet it is an open question whether security and privacy protections can or will scale along with this increasingly crowded field, and whether law and policy can keep up with these developments. This Article explores what lessons the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) and Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) Frameworks hold for promoting security, and privacy, in an Internet of Everything, with special treatment regarding the promise and peril of blockchain technology to build trust in such a massively distributed network. Particular attention is paid to governance gaps in this evolving ecosystem, and what state, federal, and international policies are needed to better address security and privacy failings."
Halting Deforestation in Brazilian Amazon: Lessons from the Deforestation Blacklist
(2019) Massoca, Paulo
"Brazil has made impressive progress towards halting deforestation in the Amazon biome. An innovative environmental agenda implemented in 2004 – the PPCDAm - has played a crucial role in that context. This study approaches the deforestation blacklist aimed at monitoring and sanctioning counties considered deforestation hotspots in the region. The deforestation blacklist has encompassed 60 counties since 2008, restricting credit loans to farmers and embargoing landholdings and products. Because blacklist removal criteria are set at the county level, institutional arrangements have emerged to achieve the collective goals of georeferencing rural properties and controlling forest clearings. Despite promising results, most counties remain blacklisted to date. This study draws on secondary data and satellite imagery analyses, as well as on stakeholders’ interviews in a cross-sectional study in five counties in the state of Pará, northeastern Amazon. I adopt a historical ecology approach to examine deforestation dynamics at the county level and rely on the Ostrom’s SES framework to investigate context-specific factors mediating local responses to this policy instrument. In this study, I discuss the challenges faced by each county in engaging stakeholders in multiple adjacent action situations towards devising strategies and tools in response to the uniform blacklist removal criteria that disregards context-specific realities. The results highlight the role played by local political and leadership capital in that process, as well as by complementary policies and initiatives in place at a given moment. Moreover, they reveal how contextual factors underlying deforestation dynamics at a given county are interconnected across the region, thus mediating varied responses to anti-deforestation policies. The study concludes by discussing the limited outcomes arising from blueprint policies implemented in a complex and dynamic mosaic of juxtaposed social and environmental realities such as the Amazon."
Harmonizing Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance Through the Paradigm of Behavioral Ethics Risk
(2019) Haugh, Todd
"Governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) are critical functions within companies—this much we know. Yet business leaders remain largely unsure of how to manage these functions effectively. The evidence is both anecdotal, as seen by recent corporate scandals, and research-based, as business law scholars levy sustained critiques against corporate compliance and governance effectiveness. At least part of the failing of GRC stems from its lack of coherent theory; there has been little attempt to harmonize the various GRC functions and determine what is at their core. Instead, the business and academic community has been content with the simple acknowledgment that GRC contains both 'overlaps' and 'differences' among its components. This Essay offers a more principled analysis. It argues that governance, risk management, and compliance can best be understood through a behavioral ethics risk paradigm. Using behavioral ethics, criminological, and network theory, the Essay explains that individual unethical decision making within the firm is at the heart of “conduct risk,” which in turn is at the core of GRC. When conduct risk is misunderstood and ignored—as is the case in most companies—it not only creates corporate compliance lapses, but it may also cause systemic risk that can swamp corporate governance. Once this dynamic is understood, effective GRC can be properly seen as an exercise in managing behavioral ethics risk within the firm. After providing the necessary theoretical framework, the Essay turns to the practical, offering strategies companies can use to identify and mitigate this newly understood risk."
How Can China Get Out of Cycle of Dynasties? A Tocquevillian Perspective
(2019) Wang, Jianxun
"China has been gotten stuck in the cycle of dynasties for more than 2000 years. The Open and Reform Policy has helped the country achieve remarkable economic success in the past forty years, but it has made little progress in terms of political development. The people are rejected to participate in public affairs in any meaningful way, and their fundamental rights are frequently abridged and violated. To simply put it, they are not allowed to govern themselves. How can China get out of the cycle of dynasties? What challenges the country needs to overcome in order to become a self-governing society? One of the striking characteristics of the Chinese regime has been administrative centralization. Chinese people and many China observers have been convinced that the centralization is indispensable for the unity, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and greatness of the country. They even believe that administrative centralization can coexist with a self-governing society. Why do they hold these beliefs? How can they be changed? Drawing upon the works of American Founding Fathers, Tocqueville, and Vincent and Elinor Ostrom, this paper is an effort to explore these issues. I propose that, without the change of the centralized structure of the Chinese regime, it’s unlikely for the country to establish a free and self-governing society. However, unless the mores, or 'habits of heart and mind', change in the society, it is very hard to do away with the centralized institutions."
How Context Influences Development: Political Settlements and Collective-Action Problems
(2019) Ferguson, William D.
"This paper develops a broad framework for political economy theory of development. It addresses three propositions: 1) Achieving economic and political development requires resolving multiple underlying collective-action problems; 2) Institutions facilitate resolving complex collective-action problems; 3) Political settlements underlie configurations of institutional systems that arise from and shape developmental prospects. Political settlements are mutual understandings held among powerful parties that they will rely primarily on politics rather than violence to resolve disputes. This paper develops and applies a typology of political settlements that facilitates analyzing how broad categories of social context influence developmental prospects. More specifically, it categorizes political settlements along two dimensions (or spectra). First, the breadth of its social foundation: the extent to which socially relevant groups are party to the settlement. Second, its degree of functional unipolarity, namely the degree to which insider elites can achieve rough agreements concerning broad allocations of decision-making power and broad national purpose (e.g., state-market or state-religion relations). Each type of settlement shapes the subsequent evolution of a society’s institutional system (or social order). Each possesses its own set of developmental collective-action problems whose resolution shapes prospects for development. The paper proceeds to illustrate key principles using a game-theoretic representation of rival coalitions, state capacity, and proclivities for cooptation, repression, staging a coup, or pursuing civil war. This typology should facilitate both developmental policy analysis and broad inquiry into the political economy of development."
How does Governance Mediate Links between Ecosystem Services and Human Wellbeing? Results from a Systematic Mapping and Rigorous Review of Literature
(2019) Nunan, Fiona; Menton, Mary; Schreckenberg, Kate; McDermott, Connie; Huxham, Mark
"Many efforts to improve the sustainable management of renewable natural resources in low- and middle-income countries seek to achieve ‘win-win’ outcomes – improved ecosystem health and improved livelihoods. It is well established that achieving win-win outcomes is challenging; a host of variables affect the quality and performance of governance. This paper reports on research that sought to go beyond identifying factors that matter for effective governance to identify how governance mediates relationships between ecosystem services and human wellbeing. It did this through a systematic mapping of relevant literature and a subsequent rigorous review. Systematic mapping is a method used to describe and catalogue the available literature and evidence using systematic and transparent review processes. The analysis of the mapping focused on identifying which components of governance are studied, how much attention each geographical region and natural resource has received, finding that the literature is ‘clumped’ with some governance components, geographical areas and sectors well-studied while others have been poorly studied. The rigorous review analysed 190 papers in more detail, identifying recurring and key themes. The analysis found that there is very little literature that looks at governance, ecosystem health/services and poverty alleviation together in detail, with little evidence of interdisciplinary investigation. Much of the research instead focuses on either governance itself or governance and livelihoods or governance and ecosystem health/services. The analysis confirmed that there is little evidence of increased income resulting from community-based approaches to natural resource governance but there is evidence of empowerment that could lead to wider benefits and that ecosystem health has improved in some cases. The analysis identified a range of factors that contribute to this situation, including insufficient long-term support, lack of alternatives and power dynamics. Customary institutions remain critical for people to benefit from ecosystem services, though these are often constrained by government decisions."
How Institutions Shape Trust during Collective Action: A Case Study of Forest Governance on Haida Gwaii
(2019) Hotte, Ngaio; Kozak, Robert; Wyatt, Stephen
"Trust between actors involved in collective action can lower transaction costs, create incentives to invest in collective activities and help actors to achieve joint gains. While existing theoretical frameworks note the importance of institutions for motivating trust and the trust literature identifies characteristics of institutions that motivate trust, empirical research regarding natural resource governance is needed to inform development of institutions for this type of collective action situation. This paper builds on an existing theoretical framework linking institutions, trust and collective action by exploring the characteristics of institutions that motivate trust. Empirical grounding was provided in the form of a case study of collaborative forest governance on Haida Gwaii, an archipelago located off the coast of British Columbia, Canada. Conflict between the Council of the Haida Nation and the Province of British Columbia regarding widespread industrial logging led the two parties to establish two structures to collaboratively govern forests and lands on Haida Gwaii: the Haida Gwaii Management Council and the Solutions Table. Interviews with past and present members of the Haida Gwaii Management Council and the Solutions Table were used to identify three forms of formal rules and one form of informal rules as well as fourteen associated characteristics that motivated trust. Cluster analysis reduced the fourteen characteristics to four clusters: alignment of interests, fairness, cohesion and satisfactory terms of cooperation."
How to Build a Strong Knowledge Commons: Learning from CODESRIA Under Structural Adjustment
(2019) Hoffmann, Nimi
"Conceived in 1964 and formalised in 1973, CODESRIA is the longest-standing pan-African intellectual organisation on the continent. Because CODESRIA is a community of scholars who create, manage and share intellectual goods outside of the state and the market, it makes sense to understand it as a knowledge commons. Drawing on archival material and interviews with CODESRIA members, I examine how CODESRIA managed to weather the storms of structural adjustment. This in turn casts light on the factors that contribute to building a strong knowledge commons."
Illuminating Hidden Harvests: The Global and Local Contributions and Impacts of Small-scale Fisheries to Sustainable Development
(2019) Mancha-Cisneros, Maria del Mar; Basurto, Xavier; Franz, Nicole; Funge-Smith, Simon
"Small-scale fisheries (SSF) contribute substantially to household, local and national economies. In developing countries, they produce almost as much fish for direct domestic consumption as large-scale fisheries, and most of this is consumed locally in rural settings where poverty rates are high and quality nutrition is needed. More people work in SSF than in all other sectors combined, and inland fisheries support even more men and women fishers, processors and sellers than do marine systems. However, due to the highly complex, diverse and dispersed nature of SSF, quantifying and understanding their many contributions is difficult. In most cases, fisheries accounting occurs at the national level, which often overlooks the local importance of SSF to the coastal communities that heavily depend on them. Large-scale fisheries have been the target of considerable management efforts because of their concentrated and largely urban base, and their visibility as an important earner of foreign exchange. As a result, SSF are too frequently marginalized in political processes and not given due attention in policy. The present study revisits and builds on previous studies to capture the hidden contributions of SSF, encompassing the pre-harvesting, harvesting and post-harvesting sectors of inland and marine fisheries. The design of the new study uses a multi-scalar approach for the study the importance of SSF at the global scale while also taking a closer look at the nuances that make SSF so important at local and sub-national scales."
Individuals, Republics, and the Human Condition
(2019) Oakerson, Ronald J.
"In this paper I explore the implications of Vincent Ostrom’s concept of a republic for the model used to explain individual behavior in institutional analysis. Vincent viewed the core of the republic (res publica) as an 'open public realm' that allows individual citizens to participate meaningfully in the process of governance (1991). Moreover, his account of individual choice draws on Tocqueville’s account of 'self-interest rightly understood' in Democracy in America (Volume II, Second Book Chapter VIII 945/1835). The public realm in the U.S. is created and sustained by constitutional liberties accorded to individuals, including the liberties of speech, press, and assembly, as articulated in the First Amendment. The purpose of these liberties is primarily public rather than private. While contemporary liberalism has stressed the importance of constitutional liberties as the bulwark of privacy values, the traditional republican standpoint stresses the importance of the use of liberty in the public realm. My plan in this essay is to show how the public use of liberty in a republic necessarily depends on something very much like Tocqueville’s account of self-interest."
Industry Self-Regulation of Cryptocurrency Exchanges
(2019) Howell, Bronwyn E.; Potgieter, Petrus H.
"Volatility of crypto currency values, and fears of illegal use, have led to calls for government regulation of the industry. However, it is not clear that third-party governments, more used to regulating fiat currencies, are best-placed to undertake this activity. Drawing from the literature on early self-regulation of share markets in the 18th century and the management of bank-issued currencies in the 19th and 20th centuries, a case exists for self-regulation of crypto currency exchanges. Self-governance tools include internal rules applied by the market operators and the disciplines exerted by those choosing (voluntarily) to trade on them. This draws on the Ostrom legacy the economics of club goods for governing the commons. In this case, the club goods are the rights to use a shared platform and set of rules to transfer value between different crypto currencies, and between fiat and crypto currencies. We examine the rules associated with embryonic self-regulated clubs of crypto currency exchanges such as the Virtual Commodity Association (VCA) and compare them with the effectiveness of regulatory rules established by governments seeking to use their formal powers of regulation to govern crypto exchanges. We ask whether self-regulatory clubs will be more effective at finding innovative new ways to constrain opportunistic behaviour than third-party rivals."
An Introduction to the Tribal Governance Database Project
(2019) Day, Shane
"This paper is designed to serve as an introduction to the Tribal Governance Panel Dataset Project, a project that is in the process of compiling a comprehensive set of more than 300 political, economic, sociological, public health, and other indicators for each of the 341 federally-recognized Native American tribes in the contiguous United States. Comparative small-n and large-n quantitative work on Native American tribal governments is virtually non-existent due to the lack of a comprehensive source of data, an issue that this project aims to remedy. The paper will review existing work on tribal governance, highlighting the limitations of existing small-n comparative analyses, and suggesting how quantitative analysis might be used to test various established hypotheses regarding the relationship between governance form and various socio-economic outcomes. It will then provide a background behind the dataset and the variables collected thus far. It will also present several preliminary analyses employing a variety of comparison of means techniques in order to illustrate ways in which the data may be analyzed once the database is finalized. Outcome variables that are examined include per capita income, nominal per capita income growth from 1990 to 2010, economic growth rate from 1990 to 2010, unemployment rate, and unemployment rate change from 1990 to 2010. Finally, the presentation will be used to solicit ideas for collaborative research with interested Workshop-affiliated faculty and students."
Investigating Governments’ Restrictions on CSOs with Covenants, Constitutions, and Distinct Law Types
(2019) DeMattee, Anthony
"The number of civil society organizations (CSOs) around the world has expanded since the late-20th Century, and so too have the laws and policies regulating the sector. A growing number of researchers study these laws and caution the regulatory expansion is, in fact, a global crackdown on civil society. This article asks two questions of a thoroughly researched form of legal repression—governments’ restrictions on foreign aid to CSOs. First, do institutional differences affect the adoption of these laws? Second, do laws that appear different in content also have different causes? A two-stage analysis answers these questions using data from 138 countries from 1993-2012. The first analysis introduces institutional variables concerning constitution-level differences regarding international treaties and the ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The study then uses competing risk models to test whether the factors that predict law adoption varies across law types. The study finds constitutions and preexisting institutions matter. Given a country ratifies the ICCPR, constitutional rules that place treaties above ordinary legislation create preexisting institutions that make adopting restrictive laws less likely. Competing risk models find different laws have different risk factors, which suggests these laws are more conceptually distinct than analysts presume. Alternative strategies for event history analysis and rare event models confirm all general findings. The practical significance of these findings are twofold: first, when studying the adoption of laws, analysts should incorporate into their theory the preexisting institutions that structure the legal context and constrain lawmaking. Next, studies should embrace conceptual differences among laws. Doing so allows us to build up theory concerning their origins, implementation, and effects on people and organizations. Implementing these findings in future work will strengthen the theory, methods, and concepts used to understand the legal approaches states choose to regulate civil society."
It Depends on What You Share: The Elusive Cost Savings from Service Sharing
(2019) Aldag, Austin; Warner, Mildred E.; Bel, Germa
"Inter-municipal cooperation is the most prevalent alternative service delivery method for US local governments. While aspirations for budgetary savings are one motivating factor, increased service quality and regional coordination are also important goals. We use an original 2013 survey of local governments in New York State to assess the level of service sharing and outcomes. We match our survey with twenty years (1996-2016) of service-level costs data to explore the relationships between sharing and costs across twelve common local government services. Our multivariate time series regressions find that service sharing leads to cost reductions in solid waste management, roads & highways, police, library, and sewer services; no difference in costs for economic development, ambulance/EMS, fire, water, and youth recreation; and higher costs in elder services and planning & zoning. These differences are explained by whether services have characteristics such as asset specificity and the ability to achieve economies of scale on the one hand, or if sharing leads to greater administrative intensity or quality and regional coordination outcomes on the other hand. We also analyze the effect of sharing on service costs over time, and find solid waste management, roads & highways, police, and library are the only services where costs show a continued downward trend. Because cost savings are elusive, public sector reformers should be careful not to assume cost savings from sharing."
Judicial Deference and the Efficiency of the Common Law
(2019) Kanazawa, Mark
"Economists and legal scholars have long been interested in the efficiency of common law. A shortcoming of existing studies in this literature is that they ignore the role of judges in reviewing legislative enactments. Judicial review ties the efficiency of common law to the efficiency of the statutes reviewed. If judges defer to inefficient statutes, the common law will then reflect those inefficiencies. To investigate the efficiency of judicial review, the paper examines 647 judicial rulings of occupational licensing statutes in federal and state courts during the period 1885 to 1911. Evidence from this analysis suggests that judicial deference has evolved over time, from efficiency-supporting review during the Progressive Era to inefficient deference currently."
Knowledge Commons
(2019) Madison, Michael J.; Frischmann, Brett M.; Strandburg, Katherine J.
"This chapter describes methods for systematically studying knowledge commons as an institutional mode of governance of knowledge and information resources, including references to adjacent but distinct approaches to research that looks primarily to the role(s) of intellectual property systems in institutional contexts concerning innovation and creativity. Knowledge commons refers to an institutional approach (commons) to governing the production, use, management, and/or preservation of a particular type of resource (knowledge or information, including resources linked to innovative and creative practice). Commons refers to a form of community management or governance. It applies to a resource, and it involves a group or community of people who share access to and/or use of the resource. Commons does not denote the resource, the community, a place, or a thing. Commons is the institutional arrangement of these elements and their coordination via combinations of law and other formal rules; social norms, customs, and informal discipline; and technological and other material constraints. Community or collective self-governance of the resource, by individuals who collaborate or coordinate among themselves effectively, is a key feature of commons as an institution, but self-governance may be and often is linked to other formal and informal governance mechanisms. For purposes of this chapter, knowledge refers to a broad set of intellectual and cultural resources. There are important differences between various resources captured by such a broad definition. For example, knowledge, information, and data may be different from each other in meaningful ways. But an inclusive term is necessary in order to permit knowledge commons researchers to capture and study a broad and inclusive range of commons institutions and to highlight the importance of examining knowledge commons governance as part of dynamic, ecological contexts."
Land as an Object of 'Good Governance': Beyond Rights and Property
(2019) Bonanno, Anya; Foster, Katie; German, Laura
"Recent years have witnessed growing interest in land as a resource to be exploited, object of discursive engagement, and problem arena within international development. 'Land governance' as a concept has come to be codified in very specific ways. This paper takes an historical and ontological approach to interrogate this evolution and the visibilities and invisibilities rendered by the consolidation of a global land governance regime. To do this, we draw on original documents in the grey literature to examine how land governance has 'come to be' as a concept and domain of practice; critical scholarship that interrogates these concepts to render visible the work that they do; and ontologically-rich ethnographies that articulate other ways of knowing 'land' to highlight the invisibilities rendered by these framings. Dominant framings of land governance emphasize land as an entity isolated from other things or relationships; land as 'resource'; a strong focus on property and rights to frame engagements with land, and in particular formal and privatized title; and land as a commodity, among others. The flip side of this construction include outcomes rendered invisible by these framings, and the possibility of governing land otherwise. The 'work' owing from these framings include the freeing up of customary land (and tenure security) for investors; reduced ecological connectivity; and the disruption of ecological functions and social relationships. Ontologically-attuned ethnographies show how land might be envisioned otherwise - as an entity calling for duties as much as rights; constitutive of and continuous with social relationships; or as relationally linked to all life forms."
The Land–Water–Food Nexus: Expanding the Social–Ecological System Framework to Link Land and Water Governance
(2019) Klümper, Frederike; Theesfeld, Insa
"Besides looking at land and water nexus from the ecological, hydrological or agronomic angle, not much attention has been paid on the governance interface between the two agricultural input resources. Likewise, in widely used heuristic frameworks, such as the social–ecological system (SES) framework, governance interactions between resources are not sufficiently addressed. We address this gap empirically, using the case of Tajikistan, based on a farm household survey analysis of 306 farmers. The results indicate that land system variables contribute to the willingness to cooperate in irrigation management. Specifically, formal land tenure has a positive effect on farmers paying for water as well as on the likelihood of their investing time and effort in irrigation infrastructure, which is decisive for Tajikistan’s food and fiber production. Irrigation system variables show that, e.g., being an upstream user increases the likelihood to contribute to labor maintenance efforts. We further discuss how decisions with respect to the land sector could be designed in the future to facilitate cooperation in other resource sectors. From a conceptual perspective, we suggest that the SES framework can be expanded in two ways in order to serve an integrated analysis of changes in the governance of two natural resources, here land and water. Either (1) by adding a second-tier 'governance nexus' variable inside the governance variable of an irrigation system; or (2) by adding a land resource unit and system outside the irrigation system. Trade-offs of both options will be discussed."
Legal Aspects of Governing the Commons and Technical Challenges of Smart City Development
(2019) Blicharz, Grzegorz
"A modern city is considered a 'system of systems': a technological center that concentrates data of all objects and entities, especially citizens, influencing the condition of the city. The question to be asked is whether the idea of technological centralization must necessarily mean or inevitably lead to the centralization of legal sphere. This question also stands before national legislators and decision-makers at the EU level. The European Parliament noted in its 2014 and 2017 reports that a smart city is not only made up of technological solutions, but above all of people who should influence the city's development. Hence, among the goals to be met by an optimal smart city project, EU considers the growth of bottom-up initiatives. Proposed projects and ideas of smart city pose a number of questions in this respect: how to shape legal standards of mobile technology, IoT, etc., how to unify technical standards, and the most important, how to adjust the ownership structure of new technologies so as to meet the requirements of stable urban development, and to address the need for privacy and security that are exposed to greater risk in each integrated network. The paper will analyze legal solutions used in the past and those currently used that can facilitate engagement of citizens in developing smart city, and can influence a proper ownership model of smart technology which is decisive for privacy and security issues."
Measuring Discretion and Delegation in Legislative Texts: Methods and Application to U.S. States
(2019) Vannoni, Matia; Ash, Elliott; Morelli, Massimo
"Bureaucratic discretion and executive delegation are central topics in political economy and political science. The previous empirical literature has measured discretion and delegation by manually coding large bodies of legislation. Building on recent advances in computational linguistics, we provide a method for measuring discretion and delegation in legal texts, which automates the analysis and allows to study these two aspects on the same body of laws. The method uses information in syntactic parse trees to identify legally relevant provisions, as well as agents and delegated actions. We undertake two applications. First, we build a measure of bureaucratic discretion by looking at the level of legislative detail – namely the number of legally relevant provisions – for U.S. states, and find that this measure increases after the creation of an independent bureaucracy. This is consistent with an agency cost model where a more independent bureaucracy requires more specific instructions (less discretion) to avoid bureaucratic drift. Second, we construct measures of delegation to governors in state legislation. Consistent with previous estimates using non-text metrics, we find that executive delegation increases under unified government."
The Missing Puzzle to Achieving People-Centred Urban Development and Ecological Governance for Climate Change in China
(2019) Liu, Jieling
"Is people-centered urban development in China achievable through institutionalizing urban ecological governance in a top-down fashion, for repairing urban environments and mitigating climate change impacts at the city level, and scaling it up to the national and even global level? Ecological civilization, the development paradigm and national environmental policy framework behind the people-centered urban development goals, conveys a deep, philosophical and humanistic connotation. Chinese cities may be able to reduce environmental externality and achieve people-centered development goals efficiently, given the government’s highly centralized power and political determination. However, whether people-centered urban development in China can truly be sustainable in the long term, relies upon the variety of human needs it recognizes and the efforts it takes to fulfill them for people to co-exist well in a collective society. The people-centered urban development in China backed by the concept of ecological civilization recognizes the universal human need and equity for quality nature and presumes providing quality nature would be sufficient to achieve sustainability. Such a view underestimates people as only being the beneficiaries of quality nature and fails to grasp and expand people’s potential capability to also be the primary means for quality nature. Genuine people-centeredness requires taking into account the cultural, aesthetic and political functions of human agents and their higher need to actualize these functions through participation. Such is needed for Chinese cities to govern natural ecological environment and develop sustainably in the long term, transcending the physical equilibria of human-nature relationship for achieving true ecological civilization"
Natural Resources Governance in Urban Communities of Ghana
(2019) Darimani, Abdulai
"Natural resources are critical common goods constituting an important source of raw materials, livelihood and a repository for all manner of wastes. They serve as the economic backbone of many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and also provide essential services like research, medicine, energy and social identity for millions of people. Despite their importance, natural resources are undergoing severe degradation. Urbanization is one of the human actions contributing to the reduction and deterioration of the quality and quantity of natural resources. Urbanization has triggered a boom in businesses and trade in towns and cities in SSA such as Accra, Banjul and Dakar, which is generating jobs, livelihoods and incomes. However, increasing urbanization is causing many problems such as waste disposal, land insecurity, water crisis and lack of access to quality health services. This paper relies on Ostrom’s theory of common goods to explore the responses of two Ghanaian urban communities to land insecurity in Accra and the water crisis in Ola Resettlement. Using case studies, the paper argues that local communities have the capacity and skills to evolve governance arrangements in response to the effects of urbanization on their communally owned natural resources like land and water."
Never Trust Bitcoin: Blockchain Technology – The Misnomer of a 'Trustless' System
(2019) Tariq, Palveshey; Jamison, Mark
"Satoshi Nakamoto's stated aspiration was to create 'a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust.' He/she/they failed to do that and may have created just the opposite. The failure isn't because Nakamoto got the technology wrong, but because of humans' mental limits. Trusting bitcoin's or any other blockchain means trusting the code. Only a relatively small number of people can understand blockchain code, and an even smaller number find it worth their while to keep up with the updates. Everyone else has to trust the coders, which means trusting blockchain governance. Anyone familiar with the history of regulation knows that politics quickly imposes new regulations whenever the public loses trust in business or, ironically, government. If blockchain technology is to avoid being overtaken by politics as usual - the very thing that Nakamoto wanted to eviscerate - members of the public have to trust blockchain self-governance systems more than they do the politicians they vote for. This is harder to accomplish than it sounds. Such self-governance systems need to include trusted members, transparent processes, public input, nurtured critics, proven results, faithfully demonstrated public purpose, and understandable agendas. Without such self-governance systems, traditional government institutions will take over blockchain governance, with the risk that the extensive data and technical efficiency of blockchain will be used for traditional political purposes at best and, at worst, for control by authoritarian regimes."
The New Approach to Resource Governance in Africa: Adopting a Pro-social Resource Governance Framework in Ghana
(2019) Ahunu, Linda
"Africa’s vast resource deposits are a sign of wealth in the continent. However, the translation of this wealth to human and economic development appears to be a wild goose chase, the major reason being poor governance. African countries have been introduced to a number of governance initiatives but the desirable results are yet to be achieved. The continent continues to lose huge sums of money through corruption as poverty deepens and sustainable development remains a mirage. One question remains unanswered: why is Africa not winning the fight against corruption? This paper identifies that one gap in resource governance in Africa lies in the non-integration of human behavior into its governance setting. This is to say that human behavior plays a role in resource governance and must be given the necessary attention. This paper attempts to address the gap by proposing a framework of eight principles designed to shift the behavior of resource managers from selfish tendencies to becoming prosocial. The eight principles evolves from the descriptive analysis of the principles of self-organization and self-governance and other principles that have worked in other jurisdictions. The objective of the paper is to create an awareness of the identified gap in Ghana to arouse the government’s buy-in of the proposed prosocial resource governance framework. The flexible nature of the framework makes it adaptable to other African countries and not restricted to Ghana. The adoption of a prosocial behavior will enable resource managers to collectively generate homegrown solutions to deal with corruption and improve resource governance."
One Swallow Does Not Make a Summer
(2019) Kurian, Mathew
"The paper adopts an agent-based modeling framework to undertake a critical examination of a recent UN directive on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6.3. The paper advances Ostrom's theoretical legacy and is based on transdisciplinary collaboration involving scholars in Brazil, Indonesia and Jordan. The paper draws important conclusions with reference to monitoring global goals and the role of place-based observatories for design of policy relevant research."
Opening the Black Box: Explaining the Effects and Mechanisms of Municipal Performance in Climate Change
(2019) de la Riva Aguero, Renzo
"Classic explanations about organizational capacity to respond to climate change focus on issues of political decision-making, governance, and the policy process. However, the relationship between climate change and local government management is hence treated as loosely connected. Due to its growing implications for greenhouse gas emissions as a consequence of population increase in developing countries, this paper uses the waste management sector as a case study to examine how variation in local governance factors may have differential effects on the performance of two waste services. Specifically, solid waste collection from the streets, on one side, and the final disposal of waste, on the other, may be affected differently by the organizational characteristics of municipalities. This distinction is significant since the differences in the complexity of providing them may reflect the gaps in municipal administrative capacity to adequately address increasingly complex service delivery needs related to waste. It may also illustrate the influence that the relationship (or lack thereof) of local political actors and civil society organizations with municipalities has on producing differential outcomes between these two waste management services. The issue becomes more urgent in the context of population growth in urban areas and the need for an effective climate change policy that incorporates waste. Using a mixed method research design, this paper conducts a comparative study based on a panel dataset of Peruvian municipalities from eight states between 2014-2016 and interviews and ethnography of four case studies of Peruvian municipalities. This study intends to fill the gap in the political science and public management literatures regarding the conditions, procedures, and relations inside developing country municipalities and how they may explain performance differentials."

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