Institutional Fit, Social-ecological Context, and the Emergence of Governance

Abstract

Institutional 'fit' has long been central to governance scholarship but implies that 'governance' is an external intervention applied to a system. If complexity theory and the notion of self-organizing governance is to be taken seriously, then governance is an emergent feature of dynamic interactions among social, ecological, and biophysical contextual factors. This study explores the question of how governance emerges within social-ecological systems using a combination of archetype analysis of small-scale irrigation cases and formal modeling techniques. The case study analysis helps highlight how different configurations of attributes that co-occur in each archetype and their inter-relationships may lead to specific types of governance and provides potential examples of how institutional 'fit' as viewed from outside the system may be understood as path-dependent fine-tuning between different SES attributes. The archetype analysis is complemented with formal modeling to further illustrate how ideas from complexity theory may be used unpack the notion of governance of SESs and offer some general practical principles for fostering sustainability in variable environments.