ABSTRACT. Adaptive governance continues to attract considerable interest in academic and policy circles. This is with good reason, given its increasing relevance in a globalized and changing world. At the same time, adaptive governance is the subject of a growing body of critical literature concerned with the ways in which it theorizes the social world. In this paper, we respond to these critiques, which we see as broadly concerning the process, power, and meaning dimensions of environmental and natural resource governance. We argue that adaptive governance theory would benefit from engaging constructively with critical institutionalism, a school of thought that, like adaptive governance, has one foot in commons scholarship. Critical institutionalism conceives of institutional change as a process of bricolage, where those involved piece together new arrangements from the resources to hand. This approach highlights the interplay of structure and agency, and illuminates how new governance arrangements form and come to be seen as natural in dynamic relation to the wider social and cultural landscape. We consider how these arrangements tend to reflect dominant power relations, whilst the plural nature of social life also provides scope for adaptation and transformative change.

Since 2000 a number of community-driven sanitation approaches have emerged that counter a historical trend to subsidise the provision of latrines to the poor. This study reports on a set of findings and conclusions concerning the effectiveness and sustainability of two such approaches operating in Zimbabwe, the community health club (CHC) approach and community-led total sanitation (CLTS). Surveys, interviews and focus groups were conducted in a total of ten project communities from three districts. Results show that, despite little resistance to the idea, a household's ability to own a latrine depends heavily on its ability to afford one. Affordability is also key in moving up the 'sanitation ladder', which is necessary if behaviour change is to be sustained in the long term. Whilst both approaches effectively encouraged measures that combat open defecation, only health clubs witnessed a significant increase in the adoption of hand washing.However, CLTS proved more effective in promoting latrine construction, suggesting that the emphasis the CHCs place on hygiene practices such as hand washing needs to be coupled with an even stronger focus on the issue of sanitation brought by CLTS.

No abstract

ABSTRACT. Scholars of comanagement are faced with a difficult methodological challenge. As comanagement has evolved and diversified it has increasingly merged with the field of adaptive management and related concepts that derive from resilience thinking and complex adaptive systems theory. In addition to earlier considerations of power sharing, institution building, and trust, the adaptive turn in comanagement has brought attention to the process of social learning and a focus on concepts such as scale, self-organization, and system trajectory. At the same time, a number of scholars are calling for a more integrated approach to studying (adaptive) comanagement that is able to situate these normative concepts within a critical understanding of how context and power fundamentally influences the behavior of a system. We propose that the "politicized" version of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework, originally developed by Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues, is well suited to addressing this challenge. The framework provides breadth, clarity, and structure by drawing the analyst's attention to the range of variables and questions to be considered when attempting a study of comanagement, the various components of the situation, and the ways in which they interact, and the criteria the analyst may wish to adopt in evaluating the outcomes of the process. Alongside its ability to address contextual factors and power dynamics, the socioeconomic and institutional dimension of the politicized IAD Framework means that it can be used to conduct analyses that result in sound policy recommendations.

In recent years, 'critical institutionalism' has emerged as a school of thought in its own right. Among its strengths is a focus on institutions as both complex and embedded, where institutional change is understood as a process of bricolage. Yet a number of distinct challenges follow from this. These include capturing the 'complex-embeddedness' of institutions; making critical institutionalism amendable to the world of policy; investigating the more hidden, informal, and everyday dimensions of institutional life; and providing explanations of commons governance that foreground the workings of power and meaning. In this paper, I provide an outline of the Critical Institutional Analysis and Development (CIAD) Framework, designed to explicitly reflect the basic tenets and core claims of critical institutionalism. Whilst it shares similarities with its predecessors-the IAD Framework (Ostrom 1990, 2005) and 'politicised' IAD Framework (Clement 2010)-the modifications it has undergone results in a qualitatively different framework geared toward critical institutional research. The paper considers ways in which the CIAD Framework facilitates systematic and critical analyses of commons governance whilst addressing key challenges a critical institutional approach engenders.