The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) related to water and sanitation mandate the implementation of collaborative approaches to water governance to secure water for all by 2030. The implementation of collaborative governance requires the adoption of supportive regulations, resources, and the development of capable public sector institutions. In recent years, several countries in Latin America have introduced reforms to their water codes to promote collaborative water governance. However, our knowledge of the outcomes of these reforms is still in its infancy, in particular on how they influence the evolution of existing governance initiatives. In this paper, I study how collaborative water governance initiatives in Ecuador responded to the introduction of new regulations for stakeholder participation in watershed councils. Our findings show that network structures respond in different ways to policy change. In a context where regulations limit the participation of NGOs in watershed committees, the network with higher dependency to external resources was incapable of adjusting. On the other hand, the key elements that helped the resilient network navigate policy change were the existence of high levels of trust, the availability of resources to subsidize participation, the ability to connect the local structure to other networks, and high levels of perceived legitimacy. Governments and international donors interested in SDG 6 should consider these elements to design and implement strategies to promote collaborative management in regions where initiatives already exist. Failure to do so may cause weaker structures to disappear, and discourage actors from future participation, increasing the costs of putting collaborative structures in place and leaving inequalities untackled.
Institutions are important to enhance the contribution of mining industries not only to economic growth, but also to environmental justice and equality. In this paper, we study the processes by which four Latin American countries modified their existing institutions to manage the effects or large-scale mining in their territories. We focus on the political struggles to introduce legislation to restrict the geographical expansion of large-scale mining in their territories. To this end, we integrate a leading theory of the policy process with theoretical insights from studies of environmental governance and political settlements. Our findings show that processes of policy change followed distinct paths with common elements. The elements that link the initial conditions with change are policy learning, challenges to dominant policy images, conflict expansion, and the involvement of veto players. We also observe that the outputs of the reforms diverge significantly. Three contextual variables contributed to the variability of the outputs of these reforms; the degree of cohesion of elites, the degree of development of environmental institutions, and the relative dependency on mineral revenues. During the processes of policy making, these institutions offered different opportunities and constraints for policy challengers to advance their agenda and for dominant actors to maintain the status quo. The new policy designs offer opportunities for countries to deal with the effects of mining on sensitive ecosystems but political instability threatens the long-term institutionalization of these reforms.
La coordinación entre múltiples centros para la toma de decisiones y los tipos de actores, en todas las escalas y sectores, resulta fundamental para mejorar la efectividad de la implementación de la Agenda 2030 y los objetivos de desarrollo sostenible (ODS). Tal desafío es especialmente crucial para los acuerdos metropolitanos en los países en desarrollo donde la capacidad del Estado se muestra débil y las personas, a menudo, carecen de recursos para actuar sobre los problemas a los que deben enfrentarse. En el Distrito Metropolitano de Quito, varios centros de toma de decisiones implementan acciones para abordar problemas públicos relativos a políticas a través de la coordinación con organizaciones del tercer sector. En principio, la coordinación debería conducir a una mejor implementación de políticas; sin embargo, sabemos muy poco acerca de cómo se comporta el sistema y de sus resultados. En este artículo, analizamos tres cuestiones: primero, observamos la distribución de las acciones de los ODS implementadas por los actores del sistema; segundo, estudiamos la participación de diferentes tipos de organizaciones de la sociedad civil en el desarrollo de dichas acciones; finalmente, exploramos la asociación de la participación de la sociedad civil y la efectividad de la implementación de políticas.
Scholars of mining policies are beginning to understand how the most recent boom in commodity prices (2000–2014) influenced the institutional development of the mining sector in Latin America. We contribute to this literature by studying the design, dynamics, and outcomes of interorganizational coordination in Colombia and Ecuador. Our findings show that, despite their divergent policies, both countries failed to integrate the mining sector's three main policy games—formalizing artisan and small‐scale operations, increasing the number of large‐scale projects, and tackling illegal extraction. Several characteristics of the design of coordination initiatives influenced policy failure—the reliance on hierarchy mechanisms to motivate coordination, the lack of specificity of the coordination mandates, and the lack of specific resources for coordination. Contextual factors also shaped the dynamics and outcomes of coordination. The limited geographical spread of artisanal and small‐scale mining and of illegal extraction, the environmental sector's weakness, and the creation of a multilayered structure for public‐sector coordination contributed to policy effectiveness in Ecuador. On the other hand, the ample spread of artisanal and small‐scale mining and of illegal extraction, the lack of a clear coordinating structure, and the environmental sector's growing vigor contributed to sustained policy failure in Colombia.
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