Solving environmental problems on a regional scale demands joint efforts by multiple stakeholders, but coordinating such efforts can be difficult in complex governance systems. In this article, we combine the literature in Adaptive Governance with the Ecology of Policy Games (EPGs) framework to enhance our understanding of how complex governance systems react to environmental focusing events. We study the EPGs in the Paraná River delta in Argentina following widespread fires caused by slash‐and‐burn practices in 2008, and analyze how new forums created to address the consequences of this event differ from the forums created prior to the event in terms of their capacity to attract stakeholders and to provide higher interconnectivity to the whole governance system. Furthermore, we offer an initial evaluation of the Comprehensive Strategic Plan for the Conservation and Sustainability of the Paraná River delta, the main forum in the EPGs created to address the negative consequences of the focusing event. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for the study of complex governance systems where stakeholders are able to address the management of natural resources at a regional scale.
Sustainably managing regional‐scale common pool resources and providing for environmental public goods often requires the cooperation of multiple governments in the design and adoption of diverse institutional arrangements. Do government actors anticipate the collective action challenges of credible commitment and public goods provision in devising institutional arrangements? Drawing on public–private partnerships, local public contracting and political economy literatures, hypotheses on expected diversity in design are developed. The hypotheses are tested using fine‐grained data from the approximately 3,000 rules composing the New York City watersheds governing arrangements focusing on measures of discretion, shared decision‐making, monitoring, compliance and sanctioning. Using mixed methods we find that actors resort to distinct designs to create credible commitments, when compared to the provision of public goods. Also, the design of primary public goods arrangements varies from secondary public goods. The article presents a novel approach for using textual data to empirically test hypotheses grounded in theories of institutional design.
Policymaking in modern democracies often occurs in polycentric governance systems where decisions are made in multiple, relatively interdependent policy forums. The role and performance of policy forums, however, is likely to be influenced by their broader institutional context. Institutional contexts impose transaction costs that stakeholders must consider when self-organizing, particularly in weakly institutionalized settings where the transaction costs of collaboration are high. Using social network analysis, we analyze forum participation dynamics in the Lower Valley of the Chubut River in Argentina; a weakly institutionalized setting where water policy problems are increasing in the face of growing population and climate change. Our findings show that forum participants tend to perceive certain types of collective action problems as more salient, and forums tend to attract participants with similar perceptions about cooperation problems (a specific type of collective action problem). These situations may lend forums not only to facilitate the generation of trust among stakeholders with similar perceptions, but also to reproduce certain perceptions about which are the dominant collective action problems, which can deepen conflict in the long run. Our findings shed light on the conditions under which policy stakeholders in weakly institutionalized settings may self-organize to foster collective action.
Collective-action problems affect the structure of stakeholder networks differently in policy settings (Berardo and Scholz 2010). However, interactions in policy settings do not usually occur in an institutional vacuum; instead, they are guided and constrained by agreed-on rules. Therefore, to better understand behavior in these settings, it is important to understand the parameters that guide and constrain it. Combining arguments from game theory and social network analysis, this paper focuses on how the nature of collective-action problems affect the design of formal institutional arrangements. The cases are two institutional arrangements for the provision of high-quality drinking water, in New York City and in Boston. The design of these arrangements is measured through Networks of Prescribed Interactions (NPIs), capturing patterns of interactions mandated by formal rules. NPI structures in each case are then compared analyzing their structural measures and applying exponential random graph models (ERGMs). By comparing these NPIs, the paper assesses the effects of collective-action problems on the design of formal institutional arrangements. Results show that cooperation problems are associated with designs prescribing redundant interactions that create a balanced distribution of responsibilities among the key actors to the agreement.
Institutions are the rules of the game that guide policy behavior. Yet, the policy and administration literature on institutions and institutional design have been developed largely in parallel to policy behavior and network literatures. Drawing insights from both, we apply the Institutional Grammar Tool along with survey data to assess how addressing collective action problems result in variations in institutional designs and how rules influence behavior. Our case is the New York City Watersheds, where New York City, local governments, the State, and the Federal government agreed to secure access to high‐quality, unfiltered drinking water for New York City. Despite a long history of conflict, the parties devised a complex governing arrangement that created credible commitments while providing for a variety of public goods. Results show that rule configurations differ depending on whether they create credible commitments or provide public goods, and that credible commitment rules guide collaboration patterns among stakeholders.
Adaptive water governance involves collaboration among multiple actors, social learning, and flexibility to deal with shocks and surprises. Crises thus become a useful context to assess how the institutional arrangements contribute to adaptation. However, an important part of the specialized literature has focused on these issues as they occur in highly institutionalized settings in the Global North. This paper, instead, analyzes basin organizations in settings with variable degrees of institutionalization in South America. The objective is to analyze the actions (or lack thereof) conducted or encouraged by basin committees in watersheds of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, in the face of water crises. We analyze three case studies, involving basin committees that faced different water crises (all affecting drinking water supply) at different scales: (1) Chubut River Basin committee and a turbidity crisis in the Lower Valley in 2017 (Chubut, Argentina), (2) Piracicaba-Capivari-Jundiaí (PCJ) River Basins committee and a drought that occurred in 2014-2015 (São Paulo, Brazil), and (3) Laguna del Cisne Basin commission and a crisis associated with a failure in the water treatment operation in 2019 (Canelones, Uruguay). In each case, we analyze the institutional design of the committee and the actions (or lack thereof) undertaken regarding the crisis, including the perceptions of key stakeholders of those actions. Findings showed that stakeholders tend to act and communicate through fast channels when water crises occur, referring to basin committees only for technical and additional support (Brazil), information sharing (Uruguay), or not convening the committee at all (Argentina). Our cases in South American countries with different contexts provided empirical evidence of the barriers that basin committees face as politicalinstitutional frameworks to foster adaptive water governance (e.g., limited stability, centralization, lack of leadership).
Monitoring and enforcement have been recognized as keys for sustainable common pool resource governance. With a couple of notable exceptions, however, scholars have not examined how they are deployed when governments are the primary actors devising such agreements and where multiple public goods are provided for-an important level of governance to understand. We explore the design of monitoring and enforcement safeguards that governments adopt to limit opportunism and support compliance in a complex governing arrangement, the New York City Watersheds Memorandum of Agreement. The agreement defines how New York City and a group of watershed jurisdictions jointly manage a shared natural resource. Furthermore, we test how the design of such safeguards vary depending on the type of public good they cover, illuminating how "federal" safeguards may work at the sub-state level, and, ultimately, the particular form of polycentric governance being used. The results indicate that concerns for water quality as well as potential for opportunistic behavior drive institutional design considerations. Monitoring and sanctioning authority for water quality is dominated by state and federal actors, which hold New York City to account, while watershed jurisdictions are held responsible by regional actors for administration of economic development goods.
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