Applying the social-ecological system framework to the diagnosis of urban lake commons in Bangalore, India

Abstract

ABSTRACT. The south Indian city of Bangalore provides a challenging yet representative context within which to examine issues of governance of urban social-ecological commons. The city was once famous for its numerous large water bodies, which have witnessed tremendous encroachment and pollution in recent years. These water bodies, called tanks or lakes, were typically managed by adjacent village communities but are now administered by a number of government departments involved with aspects of lake management, with multiple overlapping jurisdictions. The public's perceptions of lakes has also changed with urbanization, transitioning from community spaces valued for water and cultural services to urban recreational spaces used largely by joggers and walkers. We focus on a set of seven lakes located in the urbanizing peripheral areas of southeast Bangalore. Some water bodies have been restored and managed effectively by newly forged collaborations between citizens and local government. Others are extremely polluted, and some have completely dried up and have been encroached. We use a social-ecological system (SES) framework to investigate why some locations have been successful in negotiating changes in governance from community-based systems to state management following urbanization, whereas other lakes have deteriorated. We use seven second-tier SES variables that were associated with self-organization in previous research: size of resource system, number of actors, leadership, social capital, importance of resource, existence of operational-choice rules, and existence of informal mechanisms for monitoring. We also include three third-tier variables previously identified as important in urban lake commons in Bangalore: scale and type of pre-existing pollution, exclusion of socioeconomic groups from the planning process, and networking with government organizations. We use this subset of 10 variables to examine social outcomes of the lakes, which we define as the extent of collective action by residents working together for lake restoration and ecological outcomes based on the ecological condition of the lakes. Collective action was low in only one of seven lakes, which challenges the presumption that citizens will not organize efforts to cope with common-pool problems. However, only two of seven lakes were highly successful in regard to both the extent of collective action and the level of ecological performance. While one lake was small and the other moderate in size, these two cases shared similar ranking in all other variables. Both lakes were polluted at a relatively low level compared with the other lakes, and in both cases, the leaders of local groups were able to network with government officials to clean up the lakes. Unfortunately, the challenge of cleaning up urban lakes after many decades of pollution is very difficult without effective interaction with various governmental units. Our analysis illustrates the usefulness of the SES framework in examining the combination of variables that makes a coll...

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“…Fleischman et al 2010;Ostrom and Cox 2010;Basurto and Nenadovic 2012;Schlüter and Madrigal 2012;Epstein et al 2013;Garrick et al 2013;Basurto et al 2013;McGinnis and Ostrom 2014;Nagendra and Ostrom 2014;Partelow 2015). It is significant also that the SES framework was developed from the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework which itself has been widely applied and extensively elaborated (Marshall 2005;Ostrom 2005), including by researchers focused on value chains for food (e.g.…”

Barriers to Climate Adaptation in Urban Areas: The Case of Water Crisis in the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo

“…Interactions among these variables generate Outcomes, which then turn into inputs or set conditions for other Interactions, and so on (see figure 1). Further, these variables are embedded in Social, Economic, and Political Settings and are connected to Related Ecosystems (Nagendra and Ostrom 2014). Within each of these variables categories are second-tier variables.…”

“…Depending on the phenomena analyzed, there may be a certain group of variables, which is most helpful in answering a research question. Field studies that apply SES framework Nagendra and Ostrom 2014;Villamayor-Tomas et al 2016;Murtinho 2016) highlight the importance of identifying the SES variables (see appendix 1), which may be particularly helpful before undertaking the data valuation. This step leads to a focused observation of parameters, which potentially have the strongest explanatory power for a certain question.…”