Capturing Critical Institutionalism: A Synthesis of Key Themes and Debates

Hall, Kurt; Cleaver, Frances; Franks, T.; Maganga, Faustin

doi:10.1057/ejdr.2013.48

Cited by 90 publications

(108 citation statements)

References 73 publications

(100 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

105

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…The inevitably reductionist approach of most scientific analysis, however, requires a focus on particular resources, and therefore also tends to look for, or contributes to the creation of specialized institutions for the governance of that particular resource. In practice, much of the relevant actions of citizens are however not inspired and determined by such specifically crafted institutions, but rather the outcome of a process of "bricolage" (Cleaver, 2002), an interactive encounter of existing (multi-purpose) institutions (i.e., contributing to make sense of the life of people and not just of water or another ecosystem service) in which sensible ideas, rules and practices can -interactively-become incorporated in the received wisdom of existing societies (Hall et al, 2014).…”

Section: New Challenges and Opportunities For The Use Of Citizen Sciementioning

confidence: 99%

Citizen science in hydrology and water resources: opportunities for knowledge generation, ecosystem service management, and sustainable development

et al. 2014

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The participation of the general public in the research design, data collection and interpretation process together with scientists is often referred to as citizen science. While citizen science itself has existed since the start of scientific practice, developments in sensing technology, data processing and visualization, and communication of ideas and results, are creating a wide range of new opportunities for public participation in scientific research. This paper reviews the state of citizen science in a hydrological context and explores the potential of citizen science to complement more traditional ways of scientific data collection and knowledge generation for hydrological sciences and water resources management. Although hydrological data collection often involves advanced technology, the advent of robust, cheap, and low-maintenance sensing equipment provides unprecedented opportunities for data collection in a citizen science context. These data have a significant potential to create new hydrological knowledge, especially in relation to the characterization of process heterogeneity, remote regions, and human impacts on the water cycle. However, the nature and quality of data collected in citizen science experiments is potentially very different from those of traditional monitoring networks. This poses challenges in terms of their processing, interpretation, and use, especially with regard to assimilation of traditional knowledge, the quantification of uncertainties, and their role in decision support. It also requires care in designing citizen science projects such that the generated data complement optimally other available knowledge. Lastly, using 4 case studies from remote mountain regions we reflect on the challenges and opportunities in the integration of hydrologically-oriented citizen science in water resources management, the role of scientific knowledge in the decision-making process, and the potential contestation to established community institutions posed by co-generation of new knowledge.

show abstract

Section: New Challenges and Opportunities For The Use Of Citizen Sciementioning

confidence: 99%

Citizen science in hydrology and water resources: opportunities for knowledge generation, ecosystem service management, and sustainable development

et al. 2014

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Various attempts have been made to identify commonalities among these critiques and the academic work they inspired, to identify the school of thought that we refer to as critical institutionalism (Cleaver 2012, Hall et al 2014, Cleaver and de Koning 2015. For Hall and colleagues (2014) the critiques coalesce around the argument that we need more socially informed models of human action, more realistic ideas about community and the constraints of collective action, and better understandings of social relations as imbued with power and meaning.…”

Section: From "Getting Institutions Right" To Complexitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It offers explanations of how things change in situations of institutional, legal, and policy plurality to produce uneven outcomes (Hall et al 2014). Departing from underlying rational choice assumptions of commons scholarship, critical institutionalists takes the view that resource governance systems are socially constructed, whereby meaning and social reality is historically and geographically situated and emerges from the interaction between members of a group or society (Berger and Luckmann 1967).…”

Section: The "Complex-embeddedness" Of Critical Institutionalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The second of these paths saw commons scholarship encounter research drawing from more critical social science traditions, including those working in the fields of anthropology, sociology, and development studies. Although this is a rather loosely constituted group, in the last five years Cleaver and others (Cleaver 2012, Hall et al 2014, Cleaver and de Koning 2015, Whaley 2018) have attempted to articulate places of commonality and overlap among the various positions. In so doing, this second branch has come to be termed critical institutionalism, and can be considered an attempt to critique and steer mainstream commons scholarship in a new direction.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Understanding process, power, and meaning in adaptive governance: a critical institutional reading

Cleaver¹,

Whaley²

2018

E&S

Self Cite

112

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

“…We thus hypothesize that the social-ecological interactions particular to Caatinga will shape translations of SFM. In the following, we first present our analytical framework based on the Social-Ecological System model [26][27][28], and the Critical Institutionalism approach [25,29,30]. After that, we discuss our methodology and present our results.…”

Section: Translations Of Sustainable Forest Management Within a Specimentioning

confidence: 99%

Sustainable Forest Management and Social-Ecological Systems: An Institutional Analysis of Caatinga, Brazil

Faggin

Behagel

Arts

2017

Forests

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) has globally gained support as a strategy to use and manage forest resources while maintaining forest ecosystem services. However, type, relevance, and utilisation of forest ecosystem services vary across eco-regions, countries, and policy implementation pathways. As such, the concept of SFM is subject to a series of translations within the social-ecological context in which it is implemented. This article discusses translations of SFM in Caatinga biome-a tropical dry forest in the north-eastern semi-arid region of Brazil. Our analysis is based on a qualitative analysis of 24 semi-structured interviews and 30 documents. We discuss SFM and the interplay of resources, governance, and actors. Results for Caatinga show that (1) a technical approach to SFM that focuses on firewood and charcoal production is dominant; that (2) SFM implementation practices hardly address the needs and interests of local populations; and that (3) local actors show little support for the implementation of SFM. We conclude that the social-ecological context of Caatinga shapes translations of SFM mostly in a techno-bureaucratic rather than a socially embedded way. As a result, local practices of forest use are excluded from the regional SFM approach, which negatively affects its implementation.

show abstract

Capturing Critical Institutionalism: A Synthesis of Key Themes and Debates

Cited by 90 publications

References 73 publications

Citizen science in hydrology and water resources: opportunities for knowledge generation, ecosystem service management, and sustainable development

Citizen science in hydrology and water resources: opportunities for knowledge generation, ecosystem service management, and sustainable development

Understanding process, power, and meaning in adaptive governance: a critical institutional reading

Sustainable Forest Management and Social-Ecological Systems: An Institutional Analysis of Caatinga, Brazil

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About