Suspicious Collaborators: How Governments in Polycentric Systems Monitor Behavior and Enforce Public Good Provision Rules Against One Another

Abstract

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.

Identifying Topics and Trends in the Study of Common-Pool Resources Using Natural Language Processing

“…For example, in 1992 Schlager and Ostrom (1992), developed a highly used conceptual framework to clarify the bundle of rights associated with common property regimes and distinguish them from open-access and private property regimes. By contrast, in 2019 Edella Schlager collaborated with several scholars to examine problems related to the provision of monitoring and enforcement functions in polycentric watershed management (Hanlon et al 2019). Although this clearly neglects Dr. Schlager's earlier empirical research (Schlager et al 1994) and more recent contributions to theoretical development (DeCaro et al 2017) it nonetheless reflects the general evolution of the literature.…”

Mechanism Design in Regional Arrangements for Water Governance

“…Building on literatures on transaction costs, this paper assessed whether differences in transaction costs risks are associated with variations in the design of monitoring, compliance, and consequence in the governance of shared water resources. Although similar work has been conducted at the international scale, comparing mechanism design across a variety of treaties (Koremenos, 2016), little work has been done in analyzing mechanism design within a country (for some exceptions, see Hanlon et al, 2019;Heikkila et al, 2011;Schlager et al, 2021).…”

“…The documents laying out the foundation of each institutional arrangement were identified by analyzing secondary sources and then corroborated by interviewees. (Hanlon et al, 2019;Schlager et al, 2021), the coding process involved two steps: First, each document was coded applying the Institutional Grammar Tool (Basurto et al, 2010;Crawford & Ostrom, 1995Siddiki et al, 2011). This approach allowed identifying the institutional statements that comprise each arrangement.…”

Rules and the Ruled: Understanding Joint Patterns of Institutional Design and Behavior in Complex Governing Arrangements

“…Building on the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework (Ostrom, 2005), with its core concepts of action situation, levels of action, and distinction between rules in form and rules in use, the grammar of institutions (Crawford & Ostrom, 1995) allows for the identification and analysis of rules, norms, and strategies at a microlevel, down to specific words and phrases. These tools of institutional analysis have been used in numerous settings to carefully explore the role of institutional arrangements in explaining relations and interactions among actors and the shared outcomes they realize (see for instance, Hanlon, Olivier & Schlager, 2019; Lien, Schlager & Lona, 2018; Novo & Garrido, 2014; Siddiki, Weible, Basurto, & Calanni, 2015).…”

“…The rules appear in the following documents: the 1997 Memorandum of Agreement (MOA), the 2007 New York City Watersheds Rules and Regulations, the 2014 New York City Water Supply Permit, and the Catskill Watershed Corporation (CWC) program rules. 5 Rule sets creating power-sharing arrangements and public goods were identified by using document titles, and section and subsection titles (Hanlon et al, 2019;Olivier et al, 2020). In total, 51 power-sharing and public goods arrangements were identified and then grouped into three categories, (1) shared decision making venues, which included the CWC, the WPPC, and several land acquisition programs, which we refer to as Power-sharing; (2) water quality infrastructure programs, referred to as Infrastructure, and (3) Economic Development programs.…”