Bottom-up Governance Research Articles

Spotify Guilds: How to Succeed With Knowledge Sharing in Large-Scale Agile Organizations

The new generation of software companies has revolutionized the way companies are designed. While bottom-up governance and team autonomy improve motivation, performance, and innovation, managing agile development at scale is a challenge. We describe how Spotify cultivates guilds to help the company share knowledge, align, and make collective decisions.

Sustainable financing of a national Marine Protected Area network in Fiji

Marine Protected Areas (MPA) are mostly studied from an environmental context. A review of available information identified a lack of knowledge in sustainable mechanisms to finance MPA networks. At the United Nations Ocean Conference in 2017, Fiji reaffirmed its voluntary commitment to make 30% of its inshore and offshore marine area MPAs by 2020 under Sustainable Development Goal 14. The work presented here uses empirical data to explore potential benefits from selected community-based MPAs to recipient local stakeholders. A Willingness to Pay (WTP) and Willingness to Contribute Time (WtCT) method was used to explore the extent to which bottom-up governance systems represent a potential financing mechanism of a MPA network. Results of 115 interviews concluded that proximity to a fishing market, dependence on marine resources, food security, income and international commitments were significant variables influencing stakeholder's WTP and WtCT to manage a MPA. We argue that there is a discrepancy between WtCT and WTP driven by income constraints. Thus, by using WTP and WtCT to support financing of a MPA network, a Provincial Trust Fund (PTF) could promote an equitable and benefits-based contribution. Equally important, a PTF has a polycentric and decentralized governance model, which endorses sustainable management of traditional fishing communities. The conclusions provide insight into a bottom-up approach for long-term financial sustainability of Fiji's national MPA commitments.

Competition, Patronage and Fragmentation: The Limits of Bottom-Up Approaches to Security Governance in Ituri

People are affected by different kinds of insecurity in the Ituri Province in the northeastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This article investigates donor-driven attempts to improve security governance there. More specifically, it investigates bottom-up approaches to security governance in Ituri’s capital of Bunia and in Irumu territory. Whereas in Bunia people are faced with high levels of violent crime, Irumu is the site of a violent conflict between the Ituri Patriotic Resistance Force (FRPI), an armed group connected to the Ngiti community, and the Congolese army. Involving local non-state security actors in security governance is perceived by international and national actors as a pragmatic way to improve security conditions. However, we show that these bottom-up security governance initiatives have not succeeded in resolving the issues that generate insecurity. We argue that this is because the drivers of insecurity in northeastern Congo are translocal and too complex for localised bottom-up approaches to significantly change the status quo.

Harvesting Water for Living with Drought: Insights from the Brazilian Human Coexistence with Semi-Aridity Approach towards Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals

The Semi-Arid region of Brazil (SAB) has been periodically affected by moderate to extreme droughts, jeopardizing livelihoods and severely impacting the life standards of millions of family farmers. In the early 1990s the Human Coexistence with Semi-Aridity (HCSA) emerged as a development approach. The debate on HCSA is limited to Brazilian literature but as a technological and a bottom-up governance experience, researches on the topic could add some insights to international debate on living with drought. The present paper adopts an historical perspective on HCSA before discussing the main HCSA’s rainwater-harvesting methods found in two case studies in the SAB as a local appropriate and advanced technological package for achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Qualitative analysis of 32 semi-structured interviews with key local stakeholders, 29 unstructured interviews with family farmers, and surveys in 499 family farms are used. The results show that regardless the highly adaptive potential, the technologies are adopted in differ rates among them and in between case studies chosen, influenced by non-technological factors and interacting the broader public policies context. Scaling up the HCSA’s technologies in the rural SAB is a development path towards the SDGs.

Exploration on Strengthening City Competitiveness and Improving Urban Governance in the Age of Ecological Civilization

In this interview, Ye Yumin, the interviewee, first clarifies basic concepts of Economics such as Urban Economics, a city’s economy, and industrial structure upgrading, and points out that, to most Chinese cities, the failure of industrial structure upgrading and new driving force fostering largely is due to their inadequate labor force structure. She argues that today’s primary task of China's urbanization is to ensure people’s overall well-being, encourage their activity and cultivate talents, accumulating human capital to support the continuous upgrading of industrial structure and developing new driving forces. Ye further argues that, in the age of Ecological Civilization, urban planners and designers play an important role in strengthening cities’ competitiveness with inclusive renewal and design concepts, while highlighting that China’s new reform of a Super-Ministry System is in line with contemporary needs to improve the overall competitiveness of the country in the future and to safeguard the public interests. Finally, by recognizing the application scopes of the both topdown Management mode and bottom-up Governance mode, Ye articulates that all problems in China’s PPP cases are caused by the poor credibility of both public and private parties, and a sound credibility system and mechanism is urgently required, which would define duties of both parties.

Transforming conflicts from the bottom-up? Reflections on civil society efforts to empower marginalized fishers in postwar Sri Lanka

We analyze the efforts of an international consortium of academics and activists to understand and address a transnational fisheries conflict in South Asia. The so-called REINCORPFISH project (2010–2016) focused on an asymmetrical conflict between trawler fishers from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu who frequently transgress into Sri Lankan waters and northern Sri Lankan fishers, whose livelihoods are affected by these intrusions as well as by a long history of civil war. Guided by notions of bottom-up governance and empowerment, the consortium engaged in action research focusing on three types of remedial activities: (a) facilitating dialogues between fishers from both countries, (b) supporting the creation of a unified fisher organization in northern Sri Lanka, and (c) engaging in an advocacy program promoting assistance for the northern Sri Lankan fishers. Although the consortium succeeded in creating widespread attention of the problem, we analyze how the project’s rationale of bottom-up governance was thoroughly challenged by divisive national and transboundary politics. The fisheries conflict intertwined with geopolitical power play, military bluster, and ethnic tension, as well as with governmental suspicion toward NGO activity of any kind, marginalized civil society and compromised its assumed role as an agent of change. We therefore demonstrate how supporting marginalized resource users through action research requires handling a multiplicity of coexisting conflicts (resource, ethnic, and geopolitical) and that studying or dealing with such conflicts in isolation is both conceptually and practically flawed.

Urban community gardens: An evaluation of governance approaches and related enablers and barriers at different development stages

The governance structures of societies and organisations are significant determinants of their success; however, little is known about those associated with community gardens. Community gardens as models of urban green space governance can follow different approaches. They often are designed and managed by groups of like-minded or neighbourhood residents and may meet local needs, typified by low investment and bottom-up governance structures. Gardens governed by top-down governance structures may meet the needs of larger and more diverse populations. Through a content analysis of international scholarly literature from North America, Australia, UK, South Africa and Germany, in addition to key informant interviews from case studies in Germany and New Zealand, the paper critically examines garden governance structures and practices at different stages of garden development. Results expand the existing knowledge of international governance types by suggesting a continuum of top-down, bottom-up and mixed governance approaches. They identify enablers and barriers to garden development in relation to governance at different stages and provide insights into governance approaches during garden planning and design, implementation and management phases.

Governance of urban nature

This paper analyses changes in the governance of urban nature in French urban policies over the past two decades. It demonstrates that the importance of “sustainable development” procedural principles has significantly declined in public policy agendas, a decline that has occurred alongside the rise to prominence of sectoral approaches based on performance and control, whether they focus on climate or urban biodiversity policies. Faced with these transformations in public action—namely the emergence of a centralized and sectoral management of urban policies ill-suited to the complex socio-environmental territories—collective movements in civil society are developing initiatives based on cooperation across territories. Consequently, the urban governance of nature reflects the conflicts between centralized policies and the composite and fragmented reality of the governance of nature in the city. We use the notion of “tinkering”, which refer to the general fragmentation of initiatives, actors, alliances and conflicts in the context of space usage in the field of urban nature, to describe these dynamics. Based on two studies of the urban policies developed by central French government authorities since the 1990s, we identify three principal discrepancies, based on three main separations, that illustrate “tinkering” with the governance of urban nature. The first relates to the discrepancy between “living nature” (biodiversity policies) and “physical-chemical nature” (in climate change policies) (Climate and biodiversity policies: sector-based governance). The second reflects the discrepancy between a technically oriented understanding of the environment and the sensory understanding of inhabitants (Discrepancies between representations and practices). Finally, the third concerns the different levels of action (Discrepancies in scale: the relationship between top-down and bottom-up governance).

Dynamics of experimental governance: A meta-study of functions and uses of climate governance experiments

Societies around the world are faced with wicked problems such as climate change. In this context, experimental governance approaches have emerged as tools with potential utility in both top-down and bottom-up governance efforts. At the same time, experimental governance has gained momentum as a desirable policy goal in its own right. As the various experimental approaches differ in their origins and serve different purposes, there is a need to organize the field. If more experimental development processes are desired, what can be expected from certain kinds of experiments? How can the field be organised in a way that benefits those designing, conducting, and evaluating experimental governance processes? In attempting to answer these questions, we carried out a meta-study of 25 articles on experimental climate governance. On the basis of the results and the previous work on experiments, we have built a ‘triangle model of experimental governance’ that proposes both vertical and horizontal dynamics within and between different functions and uses of experiments.

Governing Through Critique: Post-Conditionality and Bottom-Up Governance in the Merida Initiative

This article is about how the governmentality critique of top-down governance feeds into current interventionary policy thinking. Drawing on the Merida Initiative, a US–Mexican security cooperation agreement signed in 2007, the article brings out how neo-liberal civil society discourse continuously deconstructs the normative and analytical assumptions, categories, and concepts of modern liberal-universalism. In the Merida Initiative, civil society representatives were repeatedly delegitimized for being part of a detached internationalized NGO bubble. The goal was to enable idiosyncratic local knowledge-power to unfold its creative governing potential unencumbered by the oppressive and counterproductive reductions and exclusions of liberal-universal episteme. In this way, policy thinking actually coincides with the governmentality critique of standardized knowledge and top-down imposition. One of the negative implications is that international policy-makers lose their ability to arbitrate according to fixed normative standards.

Building resilience: A self-sustainable community approach to the triple bottom line

The purpose of this paper is to assess, theoretically and empirically, the governance approach associated with the formation of the circular value ecosystem (CVES) within the Sustainable Wealth creation based on Innovation and enabling Technologies (SWIT) framework. The SWIT framework is designed to interlink economic models, policies and strategies so as to introduce and convert residue, waste and by-product chains into multiple increasing returns cycles. Unlike regional circular economy cases in Germany, Japan and China where governments or industry have taken the lead on such initiatives - a top-down governance approach, the SWIT framework was developed for regions where government support for eco-initiatives is weak and where the participation of community stakeholders is critical – a bottom-up governance approach. The ecological, social and economic dimensions of the system are explored so as to ascertain the key stakeholders critical to the governance of the circular value ecosystem (CVES). We seek to answer: What stakeholders must be incorporated in a bottom-up CVES governance approach for the SWIT framework to be able to restore environmental resilience while creating economic returns and social benefits in rural communities? We report the results of an action research case – both successes and challenges – which sought to test this community-driven bottom-up governance approach on a rural community in Mexico. Our findings suggest that a bottom-up governance approach requires a deep understanding of the social, political, environmental and economic characteristics of the community as well as civic collaboration.

Committing to place: the potential of open collaborations for trusted environmental governance.

Conventional modes of environmental governance, which typically exclude those stakeholders that are most directly linked to the specific place, frequently fail to have the desired impact. Using the example of lake water management in Loweswater, a small hamlet within the English Lake District, we consider the ways in which new “collectives” for local, bottom-up governance of water bodies can reframe problems in ways which both bind lay and professional people to place, and also recast the meaning of “solutions” in thought-provoking ways.

Multilevel investigation of the relationships of leader humility as a form of bottom-up governance

As the nature of work rapidly changes to become more interdependent and dynamic, it has become necessary to reinvestigate the nature of effective leadership within this context. The purpose of this...

Conceptual Issues in Disaster and Governance

Disasters can be natural or man-made (the latter based on either human mistakes or terrorist attacks). Their spatial scale may vary from the global/multiregional (e.g. tsunamis, typhoons) to the national (e.g. an epidemic) and to the local (e.g. tornado, a terrorist attack on a facility). Some disasters require top-down governance, others bottom ?up, and yet others need a mix of both. They are not restricted to government intervention (at different hierarchical levels) but may also need action from NGOS, business corporations, communities and volunteers. As for government interventions, the horizontal level is much more successful than the vertical. At the vertical level, the preferred approach is from local to State to Federal (in alternative systems, from local to provincial to national). The benefits of bottom-up governance (both in the public and private sectors) are usually preferable, especially in view of the contribution of disaster response to poverty alleviation (especially in developing countries). Other relevant issues include: moral hazard (no compensation in the event of disaster to homeowners who insist on buying homes in disaster-areas such as river banks or coastline in risky hurricane areas); czars vs. multiple decision makers (e.g. agencies); and corruption (e.g. fast disaster project contract awards instead of a formal tender process).

Smart specialisation strategies in south Europe during crisis

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to assess how national and regional authorities in south-east Europe in a period of crisis perceive and set in motion research and innovation strategies for smart specialisation (RIS3) and the options that these strategies offer to overcome the current fiscal and development crisis. Design/methodology/approach – The paper starts with a literature review on the guiding principles of smart specialisation strategies and the differences from previous rounds of regional innovation strategies. Evidence on smart specialisation efforts is provided by cases studies in Greece, Slovenia, and Cyprus, focusing on the elaboration of such strategies in three countries with precarious innovation systems under severe conditions of crisis. The case studies are organised around key aspects of the smart specialisation logic, such as the selection of specialisation priorities, bottom-up governance, private sector leadership, and engines of innovation and competitiveness. Findings – The paper explores the obstacles encountered in running effective RIS strategies under crisis conditions. The paper highlights the main challenges to address, such as the readiness and credibility of public authorities to design and implement sound RIS3 strategies, the willingness of companies to be involved in strategic planning, the availability of private investment funds, innovation and diversification during a crisis, and the drivers of specialisation that could lead to competitiveness and growth. In the conclusions the paper identifies three routes towards smarter productive diversification and five critical stages in the entrepreneurial discovery process. Originality/value – The paper has both practical and theoretical significance. It focuses on the main challenges of smart specialisation and offers guidance in the elaboration of RIS3 in peripheral EU economies. On the other hand, it proposes a model for the entrepreneurial discovery process, based on the assessment of areas and futures of productivity and added-value increase, as productive diversification and crisis exit route.

Towards a Macroregional Climate Change Adaptation Strategy in the Baltic Sea Region

In this paper we ponder this question: what types of institutional principles would help to establish a macroregional climate change adaptation strategy in the Baltic Sea Region? Inspired by a new institutionalism approach, we trace some of the important elements of regulatory and normative institutional functions. We then discuss how top-down and bottom-up government and governance can contribute to a macroregional climate change adaptation strategy, and profile the local, national, and transnational development efforts that are already underway to facilitate coordination and learning about climate change adaptation in the Baltic Sea Region. Finally, we look at the specific role that a macroregional climate change adaptation strategy has in helping to manage institutional complexity inherent in a multilevel governance context.

Elinor Ostrom and the robust political economy of common-pool resources

Abstract:This paper situates Elinor Ostrom's work on common-pool resource management in the tradition of ‘robust political economy’. Ostrom's analysis of bottom-up governance institutions is shown to recognise that such arrangements though imperfect are better placed to cope with bounded rationality and incentive compatibility problems in the management of smaller- and medium-scale common-pool resources. While Ostrom's work provides an analytical framework to explain the success of these arrangements, however, the paper argues that it lacks a robust account of when, if ever, top-down governance arrangements are to be preferred.

The California Marine Life Protection Act: A balance of top down and bottom up governance in MPA planning

California recently established a state-wide MPA network that extends over 1900km of coastline and includes 124MPAs totaling nearly 2200km². Designing and implementing such an MPA network in a populous democratic state with a large number of ocean users required a balance of top-down and bottom-up governance strategies. A legal mandate for MPAs identified the goals for the network and stipulated that scientific knowledge should form the basis of MPA design, while political necessity led to a participatory stakeholder-driven MPA design process. At the time of publication, the oldest region of the network was just five years old, so it remains to be seen how the governance strategies employed in MPA planning will evolve to meet the challenges of long-term MPA management.

A Rapid Solar Transition is not only Possible, it is Imperative!

Catastrophic climate change (C3) is inevitable if carbon emissions to the atmosphere are not rapidly reduced and the now unsafe atmospheric level (400 ppm) CO2 (and rising) is not brought down by sequestration technologies to below 350 ppm. C3 prevention is possible with the replacement of global fossil fuel supplies by wind, concentrated solar power and photovoltaics, with the main obstacle being the political economy of global capitalism, specifically the Military Industrial (Fossil Fuel, Nuclear, State Terror) Complex. C3 prevention likely requires global demilitarization, agroecologies replacing industrial/genetically modified organism (GMO) agriculture, solarization, and democratic, bottom-up governance. Energy poverty in the global South must end, reaching a rough minimum of 3.5 kilowatt/person. This solar transition is achievable in 20 to 30 years using less than 40% of the proven reserves of conventional petroleum, while supplying sufficient energy to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere using agroecologies and burial of carbonate in the crust, thereby maximizing the possibility of reaching a safe atmospheric CO2 level in time to prevent C3.

The Adoption of Bottom-up Governance in China's Homeowner Associations

Since China's marketization-featured housing reform, homeowner associations have played a greater role in neighbourhood governance. Using the theory of social movements and organizations, this article investigates how homeowner associations strategically reorganize themselves to achieve their goals. Our survey in Beijing suggests that about half of the homeowner associations have adopted bottom-up governance structures, which are not specified in governmental regulations. We find that such innovations are more likely to occur when a neighbourhood needs grassroots participation to deal with external grievances, especially developer-related issues, or to overcome its powerlessness due to little access to the polity. We also find that homeowner associations are more likely to adopt bottom-up structures when their leaders believe strongly in resident participation or actively engage in extra-organizational professional activities as a means to overcome infrastructure deficit.