Environmental Resource Governance Research Articles

Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Resource Governance

The construction of an ecological civilization is receiving increasing attention from countries worldwide [...]

Roles of Formal and Customary Institutions in Environmental Resource Governance and Sustainability along Ethiopia-Kenya Borderlands: Do they Complement or Compete Each Other?

This study examined roles of state and indigenous institutions in environmental resource governance along the Ethiopia-Kenya border. We used a qualitative approach to discuss the research objectives. Interviews, focus group discussions and scheduled interviews were used as instruments of data collection. The results demonstrate that the customary institutions have survived and served for generations in defending the rangeland environment from tragic destruction enabled pastoralists to go beyond borders to get ecological benefits of mobility as an adaptive strategy. Now, unlike before, the role of indigenous institution is declining due to a lack of recognition and exploitation by the state apparatus.

Land and Water in Rural São Paulo: Case Study of Environmental Inequalities in Brazil

The governance of environmental resources in rural territories is an issue that has received special attention in recent studies. This article presents research on conflicts in the management of water policies in rural territories in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. The study addresses a case of tensions and conflicts in water governance promoted by River Basin Committees. The case study, carried out in the municipality of Barra Bonita between 2000 and 2010, used qualitative social research techniques, focusing on semistructured interviews, utilizing oral reports, and documentary survey. Based on the results of this research, this article discusses how different agrarian and agricultural contexts reproduce specific forms of inequalities in access to water, thus compromising the promotion of lasting standards of environmental justice at the local level.

Pastoral Land Rights and Environmental Resource Governance and Sustainability along Ethiopia–Kenya border

Past studies mainly focused on the effects of the lack of a pastoral land tenure security system. There is scarcity of evidence regarding the effects of pastoral land tenure insecurity in the context of cross-border environmental resource governance and sustainability that the present study attempted to contribute. The main objective of this study is therefore to assess how far the state land tenure system has impacted environmental resource governance and sustainability along the Ethiopia–Kenya border. The study employed a qualitative method in which key informant interviews, in-depth interviews, and focus group discussions were utilized as the primary data collection methods; moreover, the legal documents of the two states, journal articles, official reports of governmental, and nongovernmental organizations report and other relevant secondary sources were assessed in the review of the literature. Data were collected from various respondents from the pastoralists, nongovernmental organizations, and government bodies from local, national, regional, and international organization representatives. The findings of the study showed that in both states, the government laws and policies adopted have not taken into account the pastoral way of life. In addition, the lack of tenure security for the pastoralists has endangered cross-border environmental resource governance and sustainability. The pastoral landholding system is communally influenced mainly by states’ interests and human encroachments. It is vital that pastoral policies should accommodate pastoral felt needs and interests in which the voices of pastoralists are heard in the policy-making process; hence, there should be a special representation for the pastoral people in the regional and federal legislature (in Ethiopia) and central government parliament (in Kenya), and there should be a cross-border pastoralists forum to ensure better environmental resource governance in the borderland.

Urbanization, land use transformation and spatio-environmental impacts: Analyses of trends and implications in major metropolitan regions of Ghana

Urbanization induces spatial and environmental changes. Monitoring and understanding the nature of these changes is crucial to achieving sustainable urban development imperatives. To this end, this paper examines the evolution and spatio-environmental impacts of rapid urbanization in two major metropolitan regions of Ghana—Accra-City Region and the Greater Kumasi Sub-Region. The analysis uses Landsat satellite data and landscape metrics to examine land use transitions and to characterize the emergent landscapes over the last three decades. The results show that built-up land has increased significantly in these metropolitan regions largely at the expense of environmental land cover classes. The expansion process follows a general trend where the historical-core zones were initially sites of rapid land cover conversion to built-up, with settlements in the suburban and peripheral zones expanding in recent years and becoming integrated into the conterminous urban areas of the metropolitan regions. The analysis also uncovered a unique, dynamic and complex process whereby the urban-open-space class, being in a permanent state of flux, mediates transitions between built-up land and vegetation and vice versa. The metric-based land use transformation analysis shows that the landscape of the metropolitan regions has fragmented because of an increased expansion and aggregation of patches of built-up land in the core areas and leapfrog, sprawling expansion in the outlying suburban and peripheral zones. The paper concludes on the need for integrative urban growth management strategies that brings together spatial planning and environmental resource governance to avert the negative consequences on the natural environment of unfettered urban expansion.

Voluntary monitoring of households in waste disposal: An application of the institutional analysis and development framework

While increasing consensus has grown around the important role of monitoring in environmental resource governance, little is known about under what conditions people would rather pay private costs to implement monitoring and punishment. Using field survey data on communities and households from four suburb areas in China, this paper employs Institutional Analysis and Development framework to empirically examine households’ willingness and actual activities on waste disposal monitoring. The empirical results show that population density, community modernization, and being male significantly increase the likelihood of households supervising waste disposal while community size and heterogeneity of wealth and ethnicity seriously impede the involvement of households in waste disposal supervision. More importantly, our estimation results reveal that staffing community with full-time cadres for sanitation management suppress the enthusiasm of households in conducting waste disposal supervision, but stock of social capital and peer monitoring substantially increase the intention to supervise waste disposal and the possibility of households engaging in waste disposal supervision activities. In addition, social norms, household income, and householder age are primary predictors of the intention-behavior gap between hypothetical willingness to monitor and actual monitoring behavior. Therefore, improving community infrastructure and economic condition, reducing external intervention on community affairs, and cultivating social capital stock are important approaches to enhance public participation in environmental governance.

The Oil Climax: Can Nigeria’s fuel subsidy reforms propel energy transitions?

Recent studies in the field of political science and environmental resource governance suggest that oil-exporting economies have begun to implement fuel subsidy reforms. However, while most studies on this issue focus largely on the broader environmental and economic consequences of fuel subsidy reforms, few have examined specifically the effects on renewable energy transitions. Drawing insights from the literature on political economy and the multi-level perspective on socio-technical transitions, with empirical examples from Nigeria, first this study provides an explanation of which factors triggered fuel reforms on the basis of the interaction between landscape and regime elements and second the effects of such fuel reforms on renewable energy transitions. Findings suggest that landscape factors such as global oil crashes and pressures from international financial organisations played crucial roles in the drive for fuel reforms. Nonetheless, rentier regime members responded to these pressures by adopting institutional, discursive and redistributive measures. Of all three strategies, the institutional strategy was significantly pivotal in the proliferation of renewable energy in Nigeria. This study concludes by discussing lessons learned in shaping a transition away from fossil fuels in Nigeria and rentier countries in general.

Legal and institutional foundations of adaptive environmental governance.

Legal and institutional structures fundamentally shape opportunities for adaptive governance of environmental resources at multiple ecological and societal scales. Properties of adaptive governance are widely studied. However, these studies have not resulted in consolidated frameworks for legal and institutional design, limiting our ability to promote adaptation and social-ecological resilience. We develop an overarching framework that describes the current and potential role of law in enabling adaptation. We apply this framework to different social-ecological settings, centers of activity, and scales, illustrating the multidimensional and polycentric nature of water governance. Adaptation typically emerges organically among multiple centers of agency and authority in society as a relatively self-organized or autonomous process marked by innovation, social learning, and political deliberation. This self-directed and emergent process is difficult to create in an exogenous, top-down fashion. However, traditional centers of authority may establish enabling conditions for adaptation using a suite of legal, economic, and democratic tools to legitimize and facilitate self-organization, coordination, and collaboration across scales. The principles outlined here provide preliminary legal and institutional foundations for adaptive environmental governance, which may inform institutional design and guide future scholarship.

Resilient Settler Colonialism: “Responsible Resource Development,” “Flow-Through” Financing, and the Risk Management of Indigenous Sovereignty in Canada

This essay interrogates aspects of the recent reconfiguration of Canadian environmental resource governance in relation to Indigenous sovereignty, rights, and struggles for self-determination in the context of mining and mineral exploration. I am especially interested in the targeting of expressions of Indigenous sovereignty as threats to the “resilience” of the national economy and attempts to “manage” Indigenous sovereignty and rights through mechanisms of resource governance. I focus primarily on a set of changes made to “flow-through share” financing arrangements that allow mining firms to raise capital on the basis of tax credits for expenditures incurred in relation to engaging Indigenous rights in the mineral exploration process. I suggest that flow-through financing is a method for “risk managing” exposure to the threat of Indigenous sovereignty in the interests of mining capital and the state that produces effects of crown sovereignty. In closing, the essay considers relationships between the neoliberalization of Canadian environmental governance and settler colonialism.

Contracting for Control of Landscape-Level Resources

I. INTRODUCTIONPolicy discussions increasingly envision a role for private actors in a wide variety of governance contexts.1 Growing awareness that industry actors and nongovernmental organizations play vital leadership roles in the development of law and policy call traditional notions of the government as a unilateral decisionmaker into question.2 Environmental law is a particularly fertile ground for studying public-private approaches.3 Collaborative environmental governance4 and new governance5 approaches are increasingly evaluated for their flexibility and nimbleness in addressing complicated environmental problems.6We focus on a specific subset of private governance of environmental resources: the use of contract. Contracts govern multiple natural resources on vast western landscapes. Any single land parcel is potentially subject to a multitude of contracts. Contracts governing landscape-level resources7 range from oil and gas extraction to exploitation of mineral rights, reciprocal use of private roads to conservation of endangered species. Yet, we know little about the conditions under which contractual regimes are likely to emerge, and even less about their substantive content or normative desirability.The need for contract-or some form of governance arrangement-to control landscapes emerges from tension between manmade property divisions, such as land parcels, and natural resources.8 Legal discussion about land operates almost exclusively through the construct of property, in which land is divided and owned.9 Chopping land into neat bundles serves human purposes by reducing conflict and encouraging investment through the establishment of entitlements and boundaries. However, the property paradigm that divorces land from landscapes also imposes costs on those seeking to govern large-scale natural resources that cannot be constrained into neatly defined lines.10 As a result, areas of shared public-private control emerge.11Landscape-level resources are often imagined to be controlled almost entirely by agencies operating under state and federal laws.12 Yet, the majority of American lands, and the natural resources upon them, are privately owned. Effective resource management thus requires participation by private parties. Land itself is managed on a parcel-by-parcel basis, but resources can seldom be effectively managed, exploited, or conserved in the same way. Synergistic uses produce more effective resource outcomes than competing or conflicting uses on a parcel-by-parcel basis. Transaction costs subsume small-aquifers, scale attempts to monetize resources. Conservation, preservation, recreation, and wildlife resource management operate best when there is a single, cohesive landscape-level management approach. The need for coordination among private actors gives rise to private bargaining, which can be understood in part as a system of private ordering.13 Private bargaining leading to contractual arrangement is one form of governance for landscape-level resources crossing multiple property lines.14We examine how laws, landowner-resource-use preferences, and transaction costs affect the choice of a governance mechanism to manage landscape-level resources. We provide an overview of several areas in which contractual arrangements govern resource management, including: groundwater, oil and gas, wildlife, marine fisheries, scenic landscapes, and conservation. Then, we turn towards exploring the conditions under which private contacting emerges.15 A series of case studies of the various contractual arrangements used to manage wildfire illustrate that the homogeneity of resource use among landowners, low transaction costs, and laws that favor individualistic outcomes promote the use of contracting as a resource-management tool. These observations suggest that contracting is most difficult when land is fragmented and land uses are heterogeneous among landowners. Yet, this is precisely the setting in which the use of contract can be most important to effective resource use and conservation. …

Tragedy of the unwanted commons: Governing the marine debris in Taiwan’s oyster farming

Marine debris is a pollution problem on a global scale, which causes harm to marine ecosystems and consequently results in profoundly negative influences on mankind. This type of pollution can originate from various activities such as leisure and tourism, fishery, land-based sources, and vessels, etc. In this study, it was found that derelict fishing gear (DFG) produced by oyster farming activities is being dispersed along the southwestern coast of Taiwan, consequently reducing the leisure quality and coastal amenities. In order to understand the current problem of DFG, related stakeholders were invited to undergo qualitative interviews to observe the stakeholders’ perceptions pertaining to DFG pollution and their opinions on subsequent mitigation measures. The results of the interviews were then used to explore management issues pertaining to DFG, as well as the trans-boundary pollution problems caused by DFG based on the theory of environmental resource governance and scales of management jurisdiction. Finally, suggestions were provided to effectively reduce the DFG pollution from oyster farming, including the strengthening of environmental education and propagation, sustaining management and monitoring of marine debris by the government, using policy tools, and applying solid waste management principles.

Rio+20: Indigenous Knowledge and Intellectual Property in Coastal and Ocean Law

This report explores the extent to which indigenous knowledge have been advanced by the 1992 Rio Earth Summit up to Rio 20 in the evolution of coastal, ocean and marine environmental law. Parties to the Rio Earth Summit have failed to follow through on their commitments, but the state of the global environment would have been worse off without the Rio initiatives. But Indigenous knowledge issues have yet to gain traction in areas of marine genetic resources (MGR) and marine scientific research (MSR). Integrated, multidisciplinary and cross-sectoral ecosystem-based environmental management requires that Indigenous knowledge be re-engaged and not subjugated in a hierarchy of knowledge. Indigenous peoples' lifestyles and knowledge systems stand to be dramatically changed by policies in ecosystem management. Coastal, ocean and marine environmental resource governance needs to be constructed in a way that does not allow powerful global actors to exploit the natural resources of vulnerable populations. MSR is an opportunity for considering the role of intellectual property and bioprospecting as a force for public interest scientific research, rather than the appropriation of Indigenous knowledge. The urgent need to engage Indigenous issues and knowledge is just as relevant in the coastal and oceans arena as they are in other contexts.

Finding general patterns in complex water governance regimes

The requirements for sustainable governance of environmental resources in general, and of water in particular, have been a topic of continued concern (Holling and Meffe 1996; Gleick 2003; Pahl-Wostl 1995, 2007). This ongoing debate has been fueled by prospects of climate and global change that render the conditions under which governance has to perform increasingly unpredictable (Bates et al. 2008). Globalization exhibits breath taking dynamics and leads to large-scale changes with unprecedented speed. Climate change and the concomitant increase of extreme weather events have exposed vulnerability of water resource governance and management regimes (Pahl-Wostl 2007; Pahl-Wostl et al. 2007; Opperman et al. 2009). At the same time, it is not clear how to achieve effective water governance, and many problems have not primarily been associated with the resource base but have to be attributed to governance failures. Improving our understanding of how to achieve water governance is of paramount importance. There is increasing recognition that simplistic panaceas like privatization or decentralization as one-fit-all solutions to any governance problem are highly inappropriate (Ingram 2008; Ostrom 2007; Pahl-Wostl 2009). The papers in this special issue make a contribution to develop more general insights into governance approaches based on empirical evidence from a comprehensive assessment of case studies. They are based on papers given at the Conference on Adaptive and Integrated Water Management, which was the first major international scientific event from and for the social science water community. The authors use different approaches from standardized comparative analysis to the in depth exploration of a single case study applying a general conceptual framework. All contributions explore the need to address complexity, the role of institutional diversity and the involvement of actors. The paper by Huntjens et al. (2010) on ‘‘Climate change adaptation in European river basins’’ contains an assessment and standardized comparative analysis of the water management regimes in four case studies in three European river basins. This comparative analysis has an explorative character intended to identify general patterns in adaptive and integrated water management and to determine its role in coping with the impacts of climate change on floods and droughts. Despite its explorative character, the analysis offers very interesting insights. As expected from conceptual considerations (Pahl-Wostl 2007, 2009), the analysis showed a strong interdependence of the elements within a water management regime. For example, a lack of joint/ participative knowledge is an important obstacle for cooperation or vice versa—the two mutually dependent regime elements that were found to be of key importance. Furthermore, the research suggests that bottom-up governance is not a straightforward solution to water management problems in large-scale, complex, multiple-use systems, such as river basins. Instead, all the regimes analyzed were identified to be in a process of finding a balance between bottom-up and top-down governance. This is a clear indication of the need of a more balanced view of the interplay between different processes. The contribution of Nikitina et al. (2010) on ‘‘Towards better water governance in river basins: some lessons learned from the Volga’’ focuses on the problems of water C. Pahl-Wostl (&) Institute for Environmental Systems Research, University of Osnabruck, Osnabruck, Germany e-mail: Pahl@usf.uni-osnabrueck.de

Techno-bureaucratic Doxa and Challenges for Deliberative Governance: The Case of Community Forestry Policy and Practice in Nepal

Despite repeated pleas for participatory and deliberative governance of environmental resources, there is still a predominance of technocratic values in environmental decision-making. This is especially true in the context of forest management in the Global South where centralised and technically-oriented colonial approaches of the past continue to be reproduced and exclude affected people to have their say and share in forest related decision-making and benefit distribution. Taking a case study from Nepal's Community Forestry Program, this paper shows that despite major shifts towards practices of participatory forestry, the technocratic domination of forest science in governance has taken new and more subtle forms (considered “doxa” – taken for granted forms – after Bourdieu) of control over forestry practices. In this paper, techno-bureaucratic doxa is problematised as a key challenge to deliberative governance, and specific ways are illustrated through which it constrains deliberation in forest governance. Emerging moments of crisis in this doxa are also identified to explore possibilities for greater citizen-public official deliberation in forest governance.

Facilitating deliberative governance: Innovations from Nepal's community forestry program – a case study in Karmapunya

This paper discusses the use of a deliberative approach to governance of environmental resources at the local-level. Used in conjunction with external facilitation, a deliberative approach to governance at the local-level can be used to build dialogue between diverse perspectives, interests, knowledge, and ideas of different stakeholders. A case study of a community forest user group (CFUG) in the central hills of Nepal is used to analyse the application of deliberative processes for promoting deliberative governance. The findings indicate that there is great potential for deliberative processes to make local governance of community forests more democratic and inclusive. Effective governance at the local-level can contribute to the creation of social equity and to the sustainable management of community forests. Key words: Nepal, deliberative democracy, community forestry, Participatory Action Research, external facilitation