Governance Of Common-pool Resources Research Articles

Resolving Douglass C. North's ‘puzzle’ concerning China's household responsibility system

AbstractThis paper considers Douglass C. North's ‘puzzle’ concerning China's household responsibility system (HRS) and offers a possible solution. China's HRS, which has evolved over the past four decades to become its dominant form of rural land ownership, has stimulated spectacular economic growth and poverty reduction; however, it is based on a type of ownership which is far removed from the property rights regime which North regarded as essential. Two features of the HRS merit attention. The first is ‘split ownership’: this refers to the allocation of different aspects of ownership, including rights of access, use, management, exclusion and alienation, to a range of individual and collective actors with interests in the land in question. The second is polycentric governance: rules governing land use are derived in part from community-level action and in part from state intervention. We argue that in explaining the functioning of the HRS we need to move beyond the narrow conception of legally enforced private property rights on which North relied. We should instead embrace understandings of ownership as an emergent, diverse and complex institution, of the kind emphasized by A.M. Honoré's legal theory of ownership and Elinor Ostrom's theories of the common-pool resource and polycentric governance.

Can Nationally Prescribed Institutional Arrangements Enable Community-Based Conservation? An Analysis of Conservancies and Community Forests in the Zambezi Region of Namibia

Community-based conservation is advocated as an idea that long-term conservation success requires engaging with, providing benefits for, and establishing institutions representing local communities. However, community-based conservation’s efficacy and impact in sustainable resource management varies depending on national natural resource policies and implications for local institutional arrangements. This paper analyses the significance of natural resource management policies and institutional design on the management of common pool resources (CPRs), by comparing Namibian conservancies and community forests. To meet this aim, we reviewed key national policies pertinent to natural resource governance and conducted 28 semi-structured interviews between 2012 and 2013. Key informants included conservancy and community forest staff and committee members, village headmen, NGO coordinators, regional foresters, wildlife officials (wardens), and senior government officials in the Ministry of Environment and Tourism and the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Forestry. We explored the following questions: how do national natural resource management policies affect the operations of local common pool resource institutions? and how do external factors affect local institutions and community participation in CPRs decision-making? Our results show that a diversity of national policies significantly influenced local institutional arrangements. Formation of conservancies and community forests by communities is not only directly linked with state policies designed to increase wildlife numbers and promote forest growth or improve condition, but also formulated primarily for benefits from and control over natural resources. The often-assumed direct relationship between national policies and local institutional arrangements does not always hold in practice, resulting in institutional mismatch. We aim to advance theoretical and applied discourse on common pool resource governance in social-ecological systems, with implications for sustainable land management policies in Namibia and other landscapes across sub-Saharan Africa.

Integrating Institutions with Local Contexts in Community-Based Irrigation Governance: A Qualitative Systematic Review of Variables, Combinations, and Effects

The literature on common-pool resources (CPRs) has mostly focused on institutional conditions for successful governance of the commons. However, many scholars have emphasized that the explanatory power of institutional variables <em>per se</em> is limited and that institutions should not be isolated from the context in which they operate. Consequently, the success of CPR governance requires a more nuanced understanding of specific combinations of institutions in a specific social-ecological context. Using community-based irrigation systems as an example, this paper examines how combinations of institutions and contexts affect irrigation governance based on a qualitative systematic review of 83 English language peer-reviewed articles published since 1990. The review firstly summarizes the basic characteristics, main research subjects, and development trends in the literature on community-based irrigation governance. Then, revealing the specific effects of major combinations of institutional variables and contextual variables on the performance of irrigation governance, the review suggests that (a) the congruence of institutional arrangements with attributes of actors (e.g., group size, group heterogeneity, and social capital), (b) the specific combination of institutions and contexts of resource system and related ecosystems (e.g., hydrology, soil, and agriculture), and (c) the market incentives (e.g., irrigation systems’ spatial proximity to markets) associating with formal governance organizations, are important for improving irrigation governance performance. The main findings not only reveal existing gaps in understanding how institutions and contexts interact in community-based irrigation governance, but also indicate potential pathways to theoretical construction in complex CPR systems by further exploring the relationships between institutions and the contexts in which they operate.

Social-Ecological Institutional Fit in Volunteer-Based Organizations: A Study of Lake Management Organizations in Vilas County, Wisconsin, U.S.A.

How do the social and ecological attributes of social-ecological systems enable outcomes of those systems? The high concentration of lake organizations in northern USA enables us to study social, institutional, and ecological attributes that correlate with performance of common pool resource governance—institutional fit. In the summer of 2019, we performed an in-depth comparative study of thirty-one lake organizations in Vilas County, Wisconsin using data collected through semi-structured interviews, websites, and agency databases. We systematically compared the cases using crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis, specifically analyzing how the eight Ostrom institutional design principles lead to different outcomes for the lake social-ecological systems. The Ostrom institutional design principles played an important role in SES governance outcomes where there was low-resource dependence. We found that different combinations of design principles, social, and ecological conditions led to the same lake SES outcomes—equifinality. Although we expected that there were no panaceas for lake governance, we were surprised by the high diversity in organizational goals and the relative low diversity of rules in use.

Addressing Issues and Challenges in Managing Migratory Tuna Resources in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean

Tuna resources in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean are the world’s largest and most valuable fisheries of their type and are vital to the economy and the sustainable development of the region. However, the region witnesses a rapid decline in tuna resources and the depletion of species such as bigeye and yellowfin tunas, and overharvesting of the other species. This study investigated the collaborative management model used to manage migratory tuna resources. The study followed a case study design with a focus on the Western and Central Pacific Ocean Fisheries Commission. Forty interviews were conducted with key stakeholders. The findings indicated that six factors, namely, structure and size, self-interest, self-enforcement, leadership style, equality of power, and culture, affected significantly the outcomes of a collaborative management model. The findings also provide important insights on how the factors influenced the outcomes. The study contributes to a better understanding of international governance of common-pool resources (CPRs) and its challenges, and thus helps policymakers develop strategies for managing migratory fishing resources for the sake of economic viability and sustainability in the region.

The forest transition as a window of opportunity to change the governance of common-pool resources: The case of Mexico’s Mixteca Alta

• Our study area in Mexico’s Mixteca Alta region has experienced a forest transition. • This forest transition is the result of depopulation and a decline in the use of farmland, grazing lands, and local natural resources. • The forest transition and its causes created a window of opportunity to change the governance of common-pool resources in our study area. • These governance changes include rules limiting grazing and logging, which contribute to the forest transition in a positive feedback loop. • Reforestations supported by government institutions and non-governmental organizations also contributed to the forest transition. The notion of windows of opportunity, developed in the literature on adaptive governance, refers to the existence of circumstances or events that trigger and promote governance changes to manage ecosystems and common-pool resources more sustainably. Research has largely focused on windows of opportunity such as natural disasters and environmental crises. This paper contends that windows of opportunity should be viewed with a wider lens and include other phenomena that do not necessarily involve a growing pressure or negative impact on ecosystems and common-pool resources. Based on information gathered from interviews and the analysis of official statistics and land use/cover maps, we first show that our study area in Mexico’s Mixteca Alta region, in the state of Oaxaca, has experienced a recovery of woody vegetation—a forest transition—through secondary succession because of depopulation, deagrarianization, agricultural intensification, the decline or change in livestock, and the decline in the use of farmland, grazing lands, and local natural resources. Building on these results, we examine how these demographic, socioeconomic, and land-use changes, along with the emergence of new national institutions and local non-governmental organizations focused on the environment, provided a window of opportunity for communities to change the governance of their forests and grazing lands through the establishment of rules to limit grazing and logging, while also carrying out reforestations. These processes contributed to the further expansion of wooded areas in a positive feedback loop.

Network Capacity as Common Pool Resource

Congestion control mechanisms, by which network users share constrained capacity on Internet links, are heavily studied in computer science. Such mechanisms are traditionally automated, assuming that users do not wish to be involved in addressing congestion. However, in community-owned and operated networks, users have control over daily operational choices. We explore the design of community-based congestion policies and mechanisms, through the lens of network capacity as a Common Pool Resource (CPR). Through a series of workshops and interviews in a rural community in Oaxaca, Mexico, we encounter design opportunities for new types of tools supporting communal network management. Participants expressed desires for preserving individual privacy while collecting longitudinal data to track the network's impact on the community, prioritization of high-value applications, equal link sharing between users, and human-mediated congestion management in lieu of automated enforcement. We report qualitative insights and offer design directions for future systems to address network resources in a manner compatible with Ostrom's principles for CPR governance.

Challenges and Approaches to Scaling the Global Commons

The re-emergence of commoning over the last decades is not incidental, but rather indicative of a large-scale transition to a more “generative” organization of society that is oriented toward the planet’s global carrying capacity. Digital commons governance frameworks are of particular importance for a new global paradigm of cooperation, one that can scale the organization of communities around common goals and resources to unprecedented levels of size, complexity and granularity. Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) such as blockchain have lately given new impetus to the emergence of a new generation of authentic “sharing economy,” protected from capture by thorough distribution of power over infrastructure, that spans not only digital but also physical production of common value. The exploration of the frontiers of DLT-based commoning at the heart of this article considers three exemplary cases for this new generation of commons-oriented community frameworks: the Commons Stack, Holochain and the Commons Engine, and the Economic Space Agency. While these projects differ in their scope as well as in their relation to physical common-pool resources (CPRs), they all share the task of redefining markets so as to be more conducive to the production and sustainment of common value(s). After introducing each of them with regards to their specificities and commonalities, we analyze their capacity to foster commons-oriented economies and “money for the commons” that limit speculation, emphasize use-value over exchange-value, favor equity in human relations, and promote responsibility for the preservation of natural habitats. Our findings highlight the strengths of DLTs for a federated scaling of CPR governance frameworks that accommodates rather than obliterates cultural differences and creates webs of fractal belonging among nested communities.

An analysis of the entrepreneurial institutional ecosystems supporting the development of hybrid organizations: The development of cooperatives in the U.S.

Hybrid institutions share features common to other ideal type organizations, but serve as an important focus of innovation, often combining features of charity, public service, and business. Where they exist, hybrid organizations are abundant, playing crucial roles in the management and governance of public goods and common pool resources. This is particularly true in the cooperative business sector, the United States (U.S.) in particular. U.S. cooperatives comprise a significant share of the agriculture, electricity, telecom, and consumer finance sectors. Yet the entrepreneurial support systems catalyzing U.S. cooperatives remains under-studied. This paper undertakes two case studies to present widely divergent forms of entrepreneurship: the institutional entrepreneurial support system of the electric cooperative sector, and; the broker's entrepreneurial role in starting The Veterinary Cooperative in support of independent veterinary clinics. The cases find that with proper support systems and actors, hybrids can not only flourish, but also provide for significant impacts with their stakeholders, as well as the broader market context. This demonstrates a need for incorporating institutional diversity vis-à-vis hybrids in environmental management, as well as the provision of the support for their growth.

Gender and the Commons

Studies on common pool resource governance have largely focused on men, who tend to have disproportionate rights and ownership with regards property and resources. This has resulted in the access and control rights of women being generally overlooked. Gender disaggregated analyses have revealed the important role of women in the governance of the commons. While certain commons may be relatively more important for women, there are variations in their level of resource access and management role, influenced by social structures and divisions. We examined the role of gender and how such intersectionality could shape the governance of the commons in the Spiti Valley in the Indian Trans-Himalaya. We found that gender, class, and caste intersected in the governance of irrigation water. Our study highlights the role of women in the governance of the commons and points to the nuanced and variable roles found within this gender group.

Rethinking Scale in the Commons by Unsettling Old Assumptions and Asking New Scale Questions

Scale is a powerful concept, a lens that shapes how we perceive problems and solutions in common-pool resource governance. Yet, scale is often treated as a relatively stable and settled concept in commons scholarship. This paper reviews the origins and evolution of scalar thinking in commons scholarship in contrast with theories of scale in human geography and political ecology that focus on scale as a relational, power-laden process. Beginning with early writings on scale and the commons, this paper traces the emergence of an explicit scalar epistemology that orders both spatial and conceptual relationships vertically, as hierarchically nested levels. This approach to scale underpins a shared conceptualization of common-pool resource systems but inevitably illuminates certain questions and relationships while simultaneously obscuring others. Drawing on critiques of commonplace assumptions about scale from geography, we reread this dominant scalar framework for its analytic limitations and unintended effects. Drawing on examples from small-scale fisheries governance throughout, we contrast what is made visible in the commons through the standard approach to scale against an alternative, process-based approach to scale. We offer a typology of distinct dimensions and interrelated moments that produce scale in the commons coupled with new empirical and reflexive scale questions to be explored. We argue that engaging with theoretical advances on the production of scale in scholarship on the commons can generate needed attention to power and long-standing blind spots, enlivening our understanding of the dynamically scaled nature of the commons.

Voluntary leadership and the emergence of institutions for self-governance

Strong local institutions are important for the successful governance of common-pool resources (CPRs), but why do such institutions emerge in the first place and why do they sometimes not emerge at all? We argue that voluntary local leaders play an important role in the initiation of self-governance institutions because such leaders can directly affect local users' perceived costs and benefits associated with self-rule. Drawing on recent work on leadership in organizational behavior, we propose that voluntary leaders can facilitate a cooperative process of local rule creation by exhibiting unselfish behavior and leading by example. We posit that such forms of leadership are particularly important when resource users are weakly motivated to act collectively, such as when confronted with "creeping" environmental problems. We test these ideas by using observations from a laboratory-in-the-field experiment with 128 users of forest commons in Bolivia and Uganda. We find that participants' agreement to create new rules was significantly stronger in group rounds where voluntary, unselfish leaders were present. We show that unselfish leadership actions make the biggest difference for rule creation under high levels of uncertainty, such as when the resource is in subtle decline and intragroup communication sparse.

Resource allocation in transboundary tuna fisheries: A global analysis

Resource allocation is a fundamental and challenging component of common pool resource governance, particularly transboundary fisheries. We highlight the growing importance of allocation in fisheries governance, comparing approaches of the five tuna Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (tRFMOs). We find all tRFMOs except one have defined resources for allocation and outlined principles to guide allocation based on equity, citizenship, and legitimacy. However, all fall short of applying these principles in assigning fish resources. Most tRFMOs rely on historical catch or effort, while equity principles rarely determine dedicated rights. Further, the current system of annual negotiations reduces certainty, trust, and transparency, counteracting many benefits asserted by rights-based management proponents. We suggest one means of gaining traction may be to shift conversations from allocative rights toward weighting of principles already identified by most tRFMOs. Incorporating principles into resource allocation remains a major opportunity, with important implications for current and future access to fish.

Farmer Participation and Institutional Capture in Common-Pool Resource Governance Reforms. The Case of Groundwater Management in California

Farmers are often critically important to the success of common-pool resource governance reforms. Nevertheless, their participation in these off-farm reform processes has received limited research attention. This paper investigates farmer participation in state-mandated common-pool resource governance. Using groundwater governance in California as a case study, we show that existing social networks, in combination with asymmetries in resource access within the farming community, and a collective identity framed against central government intervention, explain participation and representation in groundwater governance processes. An important governance paradox has emerged, in which groundwater-dependent users are unequally represented in the very groundwater management agencies that have been developed to protect them. This case sheds light on documented shortcomings of common-pool resource governance reforms and aims to inform the design of future reform processes.

Challenges for the Governance of Small-Scale Fisheries on the Brazil-Bolivia Transboundary Region

Developing institutional arrangements for supporting sustainable fisheries has been a critical challenge for the governance of common-pool resources, especially in transboundary regions. In this paper, we analyze the impact of governance arrangements on a small-scale fishery system on the Brazil-Bolivia border in the Amazon region. Data collection involved documental analysis, literature review and conduction of semi-structured interviews with fishers and environmental protection/regulatory agencies’ staff. We present an exploratory qualitative analysis of the interactions between the fishery system’s attributes (biological, environmental, technical and governance), examining institutional arrangements among diverse stakeholders. Results reveal that the small-scale fishery characteristics and the relationships between resources and stakeholders has contributed to stock maintenance and overall sustainability of the fishery system. Nevertheless, we also found that the governance structure is fragile due to weak institutional arrangements within and between countries, resulting in increased vulnerability of the fishery system to imminent threats.

Toward an Integrated History to Govern the Commons: Using the Archive to Enhance Local Knowledge

Communities that have used common-pool resources (CPRs) for generations often preserve a valuable ‘institutional memory’. It can be understood as a subset of local knowledge concerning strategies, norms, and rules used by the community to deal with CPR problems (e.g. overexploitation) in different time periods. Scholars have argued that institutional memory is useful in two aspects of CPR governance: as focal point to encourage users to sustain and to undertake collective action, and as support knowledge to design new policies. However, institutional memory is constrained by personal and social memories, and therefore it must be considered not as fully cumulative but subject to a steady process of adjustment according to experience. When communities have recorded their regulations in writing, e.g. in village bylaws, it is possible to undertake a learning process to recover and take advantage of their institutional memory. One way is to carry out participatory workshops to compare the historical and present-day bylaws of the community. However, the comparison of these sources is not an easy task, because, on the one hand, they constitute a large body of rules and, on the other, they have been designed using different epistemologies (e.g. concrete vs. abstract) and linguistic forms (e.g. early modern vs. contemporary grammars). In this paper we use an approach based on the institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework to compare the historical and present-day bylaws of a community located in Cantabria (Spain). The utility of the IAD framework is verified. It enables one not only to undertake a systematic comparison of the bylaws, but also to easily display the results in participatory workshops. The use of the archive as a source of local information to enhance users’ knowledge is an uncommon procedure among CPR scholars and practitioners, and therefore we dedicate a specific section of the paper to discussing this utility.

Cross-scale interactions of socio-hydrological subsystems: examining the frontier of common pool resource governance in Arizona

A critical frontier of water management in the western US is the challenge of cross-scale interactions. It is difficult to establish clear governance boundaries and collectively act when basins are interconnected, surface water and groundwater flows are interrelated, and urban and rural water demands are increasingly affected by regional and international telecoupling. Changing climate, snowpack, and rainfall, peri-urbanization, and shifting economics of rural landscapes further increase sustainable governance challenges. Using a lens of cross-scale interactions drawn from the social-ecological literature, we develop a set of conceptual frames for socio-hydrology that highlight: (1) spatial and temporal mismatches, (2) telecoupled flows, and (3) networked and nested systems. Using the exemplary case of Central Arizona, we explore nesting of the system within the larger western socio-hydrological system (SHS), impacts of changing Colorado River policies, such as the Drought Contingency Plan, and emerging institutional arrangements between the State of Arizona, agricultural communities, and Tribal Nations. We conclude with a set of questions that inform analyses of cross-scale, multi-level governance within social-ecological systems. Without grappling with the dynamics and interconnectedness of SHSs, we cannot sustainably manage water in an increasingly arid West.

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

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.

Nurturing ecosystem-based adaptations in South Africa’s Garden Route: a common pool resource governance perspective

Increasing human demands for ecosystem services due to climate change, population growth, poverty, lack of employment, tourism, and concomitant coastal property development threatens adaptive capacity in South Africa’s coastlines. Adaptation strategies frequently propose ecosystem-based adaptation (EBA) as a model for transformative change. However, several studies point to difficulties implementing EBA across the world. The aim of this paper is to assess to what extent social-ecological systems approaches and common pool resource (CPR) governance theories could inform EBA. Data obtained from interviews and surveys with policy makers and residents in South Africa’s Garden Route District were interpreted using the robustness framework (RF) and the design principles (DPs), two common tools for analyzing CPR governance. We found that the Garden Route coast is threatened by negative interactions between hard public and private infrastructures and ecological infrastructures (the cornerstone of EBA) which are driven by weak local government bodies and asymmetrical power relations. By coding the data for elements/interactions within the RF and then identifying and mapping the DPs onto the RF, we also revealed ways to leverage transformative EBA in the Garden Route. Our analyses suggest that the interactions between human-made and ecological infrastructures, as well as power relation, should be at the core of any development debate. Trade-offs should aim for maximum congruence between sustainability and equity in ecosystem services provisioning. This paper provides some considerations for researchers and decision makers to leverage transformative EBA that could potentially apply to areas experiencing similar challenges.

Mapping Ostrom’s common-pool resource systems coding handbook to the coupled infrastructure systems framework to enable comparative research

In the study of common-pool resource (CPR) governance, frame- works provide a metatheoretical language to describe system states, dynamics, elements, and relationships. The coding manuals which accompany CPR frame- works–in addition to providing guidelines for connecting empirical case work to conceptual variables–define a vocabulary of coding questions. For empirical work, connecting variables and coding questions with framework elements con- tributes to conceptual advance. In the process of analysis and publication, it is tempting to offer a novel framework without also developing, applying, or modi- fying the foundational questions and variables of coding manuals buttressing said frameworks. However, if the scholarly community is to generate robust knowl- edge for the study of CPR dilemmas, we must provide the underlying work of comparing across frameworks. In this paper, we report on one way the community might conduct such comparisons. We present results and challenges of using a group consensus process to link the more than 450 coding questions derived from the original Institutional Analysis and Development Framework (IADF) to the recently proposed Coupled Infrastructure Systems Framework (CISF). Despite overlap, discrepancies in the conceptual positions of the IADF and CISF suggest a need to modify or create new coding variables related to concepts of system boundaries, externalities, cross-scale interactions, multi-functionality, and tech- nological change. We suggest that such work needs provisioning if commons scholars are to navigate the continued challenges of tailoring frameworks and coding manuals to evolving CPR governance dilemmas.