Local Institutional Arrangements Research Articles

Governing Landscape Simplification in Rapid Commercialization Contexts – the Case of the Dike-Pond System in the Pearl River Delta, China

In the last decades, rapid agricultural commercialization has led to landscape simplification, posing threats to the social and ecological values of agroecosystems worldwide. This paper draws upon the landscape commons concept, advocating for an institutional perspective to comprehensively understand the local governance concerning landscape simplification. We contributed to commons research by expanding the scope into holistic and multifunctional landscape systems, and particularly concentrate on pond landscapes. We select the case of a dike-pond system in the Pearl River Delta, China, to scrutinize the local institutional arrangements and their interplay with landscape simplification. This study utilizes the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework in conjunction with Ostrom’s Design Principles (DPs). Findings from the study reveal that an emphasis on ponds exhibiting comparative profit advantages over dikes and rivers, coupled with a preference for intensive fish production in collective decision-making, has resulted in land cover simplification and erosion of the system’s multifunctionality. To address this issue, we recommend considering multiple biophysical elements and functions in the governance of landscape commons while identifying avenues to reinforce local institutions, in alignment with Ostrom’s DPs.

DEVELOPMENT OF BUSINESS GROUPS IN BRAZIL

Objective: This work aims to understand and analyze the development of large business groups, or Business Groups (BG) in Brazil. Methodology: The article is based on a historical analysis focused on the longitudinal analysis of cases from the Brazilian context to uncover the development trajectories of BG. Results: The historical analysis reveals that BGs in Brazil benefited from institutional failures, some of which were generated in times of crisis, and knew how to take advantage of dynamic institutional arrangements during pro-market reforms, such as the use of government incentives to leverage their participation in the privatization process. Consequences of this capacity include the accelerated growth of several groups without the need for dispersion of capital and control, and the successful implementation of strategies such as vertical integration through acquisitions. Originality and value: By showing how BGs emerged and developed in Brazil, taking advantage of opportunities offered by local institutional arrangements, the study presents the mechanisms that explain the persistence of BGs' superior performance over a long period of time.

Community Management of Groundwater under a Private Property Regime: An Example of Institutional Local Adaptation to Overexploitation Problems in the Copiapó Aquifer, Chile

The governance model established in Chilean water law delegates responsibility for groundwater management to private water rights owners. The Copiapó aquifer in the Atacama Region, Chile, has problems of overexploitation resulting from intensive use of the resource. This is explained by the limited information on the water availability in the aquifer and the existence of legally granted water rights whose flows exceed the rate of natural recharge. In this context, water users formed Chile’s first groundwater users’ community in the Copiapó basin for the collective administration of the aquifer. Although this organization is regulated by Chilean water law, the way in which its members participate in decision-making processes and some self-management mechanisms that they have implemented are local institutional arrangements that go beyond the rules established in the Water Code, showing this organization to be an empirical case of institutional adaptation to the overdepletion of an aquifer. The local institutional arrangements include incorporating environmental protection objectives for aquifers and wetlands, establishing an institutional arrangement that guarantees the participation in the decision-making processes of different water uses and users, developing an internal management model that promotes temporary transfers of partial volumes of a water right and carrying out studies to improve water management.

Decentralization and Corruption in Public Service Delivery: Local Institutional Arrangements That Can Help Reduce Governance Risks

Abstract Decentralization reform has both advantages and risks. Bringing service delivery “closer to the people” can improve information flows and strengthen accountability, but it may also leave systems vulnerable to elite capture and corruption by municipal government officials. While past research has acknowledged the possibility of corruption under decentralization, relatively little work has connected those risks to features of these reforms or specific local institutional arrangements. To explore the conditions that can help mitigate the risks of corruption under decentralization, we study the case of health sector reform in Honduras where municipal governments, associations, and NGOs each serve as intermediary-managing organizations under a common decentralized health service delivery model. We argue that three types of institutional arrangements reflecting local accountability practices serve as checks on the authority granted through decentralization and can help guard against corruption: external supervision, civil society engagement, and public participation. Empirically, we draw on data from more than 600 street-level bureaucrats, valuable but under-utilized informants about municipal corruption, across a matched sample of 65 municipalities with contrasting forms of administration. We find that reported corruption is highest under decentralization led by municipal governments, as compared to association- or NGO-led varieties. Both external supervision and civil society engagement help attenuate the positive association between decentralization and corruption, but public participation does not. Overall, this research highlights the importance of considering reform features and local conditions when designing policies to help manage risks and support effective social sector decentralization.

Silent transitions: Commercialization and changing customary land tenure systems in upland Laos

What happens to local institutional arrangements regarding access and use of communal land under the forces of agricultural commercialization? Taking Khwaykham village in Phongsaly province, Laos as a case study, this paper sheds light on this question as farm households in the settlement have progressively transitioned to commercial farming, specifically tea cultivation. Traditionally, farm households’ access and rights to use the land were embedded in their swidden agriculture practices. The adoption of tea has increasingly fixed land use rights, making land sticky at the household rather than communal level. How, why and with what effects this occurs are the focus of the paper. We argue that while this transition to tea cultivation has benefited – in income terms – most farm households in the village, it has also created an agrarian context for increased inequity between those households who rapidly took the opportunity from the tea boom and others who have missed out on it.

Whose integration?

Lingering spatial disparities within the EU have often been explained by macro-level structural trends. However, studies have also spelt out the role of local agency in organising social integration processes through local institutional arrangements. The agency of socially skilled local actors is acquired by recombining various resources and denotes their capacity to (re)negotiate the web of local relations and membership in the community through the distribution of developmental goods and controlling access to services. Informed by theories of development as institutional change and strategic action field theory, our paper analyses the evolution and action of this local project class in organising social order by acting as brokers between the institutional environment and local institutional arrangements. Our research question hinges upon the process through which the project class (re)combines resources in order to maintain local social order based on their own perceptions and visions of the locality. Empirical evidence was gathered through various qualitative research projects over two decades, supplemented by recent follow-up interviews with the same actors in a small peripheral town in northern Hungary. Our extended research indicates that maintaining local social order derives from the local elite’s perceptions of spatial injustice, which means maintaining pre-existing social and class positions. This is a highly selective process and reflects degrees of vulnerability within the local community.

Building urban flood resilience through institutional adaptive capacity: A case study of Seoul, South Korea

Building resilience has been a critical agenda for disaster risk management, but how to build and what to build tend to remain abstract. Our analysis offers insights on practices deployed by the Seoul Metropolitan Government to increase the city's resilience to floods. By specifically choosing two districts in the city, we interviewed key informants involved in flood risk management (FRM) and reviewed documents on FRM at the city and local levels. We manually coded the qualitative data by matching the content with 22 institutional adaptive capacity criteria developed by Gupta and colleagues. We found that the deployment of formal local public organizations, supported by South Korea's city and local level institutional arrangements, augmented human resources and enhanced flood resilience through constructive redundancy in flood risk monitoring and neighborhood-level outreach to community members. We also found that long-term (e.g., 10-year) risk management plans may possibly become a barrier to exploratory and reflexive social learning processes (i.e., double-loop learning), unless there is an effort to regularly examine and reframe risk in the plans. Seoul can further enhance resilience to floods by increasing citizens' abilities to act (i.e., strengthening their capacity for autonomous actions); this can most effectively be done by providing individuals with plans and detailed scripts for action in the face of flood risk.

Inframarginal externalities: COVID-19, vaccines, and universal mandates.

COVID-19 vaccine mandates are in place or being debated across the world. Standard neoclassical economics argues that the marginal social benefit from vaccination exceeds the marginal private benefit; everyone vaccinated against a given infectious disease protects others by not transmitting the disease. Consequently, private levels of vaccination will be lower than the socially optimal levels due to free-riding, which requires mandates to overcome the problem. We argue that universal mandates based on free-riding are less compelling for COVID-19. We argue that because the virus can be transmitted even after receiving the vaccine, most of the benefits of the COVID-19 vaccine are internalized: vaccinated individuals are protected from the worst effects of the disease. Therefore, any positive externality may be inframarginal or policy irrelevant. Even when all the benefits are not internalized by the individual, the externalities mainly are local, mostly affecting family and closely associated individuals, requiring local institutional (private and civil society) arrangements to boost vaccine rates, even in a global pandemic. Economists and politicians must justify such universal vaccine mandates on some basis other than free-riding.

Community enforcement and tenure security: A fuzzy-set qualitative Comparative analysis of twelve community forest management initiatives in the Peruvian Amazon

The interest of policymakers in community management of tropical forests is ever growing. Yet, a large research body shows varied levels of success of community conservation initiatives. While policymakers often prioritize legal forest ownership, mostly land titles, consensus exists that success rather depends on a broader set of local institutional arrangements and their fit with the forest context. In this paper, we contribute to building theory on these institutional arrangements and their interaction. We apply a fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to case study data on 12 voluntary community conservation initiatives in northern Peru to explore the relationship between local enforcement, legal and alternative property rights, and conservation effectiveness. As recommended for QCA our case selection was intentional and the cases exhibit diverse conservation successes, geographic characteristics, legal and customary property rights, and enforcement mechanisms. We conclude that strong community enforcement mechanisms are indispensable for effective conservation in voluntary initiatives. Furthermore, we find for cases with strong enforcement mechanisms, that some government back-up, i.e., local government support for enforcement and/or legal rights to conserve the forest, significantly increases conservation effectiveness. Strong conservation enforcement tends to be present in communities with strong forest rules, leaders, and pre-existing community institutions. Our findings suggest the importance of paying close attention to community characteristics during project design and refraining from one-size-fits-all-solutions, such as focusing mainly on the presence of legal ownership rights over the forest. Instead, more focus needs to be placed on understanding existing community institutions and supporting communities to strengthen and adapt these for conservation enforcement, rather than imposing new arrangements. Finally, policymakers can help community enforcement institutions become even more effective, by providing them with legal rights to conserve the forest and by strengthening their relationship with local governments so that they receive support in situations they struggle to handle alone.

Towards an integrative perspective on commercialised wild-gathered bamboo use: insights into the extraction of lung bamboo in the Vietnamese uplands

ABSTRACT Bamboo is a vital non-timber forest product (NTFP) and income source for rural communities in the Global South, including in Latin America, Asia, Africa and Oceania. Due to the manifold goods and services it provides to society, bamboo has recently drawn considerable attention in the forest-development discourse. The potential that bamboo offers as a substitute for timber in the industrialised production of pulp, paper, charcoal and flooring is spurring bamboo commercialisation in light of nascent bamboo-processing industries. This is most apparent in Asia, where Viet Nam has some of the largest forest bamboo resources and ambitious government plans aim to boost sector development in the future. As is observable worldwide, the bulk of bamboo in Viet Nam grows naturally, often as a weakly regulated common-pool resource. Hence, as for many other wild-gathered NTFPs, the commercialisation of the harvesting, trading and processing of forest bamboo raises questions about balancing use and conservation to achieve long-term sustainability. Empirical studies that provide an integrative perspective on wild-gathered bamboo commercialisation are rare. To close the knowledge gap, this exploratory study investigates the social, economic and ecological dimensions of the commercialisation of lung bamboo (Bambusa longissima sp. nov.), a native bamboo species endemic to north-central Viet Nam. We combined quantitative and qualitative social science research methods with a forest inventory of selected lung bamboo exploitation sites in the Que Phong district (a mountainous region of Nghe An province), where lung bamboo use constitutes a vital element of local livelihoods. Our results highlight the need to consider the complex interplay of local livelihoods, harvesting regimes, institutional arrangements and value-chain configurations to understand the ecological outcomes of wild-gathered bamboo commercialisation. We call for the adoption of an integrative perspective when designing practical project interventions, sector plans and policies for forest bamboo commercialisation. Promoting alternative livelihood options, robust and clear institutional arrangements to regulate access and tenure, capacity building in management and harvesting and, not least, supportive commodity-chain governance are critical elements on the pathway to greater sustainability in wild-gathered bamboo commercialisation.

Evaluating the governance of a European program by identifying the types of overages based on the example of LEADER programs in France, Spain and Hungary: A problematic role for local institutional arrangements?

The evaluation of the governance of the implementation of the European LEADER approach was carried out in six case studies in France, Spain and Hungary using an analytical grid cross-referencing two complementary theoretical frameworks: the analysis of overages (i.e. the identification of the diverse effects of public policy) and learning phenomena. It was shown that the overages (especially institutional) of the LEADER approach were greater when the governance and management learning subsystems converged. Conversely, the overages remain more limited when the two systems diverge, which is often the case when the program is used as a tool by certain political or economic actors. Overall, these results underline some of the limitations of bottom-up and integrated programs such as LEADER, which are characterized by a relative non-linearity in their implementation.

Legal hunting for conservation of highly threatened species: The case of African rhinos

AbstractLegal hunting of threatened species—and especially the recreational practice of “trophy hunting”—is controversial with ethical objections being increasingly voiced. Less public attention has been paid to how hunting (even of threatened species) can be useful as a conservation tool, and likely outcomes if this was stopped. As case studies, we examine the regulated legal hunting of two African rhino species in South Africa and Namibia over the last half‐century. Counter‐intuitively, removing a small number of specific males can enhance population demography and genetic diversity, encourage range expansion, and generate meaningful socioeconomic benefits to help fund effective conservation (facilitated by appropriate local institutional arrangements).Legal hunting of African rhinos has been sustainable, with very small proportions of populations hunted each year, and greater numbers of both species today in these countries than when controlled recreational hunting began. Terminating this management option and significant funding source could have negative consequences at a time when rhinos are being increasingly viewed as liabilities and revenue generation for wildlife areas is being significantly impacted by COVID‐19. Provided that there is appropriate governance, conservation of certain highly threatened species can be supported by cautiously selective and limited legal hunting.

The importance of local people and institutional arrangements for forest concessions in Brazil

Resumo O advento das concessões florestais na Amazônia Brasileira gerou expectativa de aumento de madeira legal no mercado e concomitante conservação das florestas públicas. Contudo, ainda não ganharam a escala necessária. O objetivo desse artigo foi analisar a experiência do Brasil com concessões florestais para empresas privadas desde a sanção da Lei de Gestão de Florestas Públicas (LGFP), lei 11.284/2006, sob a perspectiva dos arranjos institucionais locais. Foi analisada a documentação relacionada à implementação da LGFP combinada com as informações obtidas por meio da observação direta dos acontecimentos e entrevistas no campo. Observou-se que o desafio da garantia de direitos às populações locais gerou insegurança jurídica aos atores envolvidos comprometendo a continuidade do manejo das florestas já concedidas e novos processos de concessão. Estabelecer arranjos institucionais mais favoráveis será determinante para que a política pública contribua à mudança do setor florestal e seus estigmas.

A importância das populações locais e dos arranjos institucionais para as concessões florestais no Brasil

Abstract The advent of forest concessions in the Brazilian Amazon generated the expectation of an increase in the supply of legal timber and concomitant conservation of public forests not yet reached. The aim of this article was to analyze Brazil’s experience with forest concessions for private companies since the approval of the Public Forest Management Act (LGFP), Act 11.284/2006, from the perspective of local institutional arrangements. We analyzed documentation related to the implementation of the LGFP combined with information obtained through direct observation and interviews in the field. It was observed that the challenge of guaranteeing rights to local populations has created legal uncertainty for the actors involved. This compromised the continuity of forest management operations already granted and the advancement of new concession processes. Establishing more favorable institutional arrangements will be key for the sustainable management of legal timber to contribute to changing the sector and its stigmas.

Investment impacts of gendered land rights in customary tenure systems: Substantive and methodological insights from Malawi

• The impact of individuals’ tenure security under customary regimes is investigated. • The analysis uses a unique survey experiment in Malawi. • Having land rights of bequest and sale increases investment and cash crop adoption. • Women’s land rights joint with local institutional arrangements can amplify the effects. • The effects can be obscured by measurement error associated with traditional data collection. Although most of the world’s agricultural land is cultivated under customary tenure regimes that tend to change over time in response to exogenous factors, the impact of customary rights on productivity and investment remains under-researched. Using unique data from an experiment in Malawi, we show that (i) parcel-level bequest and sale rights affect investment and cash crop adoption; (ii) impacts are gender-differentiated -women’s rights affect investment and men’s cash crop adoption- and vary by inheritance regime; and (iii) measurement error associated with traditional approaches to survey data collection easily obscures these effects. Beyond reinforcing the need for careful empirical research, this suggests that gradual erosion of women’s customary rights may reduce land related investment and that measures other than titling (e.g. changes in family law or legal support) may enhance it.

Pastoralist Dilemmas: Where to Go and When to Move, or with Whom to Talk?

Pastoralists in Western Mongolia face a range of challenges during their annual grazing cycle due to the simultaneous but conflicting needs for secure allocation rules and a high degree of flexibility. In this paper, I analyze the seasonal arrangements and corresponding strategies that households adopt to deal with unpredictable environmental conditions and the demands of supplying livestock with sufficient forage throughout the year. In contrast to game theory simulations, I argue that dilemmas are: a) often not a question of cooperating or not, but form continua of more or less; and b) socially embedded as people operate in a multitude of relationships that influence their decision-making. Therefore, sharing information in a manner that prioritizes the requirements of individual households while not jeopardizing social reputation is crucially important. Rhetorical skills play an important role in this regard, but there are also situations when herders blatantly ignore state law or local institutional arrangements and risk confrontation to ensure the survival of livestock leading to a situation where free-riding may at times become the dominant strategy.

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.

Politics, economics, Ricardus Haber and environmental policy in Lebanon

ABSTRACT Unsustainable dependence on natural resources combined with the absence of strict regulation and political stability have battered the environment of Lebanon. Examining the work of Ricardus Haber, we analyse how local institutional arrangements have shaped policy outcomes in a mostly top-down, politicised context. Lack of political will and communication between different sectors, institutional deficiencies and embedded corruption hinder effective governance of natural resources. The Lebanese environmental movement has failed to build on Haber’s early success but, if we have peace, there are still opportunities for networking with policymakers, increasing incentives and creating a better participatory platform for stakeholders.

Institutional analysis of top-down regulatory: evidence from Iran local governance

Abstract Population growth, along with climate change, has exacerbaed the water crisis in local communities. The simplest and quickest response of governments to such problems is direct intervention in local governance. Such solutions are usually proposed without regarding the indigenous knowledge of the local people. These also include top-down policies on water issues, which disrupt local institutional arrangements and eliminate the possibility of collective action by stakeholders in reaching an agreement. A case study of one of the water basins in Chaharmahal Bakhtiari in Iran (the Gorgak River in Sureshjan city) using an institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework shows that in the past, people acted collectively to solve the asymmetric distribution and drought problem. But government intervention, which initially sought to improve water conditions, has disrupted the region's institutional arrangements and power asymmetries between exploiters. Our study used the IAD framework to examine changes in institutional arrangements due to the introduction of technology and government intervention by the game theory. It clarifies that government intervention in local institutional arrangements, even if designed with the intention of improving conditions, may lead to greater inequality due to disregarding physical and social conditions and local knowledge. This inequality can eventually worsen the situation.

Toward a Sustainable Decommissioning of Offshore Platforms in the Oil and Gas Industry: A PESTLE Analysis

The growing complexity of environmental challenges has progressively led to the emergence of Sustainable Business Models (SBMs) able to embed economic, environmental, and social flows in a unified value network. All sectors are demanding innovative and sustainable solutions, including the oil and gas industry, which aims to address the issues about the decommissioning of offshore platforms. However, although the relevant literature highlighted the potentialities related to a multi-reuse of these structures, the effect of Sustainable Decommissioning (SD) on macro-environmental factors is still an open question. Based on these considerations, this study follows a Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental (PESTLE) analysis according to semi-structured interviews conducted with oil and gas key informants and stakeholders in the Italian context. The results of the analysis can provide a novel thinking for addressing the challenges related to a sustainable decommissioning of offshore platforms and shed light on the importance of synergistic efforts by local entrepreneurship and institutional arrangements to combine economic and environmental sustainability with social needs. This paper can contribute to the emerging field of sustainable business models related to the decommissioning of offshore platforms and suggests avenues for future research.