Institutions and incentives for biodiversity conservation

Incentive measures for biodiversity conservation cannot be evaluated and compared outside the context of institutional performance and relationships. The institutional framework for biodiversity incentives includes a variety of organizations operating on different spatial scales. The institutional actors with an impact on biodiversity include community groups, local and national governmental structures, NGOs, business enterprises and international organizations. But the positve influence of conservation-oriented organizations is often significantly outweighed by the negative influence of other sets of institutional actors who are largely unaware of biodiversity as a concept and not unduly concerned with its conservation. There are several options for improving the institutional framework for biodiversity incentives: (1) decentralization of resource management decision making to local levels; (2) engaging and reorienting government institutions; (3) establishing new national and international institutions; and (4) establishing functional linkages between key institutional actors. The role of local, national and international institutions in designing and implementing effective incentive measures for biodiversity conservation will be critical. But the dynamics within and between institutional actors influencing biodiversity conservation are complex, variable and insufficiently understood, somewhat like biodiversity itself.     

Ethical Know-how and Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Small Scale Fisheries on the Eastern Black Sea Coast of Turkey

In the context of development and changes in two small-boat fisheries on the eastern Black Sea coast of Turkey, this article discusses how institutions are embedded in tradition, and what is “traditional” in “traditional knowledge”. Taking new institutional economics’ focus on institutions and approaches to traditional ecological knowledge as vantage points for discussion I compare systems of informal management in one discontinued and one new fishery to address questions such as: What kinds of knowledges and rules are involved in these kinds of fishing? What constitutes a tradition of knowledge? What is the role of tradition in working out new rules? I couple theories of situated knowledge (Ingold) and embeddedness of rules (Varela), both of which are inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach, to show how institutions and traditional ecological knowledge are embedded and come together in practice.     

A Case of Greenlandic Fisheries Co-Politics: Power and Participation in Total Allowable Catch Policy-Making

Greenlandic governance institutions have been criticised for their colonial heritage of centralisation and lack of democratic participation. In the same manner, Greenlandic fisheries management is notorious in the academic literature for its centralised and locally illegitimate character. While recognising the lack of localised co-management fisheries governance institutions in Greenland, we argue that something has yet to be said about power and user participation in the centralised institutions that have developed. From a symbolic interactionist perspective we dissect the centralised institutions in terms of a differentiated cast of actors and their interaction and argue that participation and power come in many institutional guises as the complex cast of actors within the centralised system represent themselves and others. If we are to understand power and participation in Greenlandic fisheries governance, we need to understand the creation of alliances of the subject-positions that seek control of the self-rule fisheries governance decision-making.     

Expert thinking and environmental institutions

The paper explores environmental institutions that facilitate the trial and error search for sustainable development. The argumentation refers to four case studies of environmental management in the US, Europe, and China. To diagnose the institutional constraints of environmental management, the studies focus on the mental models with which experts understand environmental problems and justify their efforts to fix the problems. As such, the mental models also reflect the institutional rules that constrain expert actions. Design principles for novel environmental institutions are developed on the basis of institutional theory and case study findings. In conclusion, implications of the proposed institutional arrangements for the public role of experts are discussed.     

Local Ecological Knowledge and Institutional Dynamics for Ecosystem Management: A Study of Lake Racken Watershed, Sweden

The sustainable use of resources requires that management practices and institutions take into account the dynamics of the ecosystem. In this paper, we explore the role of local ecological knowledge and show how it is used in management practices by a local fishing association in a contemporary rural Swedish community. We focus on the local management of crayfish, a common-pool resource, and also address the way crayfish management is linked to institutions at different levels of Swedish society. Methods from the social sciences were used for information gathering, and the results were analyzed within the framework of ecosystem management. We found that the practices of local fishing association resemble an ecosystem approach to crayfish management. Our results indicate that local users have substantial knowledge of resource and ecosystem dynamics from the level of the individual crayfish to that of the watershed, as reflected in a variety of interrelated management practices embedded in and influenced by institutions at several levels. We propose that this policy of monitoring at several levels simultaneously, together with the interpretation of a bundle of indicators and associated management responses, enhances the possibility of building ecological resilience into the watershed. Furthermore, we found that flexibility and adaptation are required to avoid command-and-control pathways of resource management. We were able to trace the development of the local fishing association as a response to crisis, followed by the creation of an opportunity for reorganization and the recognition of slow ecosystem structuring variables, and also to define the role of knowledgeable individuals in the whole process. We discuss the key roles of adaptive capacity, institutional learning, and institutional memory for successful ecosystem management and conclude that scientific adaptive management could benefit from a more explicit collaboration with flexible community-based systems of resource management for the implementation of policies as experiments. Received 26 April 2000; accepted 13 October 2000.     

Adapting Agricultural Water Use to Climate Change in a Post-Soviet Context: Challenges and Opportunities in Southeast Kazakhstan

The convergence of climate change and post-Soviet socio-economic and institutional transformations has been underexplored so far, as have the consequences of such convergence on crop agriculture in Central Asia. This paper provides a place-based analysis of constraints and opportunities for adaptation to climate change, with a specific focus on water use, in two districts in southeast Kazakhstan. Data were collected by 2 multi-stakeholder participatory workshops, 21 semi-structured in-depth interviews, and secondary statistical data. The present-day agricultural system is characterised by enduring Soviet-era management structures, but without state inputs that previously sustained agricultural productivity. Low margins of profitability on many privatised farms mean that attempts to implement integrated water management have produced water users associations unable to maintain and upgrade a deteriorating irrigation infrastructure. Although actors engage in tactical adaptation measures, necessary structural adaptation of the irrigation system remains difficult without significant public or private investments. Market-based water management models have been translated ambiguously to this region, which fails to encourage efficient water use and hinders adaptation to water stress. In addition, a mutual interdependence of informal networks and formal institutions characterises both state governance and everyday life in Kazakhstan. Such interdependence simultaneously facilitates operational and tactical adaptation, but hinders structural adaptation, as informal networks exist as a parallel system that achieves substantive outcomes while perpetuating the inertia and incapacity of the state bureaucracy. This article has relevance for critical understanding of integrated water management in practice and adaptation to climate change in post-Soviet institutional settings more broadly.     

‘Bridges to cash’: channelling agency in mobile money

Encountered by mobile money professionals – industry and philanthropic actors seeking to bring mobile phone‐enabled financial products to poor people in the ‘developing world’ – the authors move together with new collaborators to inquire into a problem they had been grappling with for some time. This is the problem of agency; specifically, the agency of ‘mobile money agents’, the people ‘on the ground’ or ‘in the field’ who form a crucial function in permitting others to put cash into an electronic money transfer system and pull cash out of it. These ‘human ATMs’ or ‘bridges to cash’ become the object of analytical scrutiny for mobile money experts and anthropologists. This article takes that analytical scrutiny – and not mobile money agents themselves – as its object. It seeks to understand how ‘agency’ inflects debates over money, its meaning and its pragmatics, and its transformation in new communicative infrastructures, and how it might inform anthropology and political struggles over money and payment.     

Racism and anti-racism in the two Irelands

This article addresses institutional understandings of and responses to racism in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, examining the different trajectories and their implications. This comparative analysis assesses state and institutional failure to meet basic obligations under international rights treaties, such as ethnic monitoring in state institutions, equal provision of state services and ensuring adequate responses to racism such as in policing. We draw on this to illustrate how civil society actors have sought and been able to influence institutional actors in the context of these trajectories. Northern Ireland is belatedly influenced by UK law and policy norms, while the Republic was quicker to legislate against discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity, yet dismantled much of its institutional infrastructure for responding to racism.     

Realizing responsibility. Institutional routines,critical intervention,and the “big” questions in the controversy over non-invasive prenatal testing in Germany

NIPT has become a matter of controversy in Germany over the past years, there is now a widespread concern that it raises fundamental social and ethical questions. Starting from the assumption that responsible governance requires governance actors to address these questions, the article examines how the main governance actors realized their responsibility in the sense of conceiving and performing it. Building on the pragmatic sociology of critique, we study how actors are doing responsibility within a given institutional and political context. We show that critical interventions disrupted institutional routines and caused governance actors to struggle with conflicting commitments of complying with institutional rules and exercising responsibility by taking social and ethical considerations into account. Whereas these conflicting commitments posed a predicament for political decision-makers, who solved it through shifting responsibility for social and ethical issues elsewhere, there was no such predicament for the producers; for them, routine and responsibility converged.     

Text mining analysis of institutional fit of Lake Basin water governance

The purpose of this work was to quantitatively determine the institutional fit of the existing and applicable water governance laws in the Songkhla Lake Basin (SLB) Thailand, using text mining analysis. The study found out that the current governance system is not fit for the purpose of the sustainability of the SLB. Data derived from text mining were able to show the weakness in the applicable/relevant water governance laws and such challenges in enforcement and compliance. Institutional priorities were identified and compared to management response to issues concerning SLB; this imbalance showed another challenge to fit. The results of this study further buttressed the need for institutional reforms towards an Adaptive Integrated Lake Basin Management (AILBM). The general assessment of degree of recognition and involvement of institutions, overlaps, gaps, institutional priorities and response to resource management show a clear picture of misfit of the water laws used to govern the SLB. To achieve institutional fit, future institutional reforms should be based on the principles of AILBM and the development of institutions that are capable of creating a singular coordinating and policy harmonization committee to clearly identify roles and responsibilities and delineate functions with appropriate management response to the socio-ecological system of the SLB.     

Fire Management in a Natural Protected Area: What Do Key Local Actors Say?

Public policies on fire in forest ecosystems are changing from fire-fighting and suppression to an integrated management approach that incorporates ecological and social considerations. However, policy implementation is usually directed by central governments without considering local actors. We identified key local actors in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, Mexico. This is an important natural protected area of high socio-environmental complexity and the overwintering sites of monarch butterfly that migrate from Canada and United States every year. We applied network and grounded theories to analyze qualitative information derived from semi-structured interviews with 28 key local actors including government employees, local inhabitants, non-governmental organization and academic personnel. We identified actors who play essential roles in local fire management. Aside from fire-fighting, local actors engage in fire prevention, habitat restoration, research, training, planning, coordination, and communication activities that are specific to a spatial, temporal, institutional, and environmental context of fire management. The incorporation of the concepts that local actors associate with fire knowledge, behavior, and regimes would result in better planning for fire management in the short, medium, and long-term.     

A Complex-Systems Approach to Pastoral Commons

In recent years a new approach has begun to emerge in commons scholarship that draws on complex systems thinking and that makes use of concepts such as fit, scale, and the adaptive renewal cycle. This paper explores what complex systems thinking has to offer for commons scholarship by applying these concepts to the pastoral commons of the Gabra ethnic group of north-central Kenya. The concepts of fit and scale can help us to understand why some features of the institutional regime of the Gabra do not conform to mainstream principles such as clearly defined boundaries, clearly defined membership rules, and subsidiarity. The notion of the adaptive renewal cycle can help us to describe and understand some aspects of dynamics of Gabra institutions, especially those related to the management of shallow wells. Applying the adaptive renewal cycle to larger and longer scales highlights the possibility that the Gabra social–ecological system is becoming increasingly brittle, with evolving institutional arrangements putting more and more constraints on adaptation and especially on nomadic mobility. An examination of the distinctive nature of dryland pastoral commons, and in particular a complex systems approach to this examination, suggests a number of issues that relief and development organizations should consider, including how to foster novelty and innovation through all the phases of the adaptive cycle.

Future oriented conservation: knowledge governance,uncertainty and learning

Despite significant progress in understanding climate risks, adaptation efforts in biodiversity conservation remain limited. Adaptation requires addressing immediate conservation threats while also attending to long term, highly uncertain and potentially transformative future changes. To date, conservation research has focused more on projecting climate impacts and identifying possible strategies, rather than understanding how governance enables or constrains adaptation actions. We outline an approach to future-oriented conservation that combines the capacities to anticipate future ecological change; to understand the implications of that change for social, political and ecological values; and the ability to engage with the governance (and politics) of adaptation. Our approach builds on the adaptive management and governance literature, however we explicitly address the (often contested) rules, knowledge and values that enable or constrain adaptation. We call for a broader focus that extends beyond technical approaches to acknowledge the socio-political challenges inherent to adaptation. More importantly, we suggest that conservation policy makers and practitioners can use this approach to facilitate learning and adaptation in the context of complexity, transformational change and uncertainty.     

A framework to assess adaptive capacity of the water resources system in Nepalese river basins

This paper discusses an indicator-based framework – consisting of seven indicators, four parameters, and an index – to assess adaptive capacity of the water resources system in the Nepalese context and applies this framework to the Bagmati River Basin (BRB) in Nepal. With respect to the BRB, and Nepal in general, the study results show variations in adaptive capacity of the water resources system across the river basin (eight districts within the BRB), at different geographical (district, river basin and national level) as well as temporal (over decades) scale. Such variations suggest a need of differential policy interventions at different spatial scale to achieve adaptive management of the water resources. The adaptive capacity index can be used to prioritize basins, the adaptive capacity parameters can be used to identify the broader areas of intervention in the selected basin, and adaptive capacity indicators reveal the degree of attention required to strengthen adaptive capacity of the water resources system.     

Fragmentation,Cooperation and Power: Institutional Dynamics in Natural Resource Governance in North-Western Namibia

Contemporary theoretical accounts of common pool resource management assume that communities are able to develop institutions for sustainable resource management if they are given security of access and appropriate rights of management. In recent years comprehensive legal reforms of communal rural resource management in Namibia have sought to create an institutional framework linking the sustainable use of natural resources (game, water, forest) and rural development. The state, however, ceded rights to rural communities in an ambiguous and fragmented manner, creating a number of instances of overlapping property rights and different legal conditions for different natural resources. Nowadays communities grapple with the challenge of developing institutions for these resource-centered “new commons”. This paper describes the process of local institutional development, focusing on the challenges arising from the necessity to define group boundaries, the issues arising from monitoring and sanctioning within newly defined institutions, and the ideological underpinnings of different trajectories of communal resource management.     

Illusions and realities of the ecosystem approach to the study and management of marine and oceanic biological resources

The scientific and applied problem of the ecosystem approach to the management of marine biological resources arose during the last quarter of the 20th century as a component of the Rational Nature Use Concept. This occurred mostly because the existing fishery rules and concepts of the optimum yield theory, which were introduced in the practice of fishery regulations, have proven to be insufficiently effective to conserve biological resources and provide stability of the fishery resource base. The ecosystem approach to biological-resource management implies a change of the autecological studies of commercial stock units (populations) and the managerial single-species models for the sustainable-sized management, taking the impacts of the fishery on marine ecosystems into account, as well as those of marine ecosystems on the fishery. At present, the ecosystem-based biological-resource management includes a complex of ecological topics and issues, such as biodiversity conservation, effect of climate changes, sustainability of stocks and communities, interspecies relationships, multi-species fishery, conservation of rare species, protection of especially important water bodies and landscapes, biotope degradation, anti-pollution measures, invasive species, ranching aquaculture, genetic diversity, etc. The main current problem, besides insufficient knowledge of many of these issues, is how to practically integrate such a large number of parameters into the management system. Thus, the complicated and long-term problem of ecosystem management of marine biological resources should be solved step-by-step, following the progress in the technical capabilities and concepts of natural processes. As well, certain better-studied elements of the ecosystem approach should be implemented first in the practice of management, while taking the regional specifics into account.     

Water Justice and Integrated Water Resources Management: Constitutionality Processes Favoring Sustainable Water Governance in Mexico

This research analyzes four ongoing water conflicts in Jalisco state, Mexico, through the lens of constitutionality. Constitutionality refers to a bottom-up institution building process based on the activation of emic perceptions of people who are often marginalized in policymaking, as well as on alliances with external actors, with the aim of achieving recognition by the state of self-created institutions. Results show that the constitutionality concept helps to link analysis of local people’s resistance movements against top-down water policies with an emerging process of institutional innovation that aims for more sustainable water governance. Local institutional innovations embody the principles of water justice; these are recognized by the state as being part of its own Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) policy, and thus find their way into state policy arenas. This analysis provided the basis for the formulation of a conceptual framework that integrates water conflicts, water justice, and IWRM into the concept of constitutionality.     

Integrated management of land and water resources based on a collective approach to fragmented international conventions

Interlinked crises of land degradation, food security, ecosystem decline, water quality and water flow depletion stand in the way of poverty reduction and sustainable development. These crises are made worse by increased fluctuations in climatic regimes. Single-purpose international conventions address these crises in a piecemeal, sectoral fashion and may not meet their objectives without greater attention to policy, legal, and institutional reforms related to: (i) balancing competing uses of land and water resources within hydrologic units; (ii) adopting integrated approaches to management; and (iii) establishing effective governance institutions for adaptive management within transboundary basins. This paper describes this global challenge and argues that peace, stability and security are all at stake when integrated approaches are not used. The paper presents encouraging results from a decade of transboundary water projects supported by the Global Environment Facility in developing countries that test practical applications of processes for facilitating reforms related to land and water that are underpinned by science-based approaches. Case studies of using these participative processes are described that collectively assist in the transition to integrated management. A new imperative for incorporating interlinkages among food, water, and environment security at the basin level is identified.     

Institutional Development in the Face of Complexity: Developing Rules for Managing Forest Resources

The ability to develop institutions is constrained by human capacity to cope with complexity. But complexity is multidimensional and it is not clear which forms of complexity present the greatest challenges for institutional development. In the context of natural resources, the predictability of resource availability affects expectations that an individual or group will be able to capture the benefits of management. In addition, incomplete understanding of cause-and-effect relationships creates uncertainty about the consequences of alternative management options. These features influence calculations about resource management. The importance of resource complexity relative to various social, political, and institutional factors known to influence collective choice remains an open question. We evaluate the relative importance of several forms of resource complexity and characteristics of resource users for the development of rules for management for forest products in Indiana.