Panel 7.3. Long-term institutional change in polycentric commons governance

Many parts of the arid Western U.S. are faced with “grassification”: an ecological state change from a traditionally fire-proof desert ecosystem to a fire-prone grassland. This ecological state change is driven by unchecked spread of invasive grasses, a “common bad” that spreads across jurisdictional boundaries and threatens to radically change fire risk and fire regimes throughout the desert Southwest. In this paper, we ask: how do land managers, resource users, local governments, and other actors respond to an emerging threat to a shared landscape? What institutional tools and governance arrangements are available to help address emergent threats, how are these tools used, and how do these arrangements evolve over time? Our long-term case study is based on several years’ worth of interview, survey, and institutional data about efforts to address invasive buffelgrass in Pima County, Arizona. Our analysis is guided by Baldwin et al.’s Context-Operations-Outcomes-Feedback framework to show how land managers, resource users, fire districts, counties, scientists, and local conservation organizations have developed a set of polycentric institutional arrangements to address this emergent problem. Our case study spans 30 years, from the first recognition of invasive buffelgrass on the landscape through more recent efforts to create long-enduring collaborative governance arrangements. We show how efforts to address this “common bad” are aided by growing awareness of the problem, high-profile natural disasters, coordination among actors, and resources from higher levels of government, as well as how efforts are constrained by external shocks and limited governmental support for self-governance.

Idealized polycentric governance, dynamics of institutional change and the Context-Operations-Outcomes-Feedbacks (COOFs) framework assume coordination and order of interdependencies and interactions between actors. The framework juxtaposes societal mechanisms that instil corresponding dynamics. Where such internalization of externalities was not achieved, feedback cycles unleashing social-ecological adaptation process would nudge towards coordination and order. The WEFe Nexus describes an polycentric interactions between actors, activities, policies in the water, energy, food and ecology (WEFe) “sectors”. In the Algarve in Portugal additionally urban water demands associated with households and tourism developed dynamically. Throughout the last four decades governance never achieved coordination and order. Instead, conflict avoidance (not “coordination”) was only possible through enlarging the resource base (pumping, construction of dams, recently, desalinisation, interconnection with resources beyond). Still, the Algarve experienced the severe water shortages, furthered by climate change, but also by tourism development and expansion of irrigation. In parallel, water resource management was implemented since the accession to the EU and the introduction of the European Water Framework Directive. Societal mechanisms of accountable top-down public policy making, and self-organization of water users and stakeholders are actionable in Southern Portugal; also, data and awareness of ever increasing demands could trigger adjustments. However, it was apparently impossible to constrain and coordinate the Algarvian WEFe and urban water demands with available supplies. The paper wonders why this was the case and that way inductively reflects on dynamic polycentric governance and the COOF Framework. It reconstructs the mechanisms that the framework posits and wonders why they were ineffective respectively what further mechanisms and contextual development may have led to lacking efficacy of governance. The paper is based on extensive qualitative data and quantitative water use and demand data. Ultimately, the work promises a better understanding of why and when polycentric governance dynamically fails.

For more than 40 years the Chesapeake Bay Agreement (CBA) has stood as an exemplar of polycentric governance (PG) in the watershed management sector. Despite an abundance of inhibiting conditions and a dearth of enabling conditions throughout its long life thus far, the agreement has managed not only to survive, but also to expand (albeit slowly) in size, reach, and rigor. The original partners (DC, the states of MD, PA, and VA, and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)) have continued to participate. New partners (DE, NY, and WV) have joined. And progress has been made toward pollution reduction thanks to complex pressures flowing back and forth between an ever-shifting array of commercial interest groups, advocacy organizations, federal agencies, presidential administrations, governors, state legislatures, local officials, and community actors.

This paper reports results from our application of Baldwin, Thiel, McGinnis, and Kellner's Context-Operations-Outcomes-Feedback (COOF) framework to the case of collaborative watershed management in the Chesapeake Bay region from the 1980s to the present. We provide a novel approach to operationalizing the framework’s dynamic components through process tracing methodology informed by insights from Ecology of Games Theory (EGT). We are in the process now of applying this novel approach longitudinally to the case of the Chesapeake Bay Agreement, which is enabling us (1) to identify primary and secondary games played by principal actors within the organizations that constitute the Bay's PG system and (2) to trace, via storyboard-like exhibits, how those games evolved over time as actors interacted repeatedly and learned from experience within the context of US federalism.

Prominent examples of game evolution emerging from this analysis include a slow shift by national actors such as the EPA away from pure facilitation toward rulemaking and enforcement and the vital role played by litigation in forcing national actors to exercise greater authority over state and local actors. Changes in litigation strategy, including which players in these games use lawsuits against whom, and how they use them, also emerge as important themes.

This paper describes the changing institutional arrangements, by analysing and comparing drivers of cooperation between actors in a polycentric governance arrangement for conserving water bodies for a period 1960-2018. The cases are selected to represent a spatial (rural–urban) gradient in Bengaluru, which is severely impacted by urban expansion leading to severe land-use change. This paper applies the COOF framework, developed by Baldwin et al 2022, and investigates how feedback mechanisms have led to changes in the interactions between actors involved in managing and conserving six lakes in the greater Bengaluru metropolitan region. We see that the outcomes in terms of emergent patterns of behaviour, interactions and effective coordination varies based on the dependence of the actors on the common property resource. Further, we highlight that contextual characteristic such as location of the lake, the institutions governing them have influenced the way actors interact with predominantly cooperative management in the urban cases whereas in the peri-urban lakes it was predominantly conflicts and passive agreement to the status quo. We conclude that the role of the state though important is not decisive and there is an increasing role played by the community and non-state actors in ensuring conservation and restoration of lakes.

Fragile and conflict-affected states (FCS) often struggle with building their capacity, ending conflict, and creating peaceful options for the future. But strengthening state capacity is limited by the amount and type of resources a state has, the reach and resilience of different infrastructures (e.g., roads, supply lines), limitations on consolidation efforts, and a lack of control over the use of violence. The provision of services, particularly education, clean water, and electricity, has been linked to efforts of states to increase their capacity, but these provisions rarely follow a linear path nor are they always effective. Times of crisis, such as during epidemics, can exacerbate the challenges that link service provision to building legitimacy for states, particularly for societies facing ongoing conflict, but the provision of – certain – services can have a positive effect on state legitimacy. I argue that under certain conditions – through leveraging polycentric governance structures and learning – vaccination campaigns act as a specific type of service provision that allows the state to build legitimacy. This legitimacy-building will then lay the foundation for the state to start increasing both their material capacity and their ability to end conflict. I trace successive outbreaks of Ebola in Équateur Province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and show that by partnering effectively with international organizations, local leaders, and former rebel leaders, the state was able to learn from previous failed outcomes and increase its legitimacy and convince citizens to get vaccinated and adopt different funeral practices to prevent Ebola from spreading as far or as quickly as in the past. This feedback learning mechanism increased state legitimacy in Équateur Province in a relatively short time frame and has persisted.

This paper explores the extent to which outcomes from action situations at multiple levels drive institutional change in open-source software (OSS) production, using the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) as a case study. Drawing on the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD), we develop a novel methodological approach based on Ostrom’s rule-type classification and the Institutional Grammar (IG) to capture institutional change from a micro-level perspective.

We created a longitudinal dataset comprising ASF’s policy documents to identify instances of formal institutional change (i.e., a policy document change). We compare formal changes to discussions and communications by the ASF board (constitutional level) to assess their role in policy change. We also analyze incubation project emails (operational level) to assess OSS production practices. This allows us to identify divergence between rules and rules-in-use. We utilize Ostrom’s rule types (1990) to categorize policy document changes into rules types.. Then, we employ Cosine and Jaccard similarity metrics to quantify changes between document versions. We track shifts in institutional arrangements over time to identify variations in the number and type of institutional statements.

This study contributes to the commons theory by advancing our understanding of institutional change. These insights have important implications for designing institutional arrangements for OSS sustainability. Beyond OSS, the methodological innovations have widespread applicability for using text analysis to study institutional evolution.

Numerous scholars have explored the role of polycentric systems in the governance of common pool resources with studies generally painting a static picture of overall system structure and institutional interrelationships. There remains a limited understanding of how such systems evolve to affect access to, use of, and control over a common pool resource. We propose that for natural resources, polycentric systems evolve out of an iterative process between the physical/ecological characteristics of the resource and the technological/legal/socio-political factors affecting resource use. Problems that arise from use can engender conflict and cooperative processes that motivate institutional formation and subsequent institutional linkages over time to resolve the problems. This can occur for example bottom up - where a polycentric system emerges from local resource conflicts, and our study of six California groundwater basins illustrates this process. Our findings suggest a relationship between pronounced hydrologic linkages and stronger institutional linkages, suggesting that the physical characteristics of natural resources are one driver of polycentric formation. Additionally, impacts from resource use can lead to both conflict and cooperative processes between basins that shape institutional formation and institutional interactions, pointing to impacts from resource use as a second driver of polycentric formation.

This paper uses a case of urban governance to begin to extrapolate fundamental principles of polycentric governance across urban areas in general. Though there are certainly numerous differences across urban areas across the globe, this paper argues that there are key principles that apply across a wide variety of settings. These principles build on wider characteristics of polycentricity but are applicable mainly in large metropolitan areas.

The study aims at examining the effect of contextual developments on agricultural marketing cooperatives over the past 30 years in the Southern Slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania. It explores on what factors have driven changes in the agricultural cooperatives and how these drivers have affected the operation of these cooperatives. Using economic theories of Institutional change, the study looks at the effect of factor prices, interrelated institutional options, mental models and governance technologies on the internal rules of the agricultural cooperatives. To analyze the changes in internal rules in the cooperatives the study uses the seven-rule typology as an analytical tool from the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework by Ostrom. Through a qualitative approach including in-depth interviews with cooperative leaders, managers, officers and other relevant social groups the study highlights key factors such changes in policies, product prices and market access that have shaped cooperative dynamics. Cooperatives have reacted to contextual changes through adaptive measures such as formation of new cooperative umbrella organizations, seeking international markets on their own and introduction of new marketing systems to address financial challenges. The study underscores the importance of adaptive strategies and collaborative governance to strengthen the role of agricultural cooperatives in promoting sustainable development in the region.