Bruns, Bryan Randolph

Groundwater is a vital resource for domestic, irrigation, and industrial water supply in most countries. But it is one of the most difficult common pool resources to govern due to mobility, invisibility, conflicting interests, large numbers of stakeholders, and limitations of available institutions. While groundwater may seem like a typical example of a common pool resource, conventional solutions based on controlling extraction through regulatory sanctions or financial incentives usually fail. Framing the problem in terms tragic overexploitation or sustainable yield can leave out or misconstrue many of the complexities, dynamics, and tradeoffs of multiple uses and users, including groundwater quality and environment. Approaches emphasizing only top-down or bottom-up approaches are not so helpful for finding combinations of institutions for effective agency in governing groundwater commons.
This presentation draws from work on groundwater governance in Punjab Province, Pakistan, particularly Rahim Yar Khan District, where a recently-developed Groundwater Management Information System (GMIS) highlighted hot spots of groundwater depletion and contamination. This case illustrates how addressing wicked problems requires tailored approaches, starting with the understanding and involvement of the key actors. As a contribution towards finding comprehensive and lasting solutions, we apply a framework to identify the key actors and consider what can provide them with the knowledge, motivation, and agency to act together to address the groundwater problems. Experiences of a recently-convened multistakeholder platform for water governance in the district provide examples of the scope and limits of existing approaches, and the need for more attention to the narratives and power dynamics that might move or constrain action to address critical groundwater problems.

What are the implications for institutional analysis and governance if commons are (or are believed to be) co-created – including through cooperation, competition, mutual adjustment, social learning, and collective self-regulation – by the choices of multiple types of beings and not only humans? And what if not only humans are considered to have rights, duties, desires, strategies, roles, and other attributes? Could considering some nonhumans as commons actors help regenerate and sustain social-ecological systems by improving understanding and governance?

This paper explores from an Ostromian institutionalist perspective a range of arguments and issues relevant to these questions. In doing so we draw on ideas including from indigenous ontologies, sacred ecology, land ethics, environmental philosophy, rights of nature, (re)wilding, and complexity science, and on empirical findings from the life and cognitive sciences. Reciprocity and strategic behaviour in social-ecological dilemma situations are considered, as are other relationships of interdependence and cooperation including those involving interspecies mutualism, niche construction, and keystone species in ecosystems. Conceptualisation of humans and nonhumans as commons actors is explored from the perspectives of both institutional researchers and those engaged in commoning. Issues and arguments are examined in the context of illustrative cases, including of multispecies cooperation and ecological regeneration. Implications for improving institutional analysis and governance of environmental commons are discussed.

Unequal opportunities and outcomes are pervasive in commons, but conceptualization of social dilemmas in commons has typically focused on symmetric models of tragedy of the commons and prisoner’s dilemma. This paper looks at opportunities for agency in asymmetric contexts of structural advantage and disadvantage through the lens of simple game theory models of interdependent decision making in strategic situations.

Changes in the ranking of outcomes map transformations between different models of two-person two-choice situations (2x2 games) such as changing a symmetric prisoner’s dilemma into an asymmetric dilemma or a stag hunt game. Mapping the payoff space of such transformations shows that the vast majority of possible games are asymmetric. Asymmetric games with a single equilibrium with unequal outcomes make up almost half of the possible 2x2 games, but models of such situations have received little attention in social science research on environmental governance.

These asymmetric games of advantage and disadvantage illustrate how structural characteristics, such as alignment of dominant strategies, presence of alternative non-equilibrium outcomes, and pathways for transformation, shape the limits and opportunities for agency, including potential for agreements and institutional arrangements that could change situations to achieve better outcomes in terms of various criteria. In the context of the prevalence of asymmetric situations with unequal equilibrium solutions, this paper analyzes factors that may influence attempts to achieve better outcomes, including the role of threats, spite, care, persuasion, attitudes about fairness, availability of equitable alternatives, negotiations that link action situations, and sometimes difficult individual or collective decisions concerning exit, voice, loyalty, and fairness.

Keywords: asymmetric social situations, collective agency, periodic table of interdependence, suasion games, rambo games, topology of 2x2 games, unequal commons