Baldwin, Elizabeth

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.

What shapes different forms of governance and their performance, and is the concept of hybrid governance (hybrids) a promising pathway for improving the outcomes of governance, e.g. in environmental governance? Understanding these issues will improve our knowledge for crafting better governance towards desirable outcomes. A natural place to start such work is polycentric governance. Thus, this paper aims to advance on unpacking the black box of coordination in polycentric governance. As it unfolded we found that based on our definition of hybrids as overlapping modes of coordination hybrids dominate empirically. Thus, our work maps distinct hybrids, explore their emergence and determining factors as well as analyze their performance. The paper suggests a positive approach to understanding hybrids. As starting point for conceptualizing hybrids s we use the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework which is strongly related to and therefore compatible with polycentric. We illustrate its application through engagement into five contrasting, illustrative cases in which we identified four different types of hybrids as starting points for further theorizing. We end on identifying types of hybrids and contextual factors shaping them. We suggest the identification of hybrids as future research agenda for unpacking the inner workings of polycentric governance. The paper is based on an edited volume developed among proponents of this abstract and a number of scholars in the field of natural resource governance. We suggest that hybrids are stratified across temporal scales and nested across different levels of institutional order, addressing day to day coordination which is nested in institutions in larger scales of societal organization that structure these modes . Beyond the three modes of governance that overlap in hybrids, we find that the distinction of formal, state-backed legitimization of governance as opposed to informal, community-backed legitimization of governance of component modes of coordination provides a further important dimension of hybrids. The emergence and performance of hybrids depends on social-ecological context configurations.

This presentation will present Grassvasion, a tabletop game for 3-4 players that illustrates basic concepts around invasive grasses. The game is a form of science communication from an NSF grant studying the governance of invasive grasses in Southern Arizona. In the game (and in real life), a diverse set of actors needs to build their shared capacity to stem the invasion before the invasion overwhelms the community. The game is semi-cooperative. Different players take on different roles (a rancher, a park ranger, an activist, an analyst) with different individual objectives and different incentives to work together (or not) to stem the invasion. In this panel, I will present an overview of Grassvasion, including our motivation for developing the game, how we developed game mechanics and objectives that effectively communicate key themes in our social-ecological system, and how we plan to use the game to teach people in our community and beyond about the challenge of invasive grasses – and how to overcome those challenges.

A growing body of literature highlights the benefits of using classroom games to help students understand policy concepts. In practice, however, instructors often use games as ad-hoc activities to increase student engagement, rather than as an integrated way to consolidate student understanding of core course topics. The goal of this paper is to help instructors design and systematically integrate games into their undergraduate policy courses. Drawing on our experiences as instructors and researchers, we describe how we developed a sequence of games to help undergraduate students understand three of the core concepts in environmental policy, and how we integrated them into our undergraduate courses on environmental policy. We then provide a basic framework for instructors who are interested in designing games that illustrate core policy concepts by simulating real-world policy interactions.