Schoon, Michael

Water governance at the basin scale requires collaboration between a diversity of actors with very different interests. To address this challenge, water basin committees and similar groups have been promoted as the institutional arrangement to facilitate finding common ground and better governance. However, not all territories may be prepared for such an endeavor, especially if there is no previous history of collaboration, or the adequate institutional mechanisms in place. In Chile, despite the private and productively based water governance system, water basin committees have been promoted by an interministerial group for social ecological transition. Although these have not been implemented yet, learning from similar water group experiences is important to identify challenges that may require policy change. This study presents an evaluation of 7 water users’ organizations in Chile using a Context-Mechanism-Outcome approach (Carr Kelman et al., 2023). The 7 cases identified represent different geographical, historical and management capacities. The analysis shows contexts and mechanisms that may have influenced different collective action in each case. Preliminary analysis uncovers the importance of distinguishing nuances in variables that may intuitively be assessed as similar as they may plan in different ways depending on the context (e.g. users rights established by law). Understanding the mechanisms that may affect water management where water users’ organizations exist, can help preparing for territories where there is no history of collaboration.

References
Carr Kelman, C., Brady, U., Raschke, B. A. & Schoon, M. L., 2023. A Systematic Review of Key Factors of Effective Collaborative Governance of Social-Ecological Systems In: Society and Natural Resources. 36, 11, p. 1452-1470 19

In the last several years, the importance of Indigenous rights and knowledge systems in nature conservation and resource management has been acknowledged by science and
policy bodies, such as the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The concept of biocultural conservation has taken a leading role in bridging the worlds of biodiversity conservation, Indigenous cultural heritage, and numerous disciplines with wide differentiation in epistemologies, from ecology to politics to humanities. While the concept is, in many ways, able to bring together many schools of thought and provide a way forward for socially just conservation, there are also tensions both practically and theoretically. To gain insight, we explore the synergies and tensions between biocultural conservation and theories of the commons. Our intention is to show how these two approaches are complementary in theory and in practice, despite their differences, and how the synergies and contradictions can improve practice in projects involving culture and conservation. Ideally this paper could serve as a guide for scholars and practitioners regarding which perspectives are most useful in which kinds of situations.

Our study uses a context-mechanism-outcome approach to highlight how trust diversity emerges in wildfire collaborative archetypes and how it impacts collaborative environmental, social and process outcomes. Using survey data from wildland collaboratives, we identify three distinct collaborative archetypes arising from landscape and property rights heterogeneity, stakeholder distributions and value diversity and collaborative mission orientations. We characterize four distinct trust types of these collaborative groups including affinitive trust, dispositional trust, rational trust and procedural trust. We find that collaborative process mechanisms such as trust types, development and maintenance differ across collaborative archetypes. We also find that the contexts and mechanisms differentially influence outcome achievement with partial achievement of social and environmental outcomes but substantial gains in process outcomes depending on trust diversity and archetype group. Ultimately, understanding the mechanisms of operation in different contexts can help guide improved decision-making, navigate conflict and create more equitable participation in collaborative wildfire management.