Sterner, Beckett

Conservation treaties are agreed-upon institutional (rule) configurations designed to create mechanisms that share information on global biodiversity conditions and are adjustable to changing social and ecological conditions so that core treaty objectives are continuously met. Since adjustments in treaty rules can lead to fragilities elsewhere, the goal is to create a governance system that can cope with change while maintaining core conditions within acceptable parameters, e.g., to prevent species extinctions and biodiversity declines. Polycentric institutional design is thought to provide such flexibility. However, few studies have examined whether treaty rule configurations are indeed polycentric and how this may influence adaptability to change.

Polycentric systems are defined by three overarching attributes: (1) they consist of many centers of decision-making; (2) they are governed by a single system of rules that can be institutionally or culturally enforced; and (3) they foster contestation of ideas, methods, and “ways of life” that lead to the emergence of a spontaneous social order that fosters the ability to change. The Logical Structure of Polycentricity (LSP) framework provides indicators for each of the three attributes (Aligica & Tarko 2012). We couple the LSP framework with the Institutional Grammar 2.0 to measure these indicators and explore the polycentric elements of the formal institutional design of four international conservation treaties. We then provide a categorization of the degree of polycentricity evident in each treaty design with a particular focus on how the identified elements may privilege certain actors with more power to shape conservation governance, and how these power dynamics may affect trustworthiness and collective action within treaty regimes.

Citations: Aligica & Tarko (2012). Polycentricity: from Polanyi to Ostrom, and beyond. Governance, 25(2), 237-262.