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.
