Showing papers by "Claudia Pahl-Wostl published in 2014"

The capacity of water governance to deal with the climate change adaptation challenge: Using fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to distinguish between polycentric, fragmented and centralized regimes

Abstract: The notion of polycentric governance has become increasingly popular in recent years. Such development may be attributed to expectations that polycentric governance systems have a higher capacity to deal with complex challenges arising from global and climate change. Most often, employed interpretations of polycentricity emphasize the presence of several independent centers of authority in a governance domain. A commonly neglected feature of polycentric governance, as introduced by Elinor and Vincent Ostrom, is that this concept entails as well operation under one set of overall accepted rules. This paper analyzes the underlying feature of effective polycentric governance and makes a distinction between polycentric, fragmented, and centralized governance regimes. An empirical analysis of water governance systems in 27 national river basins using fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) shows that a set of factors associated with polycentricity has the highest explanatory power for high performance regarding climate change adaptation. Factors associated with fragmented and centralized regimes can be identified for paths leading to low performance. Furthermore, the analysis identifies the effectiveness of formal institutions as important condition, in particular for paths leading toward low performance. The paper elaborates on these findings and discusses as well the potential of fsQCA in such comparative analyses.

Water Resilience for Human Prosperity

Abstract: The world's human population now constitutes the largest driving force of changes to the biosphere. Emerging water challenges require new ideas for governance and management of water resources in the context of rapid global change. This book presents a new approach to water resources, addressing global sustainability and focusing on socio-ecological resilience to changes. Topics covered include the risks of unexpected change, human impacts and dependence on global water, the prospects for feeding the world's population by 2050, and a pathway for the future. The book's innovative and integrated approach links green and blue freshwater with terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem functions and use. It also links changes arising from land-use alteration with the impacts of those changes on social-ecological systems and ecosystem services. This is an important, state-of-the-art resource for academic researchers and water resource professionals, and a key reference for graduate students studying water resource governance and management.

An Analytical Framework of Social Learning Facilitated by Participatory Methods

Abstract: Social learning among different stakeholders is often a goal in problem solving contexts such as environmental management. Participatory methods (e.g., group model-building and role playing games) are frequently assumed to stimulate social learning. Yet understanding if and why this assumption is justified is quite limited. Difficulties arise from the complexity and context-dependence of processes influencing social learning. Furthermore, continuing discussion of the exact meaning and theoretical basis of social learning result in a limited capacity to assess and evaluate whether social learning has occurred. In this paper we introduce an analytical framework to develop an in depth understanding of essential processes underlying social learning facilitated by participatory methods. Concepts from different fields of science are discussed and integrated, including resource management, small group research and learning research. The individual and group perspectives are brought together via mental models and emergent roles. We added the direction of learning, being either convergent or divergent, to be able to explore if and when personal views on a problem converge into a shared understanding of a problem. The analysis of convergence and divergence of learning is facilitated through the use of the mental model concept. Methods for measurement of proposed indicators for social learning are also discussed. The framework developed provides a conceptual basis for the analysis of social learning facilitated by participatory methods and an operationalization for application in empirical research.

Research, part of a Special Feature on Global Water Governance: Challenges and Future Scope The global policy network behind integrated water resources management: is it an effective norm diffusor?

Abstract: Integrated water resources management (IWRM) has been recognized by many actors as the appropriate approach to respond to challenges in water resources management in a sustainable way. The main players in developing and diffusing the IWRM concept have included expert groups, international organizations, and multistakeholder platforms, which cooperated in various activities promoting the IWRM concept, such as knowledge generation and sharing, capacity building, and monitoring. A loose network of these actors has actively shaped and engaged in a global discourse on sustainable water resources management and managed to authoritatively shape the IWRM concept. The processes behind the spread of the IWRM concept can thus be conceptualized as development and diffusion of norms through a global policy network. Although this process has changed the discourse on water resources management and established IWRM principles as a global set of norms, national policies and regulations reflect these norms only to a limited extent and new policies lack implementation. IWRM norms have been developed and spread by a network of nonstate actors, which might have contributed to its diverging influence in global discourse on the one hand and national policy implementation on the other. We present an analytical framework to assess effects of IWRM norm diffusion and network structures that support norm development and spread through global policy networks. We also provide an exploratory analysis of the main global policy network involved in development and diffusion of the IWRM concept, including its key actors, relationships across the network, and network outputs.

The global policy network behind integrated water resources management: is it an effective norm diffusor?

Abstract: Integrated water resources management (IWRM) has been recognized by many actors as the appropriate approach to respond to challenges in water resources management in a sustainable way. The main players in developing and diffusing the IWRM concept have included expert groups, international organizations, and multistakeholder platforms, which cooperated in various activities promoting the IWRM concept, such as knowledge generation and sharing, capacity building, and monitoring. A loose network of these actors has actively shaped and engaged in a global discourse on sustainable water resources management and managed to authoritatively shape the IWRM concept. The processes behind the spread of the IWRM concept can thus be conceptualized as development and diffusion of norms through a global policy network. Although this process has changed the discourse on water resources management and established IWRM principles as a global set of norms, national policies and regulations reflect these norms only to a limited extent and new policies lack implementation. IWRM norms have been developed and spread by a network of nonstate actors, which might have contributed to its diverging influence in global discourse on the one hand and national policy implementation on the other. We present an analytical framework to assess effects of IWRM norm diffusion and network structures that support norm development and spread through global policy networks. We also provide an exploratory analysis of the main global policy network involved in development and diffusion of the IWRM concept, including its key actors, relationships across the network, and network outputs.

An agent-based model of consensus building

Abstract: Our model, CollAct is built around the question how people gain a shared understanding and reach consensus in an interactive group setting. This is an important question which is rather difficult to analyze within case studies. We model agents in a cognitive way, including substantive and relational knowledge in mental models, which may change through learning. The agents in CollAct discuss with each other and produce a group model (consensus). Factors identified to have an important influence on the results of a group discussion include group size, the level of controversy within the discussion, cognitive diversity, social behavior in form of cognitive biases (Asch and halo effect), and, depending on group size, the existence of a leading role at the beginning. Furthermore, the integration of topics into the consensus follows a saturation curve, thus the ending time of discussions should be carefully chosen to avoid a loss of information.

Water Governance and Management Systems and the Role of Ecosystem Services: Case Study Insights—Groundwater Management in the Sandveld Region, South Africa

Abstract: Freshwater resources deliver a broad set of ecosystem services essential for human health and well-being, food and energy production, social and economic stability, and for protecting and maintaining ecosystems. The ever increasing demand of water resources often result in substantial declines in the provision of ecosystem services. The management of human and environmental water needs is therefore challenging and calls for an integrative view on ecosystem services. A shift of current water management objectives is required to ensure water security for current and future generations. This article analyzes water governance and management systems (WGMS) and highlights characteristics assumed to be crucial for adaptive and integrated management: (i) institutional settings, (ii) actor networks, and (iii) multi-level structures. To understand complex WGMS one has to link these characteristics to management performances including impacts on ecosystem services. We applied this approach to the Sandveld in South Africa focusing on actor networks and the management of ecosystem services. We indicate that a basic re-thinking of water management objectives at national and regional level according to groundwater sustainability took place. A bottom-up movement in the Sandveld developed approaches to protect and sustain groundwater resources. Nevertheless, cooperation between actors and sectors from different levels is weak which in turn provides a huge barrier for the integration of ecosystem services into groundwater policies.

Water Resilience for Human Prosperity: Balancing on a threshold of alternate development paths: regime shift, traps and transformations

Abstract: This chapter addresses the involvement of water in abrupt and unexpected changes in social–ecological systems. It looks more closely at water’s many roles in reinforcing processes and stabilising feedbacks, and how systems suffer when feedback processes weaken or break. It discusses water-related disturbances and feedbacks, different categories of regime shift and ways of enhancing resilience. The issue of traps is discussed, both green water-related poverty traps, involving self-enforcing mechanisms, and blue water-related rigidity traps, when people and institutions resist change. The chapter explains the use of transformation management to get out of traps. Rapid, accelerating and surprising changes in the Anthropocene era Many of the changes in the GWS are rapid and can be surprising. Some are accelerating, but change can also be smooth and gradual. Most importantly, some change can be turbulent and abrupt, and result in non-linear responses from human, economic or ecological systems, with effects that are difficult, if not impossible, to reverse. Documented cases include the collapse of marine cod fisheries in 1992 (Hutchings, 1996), the collapse of Saharan vegetation 6–8000 years ago (Foley et al ., 2003) and the financial crises of 2008, all of which caused rapid and unprecedented reductions in resource availabilities with abrupt, unforeseen and negative effects on human well-being. The Anthropocene era has seen an increase in the links between humans and the environment, at multiple scales. Freshwater plays a significant role in this context, through its capacity to link different systems and places. Intricate cross-scale interactions play out in novel ways, which connect distant peoples and places (Adger et al ., 2008; Galaz et al ., 2010) reshaping the capacity of the biosphere to sustain human well-being (Folke et al ., 2011) and increasing the risk of abrupt change.