A major problem worldwide is the potential loss of fisheries, forests, and water resources Understanding of the processes that lead to improvements in or deterioration of natural resources is limited, because scientific disciplines use different concepts and languages to describe and explain complex social-ecological systems (SESs) Without a common framework to organize findings, isolated knowledge does not cumulate Until recently, accepted theory has assumed that resource users will never self-organize to maintain their resources and that governments must impose solutions Research in multiple disciplines, however, has found that some government policies accelerate resource destruction, whereas some resource users have invested their time and energy to achieve sustainability A general framework is used to identify 10 subsystem variables that affect the likelihood of self-organization in efforts to achieve a sustainable SES

A General Framework for Analyzing Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems

Human institutions—ways of organizing activities—affect the resilience of the environment. Locally evolved institutional arrangements governed by stable communities and buffered from outside forces have sustained resources successfully for centuries, although they often fail when rapid change occurs. Ideal conditions for governance are increasingly rare. Critical problems, such as transboundary pollution, tropical deforestation, and climate change, are at larger scales and involve nonlocal influences. Promising strategies for addressing these problems include dialogue among interested parties, officials, and scientists; complex, redundant, and layered institutions; a mix of institutional types; and designs that facilitate experimentation, learning, and change.

/pdf/the-struggle-to-govern-the-commons-5a060zxyju.pdf

The Struggle to Govern the Commons

Enchantment and Disenchantment: The Role of Community in Natural Resource Conservation

In a seminal paper, Garrett Hardin argued in 1968 that users of a commons are caught in an inevitable process that leads to the destruction of the resources on which they depend. This article discusses new insights about such problems and the conditions most likely to favor sustainable uses of common-pool resources. Some of the most difficult challenges concern the management of large-scale resources that depend on international cooperation, such as fresh water in international basins or large marine ecosystems. Institutional diversity may be as important as biological diversity for our long-term survival.

/pdf/revisiting-the-commons-local-lessons-global-challenges-4e6ky69pir.pdf

Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global Challenges

The articles in this special feature challenge the presumption that scholars can make simple, predictive models of social–ecological systems (SESs) and deduce universal solutions, panaceas, to problems of overuse or destruction of resources. Moving beyond panaceas to develop cumulative capacities to diagnose the problems and potentialities of linked SESs requires serious study of complex, multivariable, nonlinear, cross-scale, and changing systems. Many variables have been identified by researchers as affecting the patterns of interactions and outcomes observed in empirical studies of SESs. A step toward developing a diagnostic method is taken by organizing these variables in a nested, multitier framework. The framework enables scholars to organize analyses of how attributes of (i) a resource system (e.g., fishery, lake, grazing area), (ii) the resource units generated by that system (e.g., fish, water, fodder), (iii) the users of that system, and (iv) the governance system jointly affect and are indirectly affected by interactions and resulting outcomes achieved at a particular time and place. The framework also enables us to organize how these attributes may affect and be affected by larger socioeconomic, political, and ecological settings in which they are embedded, as well as smaller ones. The framework is intended to be a step toward building a strong interdisciplinary science of complex, multilevel systems that will enable future diagnosticians to match governance arrangements to specific problems embedded in a social–ecological context.

/pdf/a-diagnostic-approach-for-going-beyond-panaceas-16zp5i2x28.pdf

A diagnostic approach for going beyond panaceas

The term "common-property resource" is an example of a term repeatedly used to refer to property owned by a government or by no one. It is also used for property owned by a community of resource users. Such usage leads to confusion in scientific study and policy analysis. In this paper we develop a conceptual schema for arraying property-rights regimes that distinguishes among diverse bundles of rights ranging from authorized user, to claimant, to proprietor, and to owner. We apply this conceptual schema to analyze findings from a variety of empirical settings including the Maine lobster industry.

/pdf/property-rights-regimes-and-natural-resources-a-conceptual-4j0qilks0s.pdf

Property rights regimes and natural resources: A conceptual analysis

Integrated watershed management, preferably under the direction of a watershed or basin management body, has been prescribed in the water policy literature and from other quarters for decades. Few instances may be found where this recommendation has been implemented. This gap between prescription and practice is sometimes attributed to politics, as a sort of nuisance to be overcome or avoided through rational, comprehensive, consensus-based decision making. Fundamental political considerations are inherent in water resources management, however, and are unavoidable even if the desire for watershed-scale decision-making bodies were realized. Boundary definition, choices about decision-making arrangements, and issues of accountability will arise in any watershed and may help to explain why watershed management has more often taken polycentric organizational forms composed of subwatershed communities of interest. An example of a small Southern California watershed is used to highlight the political ...

Political Pitfalls of Integrated Watershed Management

Research on policy communities, policy networks, and advocacy coalitions represents the most recent effort by policy scholars in North America and Europe to meaningfully describe and explain the complex, dynamic policy making processes of modern societies. While work in this tradition has been extraordinarily productive, issues of collective action have not been carefully addressed. Focusing on the advocacy coalitions (AC) framework developed by Sabatier (1988) and Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith (1993) as an example of a productive research program within the policy network tradition, this article (1) examines the potential of the AC framework, with its emphasis on beliefs, policy learning, and preference formation, to provide richer explanations of policy making processes than frameworks grounded exclusively in instrumental rationality; (2) suggests that paradoxically, however, the AC framework can more fully realize its potential by admitting the explanations of collective action from frameworks based on instrumental rationality; (3) incorporates within the AC framework accounts of how coalitions form and maintain themselves over time and of the types of strategies coalitions are likely to adopt to pursue their policy goals; and (4) derives falsifiable collective action hypotheses that can be empirically tested to determine whether incorporating theories of collective action within the AC framework represents a positive, rather than a degenerative, expansion of the AC framework.

Policy making and collective action: Defining coalitions within the advocacy coalition framework

Common-pool resources (CPR) are treated as if they were fully described by two characteristics-difficulty of exclusion and subtractability of yield. We focus upon two additional characteristics, mobile flows and storage in the resource. In examining CPR settings involving fisheries, irrigation systems, and groundwater basins, we find that users of these resources pursue different strategies and design different institutional arrangements depending upon whether the resource is characterized by mobile flows and/or storage. From this evidence, we develop a typology of CPRs that is useful for understanding and anticipating resource users' strategies in confronting and solving common-pool problems.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3146531

Mobile flows, storage, and self-organized institutions for governing common-pool resources

In an earlier review of political theories of the policy process, Sabatier (1991) challenged political scientists and policy scholars to improve theoretical understanding of policy processes. This essay responds by comparing and building upon three emerging theoretical frameworks: Sabatier's advocacy coalitions framework (ACF), institutional rational choice (IRC), and Moe's political theory of bureaucracy, which he calls the politics of structural choice (SC). The frameworks are compared using six criteria: (1) the bound aries of inquiry; (2) the model of the individual; (3) the roles of informa tion and beliefs in decision making and strategy; (4) the nature and role of groups; (5) the concept of levels of action; and (6) the ability to explain action at various stages of the policy process. Comparison reveals that each framework has promising components, but each remains short of provid ing a full explanation of the processes of policy formation and change. Directions for future theory development and e...

Edella Schlager

Papers

Property rights regimes and natural resources: A conceptual analysis

Political Pitfalls of Integrated Watershed Management

Policy making and collective action: Defining coalitions within the advocacy coalition framework

Mobile flows, storage, and self-organized institutions for governing common-pool resources

A Comparison of Three Emerging Theories of the Policy Process