Bringing polycentric systems into focus for environmental governance

Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu MdM-2015-0552Introduction to the special issue on Polycentricity in Enioronmental Policy and Governanc

Connecting Cognitive and Behavioral Characteristics of Policy Conflict in Oil and Gas Politics

The essence of policy conflicts remains largely underdeveloped, both theoretically and empirically. We explore policy conflict and explain its cognitive and behavioral characteristics using data from a survey administered to policy actors involved in oil and gas politics in Colorado, USA. The analysis begins with a description of the cognitive and behavioral characteristics of policy actors and then combines them into a single index to depict varying intensities of conflict. Cognitive characteristics are comprised of three dimensions: disagreement on public policy, perceived threats from opponents, and an unwillingness to compromise. Behavioral characteristics include engagement by policy actors in a range of activities, from mobilizing opponents to providing information to the media. Ordered Logit models are used to associate the attributes of policy actors with cognitive and behavioral characteristics and an index of conflict intensity that combines these two characteristics. The conclusion offers questions and recommendations for future research

Building the Agenda for Institutional Research in Water Resource Management

This paper pursues more specifically the recommendations of a recent National Research Council report recommending greater attention to research on institutions in the field of water resource management. The important challenge for the future in institutional research lies in going beyond the observation that institutions are important and in explaining instead how institutions actually affect management options and outcomes. It is possible to illuminate the relationships between institutional features and water management through comparative institutional research. This paper offers recommendations for studying water institutions in a comparative context, including methodological recommendations concerning approaches to comparative institutional research, and topics for comparative institutional research that appear especially fruitful at this time. The example of conjunctive management is used to illustrate the importance of institutional factors in water management, drawing to some extent on the authors’ recent experience with a comparative study of conjunctive management institutions

A Social-Ecological-Infrastructural Systems Framework for Interdisciplinary Study of Sustainable City Systems

Cities are embedded within larger-scale engineered infrastructures (e.g., electric power, water supply, and transportation networks) that convey natural resources over large distances for use by people in cities. The sustainability of city systems therefore depends upon complex, cross-scale interactions between the natural system, the transboundary engineered infrastructures, and the multiple social actors and institutions that govern these infrastructures. These elements, we argue, are best studied in an integrated manner using a novel social-ecological-infrastructural systems (SEIS) framework. In the biophysical subsystem, the SEIS framework integrates urban metabolism with life cycle assessment to articulate transboundary infrastructure supply chain water, energy, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission footprints of cities. These infrastructure footprints make visible multiple resources (water, energy, materials) used directly or indirectly (embodied) to support human activities in cities. They inform cross-scale and cross-infrastructure sector strategies for mitigating environmental pollution, public health risks and supply chain risks posed to cities. In the social subsystem, multiple theories drawn from the social sciences explore interactions between three actor categories—individual resource users, infrastructure designers and operators, and policy actors—who interact with each other and with infrastructures to shape cities toward sustainability outcomes. Linking of the two subsystems occurs by integrating concepts, theories, laws, and models across environmental sciences/climatology, infrastructure engineering, industrial ecology, architecture, urban planning, behavioral sciences, public health, and public affairs. Such integration identifies high-impact leverage points in the urban SEIS. An interdisciplinary SEIS-based curriculum on sustainable cities is described and evaluated for its efficacy in promoting systems thinking and interdisciplinary vocabulary development, both of which are measures of effective frameworks

It’s time to learn about learning:Where should the environmental and natural resource governance field go next?

This Commentary reflects on the state of the scholarship on learning for environmental and natural resource policy and governance. How have we been learning about learning? We highlight theoretical and empirical advancements related to learning, as well as areas of divergence between learning theories and frameworks, and underdeveloped knowledge around processes and outcomes. To address these limitations and improve progress in both theory and practice, we offer recommendations for learning scholarship by focusing on how to collectively engage in ‘learning about learning’

Managing common-pool resources in a public service industry: The case of conjunctive water management

Water providers, public administrators, and policy-makers in the Western United States face consequential decisions regarding the use and management of limited water supplies for growing populations. A tool that water providers have employed to address this issue is conjunctive water management, or the coordinated use of ground and surface water supplies. Using the natural capacity of groundwater basins for storage of surface supplies, this method aims to enhance overall supplies and guard against drought. Implementing conjunctive water management, however, is not simple. Water providers operate under a complex array of institutional settings that affect conjunctive water management. This dissertation explains the development and implementation of conjunctive water management in the western United States in relation to the institutional arrangements that govern water resources. This dissertation looks to two literatures from a common research framework to evaluate conjunctive water management: the literature on public service industries and common-pool resource management theory. This dissertation identifies where the two literatures are weak and shows how the two theories can complement each other, helping resolve their respective weaknesses. Common-pool resource theory sets up criteria for sustainable resource management that requires matching institutional boundaries to natural resource boundaries. This dissertation explains how the criteria limit the theory's generalizability to large, complex systems. To resolve this weakness, the theory development section of this dissertation uses insights from public service industry theory on inter jurisdictional coordination. Second, this dissertation considers the weakness of public service industry theory in explaining coordination across jurisdictions. It borrows from common-pool resource literature to resolve this deficiency. The theory development section then derives hypotheses from the two literatures to explain how institutional arrangements affect conjunctive water management. The empirical section of this dissertation tests these hypotheses. In addition to testing the inferences from the theory development, the empirical analyses illustrate the different ways in which water providers coordinate the management of groundwater and surface water supplies in the West. Understanding these management outcomes in relation to their institutional settings has important policy implications for natural resource management in general

Linking stressors and adaptive capacity within the Mekong River Commission

PRIFPRI3; ISI; GRP22EPT

Does Integrated Water Resources Management Support Institutional Change? The Case of Water Policy Reform in Israel

Many international efforts have been made to encourage integrated water resources management through recommendations from both the academic and the aid and development sectors. Recently, it has been argued that integrated water resources management can help foster better adaptation of management and policy responses to emerging water crises. Nevertheless, few empirical studies have assessed how this type of management works in practice and what an integrated water management system implies for institutional adaptation and change. Our assessment of the Israeli water sector provides one view of how they can be shaped by an integrated structure in the water sector. Our analysis of recent efforts to adapt Israel's water management system to new conditions and uncertainties reveals that the interconnectedness of the system and the consensus decision-making process, led by a dominant actor who coordinates and sets the policy agenda, tends to increase the complexity of negotiations. In addition, the physical integration of water management leads to sunk costs of large-scale physical infrastructure. Both these factors create a path dependency that empowers players who receive benefits from maintaining the existing system. This impedes institutional reform of the water management system and suggests that integrated water resources management creates policy and management continuity that may only be amenable to incremental changes. In contrast, real adaptation that requires reversibility and the ability to change management strategies in response to new information or monitoring of specific management outcomes