Research
One
of the great puzzles in contemporary environmental policy is why some human
institutions are more effective than others in governing natural resources.
Whether the institution is at the level of the national government or at the
level of a small rural community, the governance of environmental public goods
and common pool resources is always a challenge. The challenge is particularly
difficult in developing nations, when citizens and their political
representatives try to achieve human and economic development without degrading
their biological environment. The purpose of my research is to contribute to an
increased understanding of the institutional structures and public policy
processes that may help or hinder efforts of human development.
As a scholar in the field of
comparative environmental policy, I grapple with the role that institutional
arrangements play in explaining varying environmental policy performance in the
developing world today. My research explores how local institutional
arrangements may interact with national and international policies to produce
distinct patterns of natural resource use, which ultimately may be observed as
biophysical alterations on the landscape (i.e. deforestation or re-growth of
forest, changes in water quality, etc). In this short note, I describe the main
questions, approaches and methods in my research program, my core findings to
date, potential directions for future research, and the broader relevance of my
research.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND
HYPOTHESES
People engaged in the harvesting of
natural resources often face many collective dilemmas. In the realms of local
environmental governance, one particularly difficult problem is to motivate
resource users to contribute actively to the organization and implementation of
rules that control access and regulate consumption of the resources. In other
words, while local resources users have to bear the lion share of the
costs of conservation, the benefits of conservation are not exclusive to the
local users. In fact, the local conservation efforts often generate improved
public goods (soil and water protection, enhanced diversity of gene pools,
carbon sequestration, etc), which are distributed to people who did not
contribute directly to that conservation effort. This situation weakens the
incentives of local people to assume the costs of conservation and it produces a
tension between the local and broader scales of political decision making. The
dilemma also raises several important questions, which much of my current
research focuses on:
(1) Why would local politicians
invest in environmental governance?
(2) What factors contribute to
effective local environmental governance?
(3) How do local institutions affect
outcomes on the landscape?
I approach these questions from the
perspective of the new institutionalism school of political economy (North 1990,
Ostrom, 1990, Knight 1992, Bates 1998). New institutionalists seek to explain
political behavior by examining the constraints imposed upon individuals by
institutions. Whereas early forms of institutionalism implied that
institutional structures determined social or political outcomes, new
institutional scholars have come to view institutional arrangements as
moderating and mediating the effects of other variables. My approach
also emphasizes the value of considering institutions at multiple levels,
drawing on earlier work that analyzes institutions as “two-level games” (Putnam
1994), “nested action arenas” (Ostrom 2005), or systems of multi-level
governance (Hooghe & Marx 2003). I recognize that institutional arrangements are
nearly always made up of several layers of social orders—from local
micro-interactional orders to international and transnational arrangements—and
that relationships of complementarity and contradiction may exist between these
layers.
Applied to the analysis of how
public policy might affect environmental outcomes, I highlight the ways in which
public policy initiatives are filtered by local institutional
arrangements to produce observable behavior and sometimes even outcomes that are
visible on the landscape. The pre-existing set of multi-tiered institutional
arrangements shape the incentives that actors face and thus the patterns of
interaction among resource users, various levels of government officials, and
other actors. The relationship between actors and institutions is often complex,
since actors both respond to institutional incentives and enact
these institutional arrangements continuously. The central hypothesis in my
research is that the configuration of local institutional arrangements and their
interactional dynamics shape the extent to which policy initiatives affect
resource use decisions and ultimately the environment.
My research challenges two core
ideas in the local governance literature. The first idea is that sustainable
management of natural resource in developing countries requires substantial
financial capital. The second idea is that the goals of sustainable resource
governance outcomes are not achievable without highly trained government
employees at the local level. To test these and competing institutional
hypotheses, I engage in comparative analysis, using both qualitative and
quantitative methods. The next section summarizes some of my main findings
related to these central questions and hypotheses.
MAIN
RESEARCH FINDINGS
One of the core
findings in the literature on natural resource governance is that local
institutions matter a great deal when explaining subnational variation of
environmental quality (Ostrom, 1990; Gibson et al 2000; Agrawal, 2005; Baland
and Platteau, 1996). Contrary to predictions from conventional micro-economic
theory, this research has found that the effect that local institutions have on
the governance outcomes is highly variable, and that local communities are
sometimes able to govern their natural resources sustainably without any
external interventions from national governments. One of the main contributions
of my research to the local governance literature is the specification of
several institutional and socioeconomic conditions under which local
organizations are able to manage their environmental resources effectively.
This is the topic of a 2007 article
published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. Here,
my co-author and I employ time series data on forest conditions derived from
satellite imagery of Bolivian forests and interview data from local
municipalities. We show that varying forest conditions depend on the moderating
effects that local institutions have on the socioeconomic and biophysical
drivers of environmental change. We further find that the local institutional
performance affects unauthorized deforestation directly and indirectly in the
areas targeted by policy, but detect no effects on total deforestation rates
(Andersson and Gibson, 2007).
What this analysis shows is that
local government institutions form an important part of explanations of
environmental change. It also shows that local governments that perform well in
terms of their internal organization of forestry activities also enjoy healthier
forests. I propose that there are two conditions that must be fulfilled in order
for local governments to achieve a high level of performance in environmental
governance. First, local government leaders need to be motivated to invest their
scarce resources into the environmental sector, and second, they need to have
the means to acquire sufficient human and physical capital to be effective in
whatever actions they decide to undertake. The empirical testing and discussion
of these two theoretical propositions represent the bulk of my published work
during the past five years. Next, I report on some of the main results of this
effort.
What motivates local politicians to
invest in natural resource governance? Comparing local responses to policy
reforms in Bolivia and Guatemala, we argue in this article that successful
environmental governance at the local level hinges upon the incentives of local
politicians (Andersson et al, 2006). We test this argument by studying the
experiences of local forestry sector governance in Bolivia and Guatemala,
analyzing survey responses of 200 mayors. Building on earlier findings published
in Andersson, 2003 and Gibson et al, 2003, we show that local-level
institutional incentives are systematically linked to variations in local
politicians’ investment decisions in the forestry sector. Further, we find that
a decentralization policy that transfers very limited decision-making powers to
local governments stifles local interest in organizing resource governance
activities. These findings are consistent with later work by other scholars (Agrawal
and Chhatre, 2006; Larson and Ribot, 2007).
In subsequent work, I have taken the
analysis of institutional incentives in local governance one step further by
analyzing the question as to why local politicians would be interested in
participatory governance. Andersson and Laerhoven (2007) compare the effect of
institutional incentives for democratic deliberation in 390 rural municipalities
in Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Peru. The chapter tests and rejects the widely
accepted idea that more decentralized regimes would necessarily enjoy better
conditions for promoting participatory governance. We find that
decentralization alone is not enough to induce participatory resource governance
in local governments. A more powerful explanation to varying levels of
participatory governance is the combination of two sources of political
incentives: demands from local self-organized resource groups as well as central
government agencies on the local government.
However, even if local politicians
respond to these incentives by investing in local environmental governance and
in democratic institutions, such investments do not necessarily lead to better
environmental outcomes. To achieve sustainable outcomes is more complicated than
that. After a local administration has decided it will do something about
the environmental problems they face, their effectiveness will depend on what
they decide to do and how they actually carry out such activities. The
next set of articles explores this issue further.
Under what conditions is local
natural resource governance effective? In my most frequently cited
single-authored article to date (as of June, 2009 there were 47 citations in
other peer-reviewed journals) I argue that efforts to study subnational policy
outcomes would benefit from widening the unit of analysis from the most-commonly
used local government administration to the local governance system (Andersson,
2004). Many individual local governments, especially in developing countries,
lack the human and physical resources to be effective governors by themselves.
It is therefore useful to recognize the linkages between different governance
actors. The empirical analysis, based on observations in Bolivia’s forestry
sector, finds that the degree of connectivity between the actors in a municipal
governance system helps explain why some systems are more effective than others.
I have also tested this idea in a broader context in recent work, by comparing
the conditions for successful governance of local common goods and services
among local governments in Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Peru (Andersson, et al,
2009; Kauneckis and Andersson, 2009; Andersson, 2005, 2006).
One of contributions of this
research is that it shows the incredible subnational variation that exists for
environmental governance in many Latin American countries. And perhaps the most
controversial finding is that contrary to conventional wisdom in this
literature, I have shown that the availability of financial resources and
formally trained employees have very little to do with environmental
performance. The performance of local institutions is a far better predictor of
such performance.
My most acknowledged contribution to
the field of comparative development policy is probably my work on the
incentives of development aid. This work started out as a commissioned study for
the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) and eventually
resulted in a peer-reviewed book, published by Oxford University Press (2005).
The study analyzes the incentives structures that are often present in multi
and bilateral aid programs.
In this work, my co-authors and I
identify two fundamental reasons why simply channeling more resources to
developing countries is ineffective for relieving their plight: incentives and
information. Even when aid is conducted bilaterally, development aid confronts a
very intricate and complicated web of divergent actor interests. For instance,
any development aid process will inevitably involve the separate, often
contradictory interests of citizens in the donor country, from whom the
resources for foreign aid are extracted. Add to these, the interests of
aid-savvy contractors, recipient government, local interest groups, varying
degrees of organized citizenry (who are often the claimed beneficiaries of the
aid) and it is easy to see the challenge of making aid work in the “common”
interest. The real complications begin, however, when the actors with these
diverging interests start to interact with each other and seek to use the aid
programs to further their individual agendas. Unfortunately, such strategic and
opportunistic behavior is not rare for any of the actors involved in the often
tangled relationships within aid programs.
The Samaritan’s Dilemma has received
enthusiastic reviews in five peer-reviewed journals. One reviewer had the
following to say about the book:
”Free copies of The Samaritan’s
Dilemma should be sent to U2’s Bono, Jeffrey Sachs, and all others who take
the “gobs-of-cash-will-do-you” approach to curing world poverty. As an
increasing portion of the development community now recognizes, sending oodles
of money to poor countries does not make them rich and may even make them
poorer. This important book explains why. The authors’ discussion is clear,
straightforward, and easy to understand, even for Bono (Leeson, 2008).
While this synthesis of findings has
attempted to convey a sense of some of the main results from my research
program, it is far from a complete review of my work. To get a more
comprehensive notion of my research and its potential contributions, it is
necessary to read some of the publications referred to in this summary. As of
June, 2009, my research had been published in four peer-reviewed books, 20
peer-reviewed articles and seven book chapters, as well as in seven commissioned
policy studies (for details, please see enclosed CV). My first four years at CU
have been extremely stimulating and productive for my research and teaching, and
I look forward to the opportunity to take my research to new levels of
achievement. The next section describes some of my plans for future research.
POTENTIAL
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
In the near
future I will seek to address what I believe to be two related limitations to
the current scholarship on the local governance of natural resources: a dearth
of studies that employ rigorous methods of analysis, and limited availability of
appropriate data for more sophisticated analysis. My future research seeks to
address these limitations through five new collaborative research projects that
combine new data collection efforts with the exploration of new methods of
analysis. To do so I have teamed up with scholars who are experts in social
network analysis, dynamic systems modeling, and remote sensing analysis to carry
out collaborative research.
All five projects include the
collection of new data that lend themselves to longitudinal and more dynamic
analyses of local governance. Two projects focus on collection and analysis of
longitudinal data on local governments’ governance arrangements for forests in
Bolivia, Guatemala, India, Peru, and Uganda, and have already been funded by the
National Science Foundation (NSF). A third project, which employs comparative
qualitative analysis of local communities under variable policy and tenure
regimes in four countries, has been funded by the US Agency for International
Development (USAID). Harvard University’s Center for International Development
funded a one-year project (2007-2008) to study the use of biophysical indicators
in comparative policy studies. Following my initial exploration of this topic
during my one-year stay at CID, I am currently collaborating with another CID
fellow, Adam Henry, to use social network analysis to test some of the ideas of
polycentric governance of natural resources, using longitudinal institutional
and environmental variables for three Latin American countries.
Finally, and together with
colleagues at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in
Vienna, Austria, the University of Michigan, and Indiana University, I am
currently in the process of applying for a new NSF grant to study the
Effectiveness of Social Learning Strategies in Coupled Natural-Human Systems.
This last project is a proposal for a four-year project, for which the
University of Colorado will be the lead research university, and it is an effort
to combine institutional analysis of community organization, household survey
research, dynamic systems modeling, and field experiments in our research on
local environmental governance. The proposal will be submitted through OCG at CU
in November of 2009.
BROADER
RELEVANCE
It is estimated
that there are about 1.6 billion people in the world today who live on less than
2 dollars a day and depend directly on forests for their daily subsistence
(World Bank, 2004). It is clear that sound use of these forests play a major
role in efforts trying to improve the livelihoods of this large group of people.
The problem is that much of the world’s forests grow in countries with weak
governance arrangements and unclear property rights systems. Ironically, many of
the people who rely on the forest the most for their survival often do not have
legal access to the resource (WRI, 2005). As a result they have little incentive
to invest in the long-term productivity of the forests they use. Most policy
analysts agree that major reforms are needed to improve the governance of these
forests to the benefit of current and future forest users, but surprisingly
little scientific knowledge exists about the types of policies and governance
arrangements that are likely to work best in specific national and local
contexts. The purpose of my research is to contribute to increased knowledge in
this area.
REFERENCES
CITED
Agrawal A.and Chattre, A. 2006.
Explaining Success on the Commons: Community forest governance in the Indian
Himalayas. World Development (34(1):149-166.
Agrawal, A. 2005.
Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects.
Durham, N.C. Duke University Press.
Andersson, K. 2006. Understanding
Decentralized Forest Governance: An Application of the Institutional Analysis
and Development Framework. Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy
2(1):25–35.
Andersson, K. 2004. Who Talks With
Whom? The Role of Repeated Interactions in Decentralized Forest Governance.
World Development Vol 32(2): 233-249.
Andersson, K. 2003. What
Motivates Municipal Governments? Uncovering the Institutional Incentives for
Municipal Governance of Forest Resources in Bolivia.
Journal of Environment and Development
12(1):5-27
Andersson, K. 2005.
¿Cómo Hacer Funcionar la Gestión Forestal Municipal? Lecciones de Bolivia.
La Paz, Bolivia: Plural Editores.
Andersson, K. and Ostrom, E. 2008.
Analyzing Decentralized Natural Resource Governance from a Polycentric
Perspective. Policy Sciences 41(1):1-23.
Andersson, K. Gordillo, G. and van
Laerhoven, F. 2008. Local Governments and Rural Development: Comparing
Lessons from Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Peru. Tucson, AZ: U of Arizona
Press.
Andersson, K. and Gibson, C. 2007.
Decentralized Governance and Environmental Change: Local Institutional
Moderation of Deforestation in Bolivia. Journal of Policy Analysis and
Management 26(1): 99-123
Andersson, K. Gibson, C. and Lehoucq,
F. 2006. Municipal Politics and Forest Governance: Comparative Analysis of
Decentralization in Bolivia and Guatemala. World Development 34(3):
576-595.
Baland, J.-M., and Platteau, J.-P.
1996. Halting Degradation of Natural Resources: Is There a Role for Rural
Communities? Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.
Bates, R. H. 1998. Institutions as
Investments. In S. B. a. M. Paldham (Ed.), The Political Dimension of
Economic Growth. New York: MacMillan.
Gibson, C. McKean, M. A., and
Ostrom, E. (Eds.). 2000. People and Forests: Communities, Institutions, and
Governance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gibson, C., and Lehoucq, F. 2003.
The Loc al Politics of Decentralized Environmental Policy in Guatemala.
Journal of Environment and Development, 12(1), 28-49.
Hooghe, L., & Marks, G. 2003.
Unraveling the Central State, but How? Types of Multi-level Governance.
American Political Science Review, 97 (2), 233-43.
Kauneckis, D. and Andersson, K.
2009. Making Decentralization Work: A Cross-National Examination of Local
Governments. Stud Comp. International Dev 44(1): 23-46.
Knight, J. 1992. Institutions and
Social Conflict. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Larson, A. and Ribot, J. 2007. The
Poverty of Forestry Policy: Double Standards on an uneven playing field.
Sustainability Science 2 (2): 189-204
Leeson, P.P. 2008. Book Review: The
Samaritan’s Dilemma. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 66:
437–444.
North, D. 1990. Institutions,
Institutional Change and Economic Development. New York, NY: Cambridge
University Press.
Ostrom, E. 2005. Understanding
Institutional Diversity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Ostrom, E. 1990. Governing the
commons: the evolution of institutions for collective action. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Putnam, Robert D. 1994. Making
Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
World Bank 2004. Sustaining Forests:
A development strategy. Washington D.C.: The World Bank.
World Resources Institute 2005. The
Wealth of the Poor-Managing Ecosystems to Fight Poverty. United Nations
Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme, World Bank, World
Resources Institute, Washington DC.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|