Suchergebnisse

Collaboration is commonly used to deliver public services that reach beyond the capacities of independent organizations. Much of the literature has been concerned with understanding the types of collaborative processes that are associated with successful collaboration. Yet, few scholars have studied how these design features unfold or evolve over time. We fill this gap through a study of a collaborative environmental management process—the South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Task Force—over a 10-year period. Using data coded from the Task Force's meeting minutes, we examine three key elements of successful collaborative processes in the literature, including internal governance and administration, internal communication, and external communication. To complement our coded data, we also rely on interviews with collaborative participants and contextual information from news media and secondary sources. From our 10-year analysis, we develop propositions about the evolution of collaborative processes, which can provide a foundation for theory development and testing in other cases.

In our study of climate change discourse in the Mekong River Commission (MRC) over the past decade, we find that climate change policy strategies are framed as science-based actions. Scale is largely expressed in terms of short-term, immediate temporal horizons that are human-dominated and regionally based. Further, we uncover a broadening of climate change discourse across multiple scales to incorporate justice, integrated water resource management (IWRM), development, and security frames. These patterns not only reflect trends in the larger global water governance and climate change discourse and reinforce historic patterns in the Mekong River Basin, but they also signal more strategic efforts by the MRC and member states to attract donor support. In our examination of links between discourse and MRC climate change action, we argue that the MRC's climate change actions narrowly reflect the production of studies and project scoping rather than real adaptive actions in the basin. We examine official documents of the MRC over the past decade to better understand how the discourse around climate change is framed and to what extent the discourse is linked to climate change actions.

In the past two decades, integrated water resources management (IWRM) has come to represent a dominant policy narrative in the field of water policy and governance. However, IWRM has come under strong criticism in recent years for what critics see as a poor record of implementation and heavy emphasis on technocratic solutions. We outline how the present debate around IWRM has become narrowly construed by focusing exclusively on IWRM as an analytical and prescriptive concept. We argue that this narrow conceptualization of IWRM, or the prescriptive epistemic form, which sets forth a set of guidelines for implementation in accordance with the logic of instrumentality, has in part resulted in a stalemate manifested in less research on the subject and scarcer attention of policy makers. To help advance beyond the stalemate, we propose two additional epistemic forms: discursive, as a point of reference for the discussion of power and values in water management and practical, or experiential and context-based understanding of water management. Recognizing this diversity of epistemic forms of IWRM to include the discursive and practical can create a shared space for multiple conflicting epistemologies and allow ways of knowing of non-expert stakeholders, thereby lessening the polarized nature of the discourse. Our typology of three epistemic forms-prescriptive, discursive and practical-offers public policy scholars a heuristic tool to approach policy concepts from multiple dimensions. Recognizing multiple epistemic forms requires new skills from policy workers and analysts, as well as institutional arrangements for articulating and translating across these forms. Adapted from the source document.

In public policy processes, collective learning among policy actors is important in shaping how these processes unfold and the types of policy outcomes that may result. Despite a widespread interest in learning by policy scholars, researchers face a number of conceptual and theoretical challenges in studying learning across different collective settings within policy processes. In this article, we offer a theoretically grounded approach to defining and understanding collective‐level learning. In defining learning, we first draw out the connection between learning processes and learning products, both cognitive and behavioral. In examining learning processes, we further explore the relationship between individual and collective learning. Then we identify and define the key characteristics of collective settings that will likely influence learning processes. We conclude by offering recommendations for policy scholars to apply this approach in studies of learning across diverse policy contexts.

The management of international rivers is increasingly marked by a heightened attention to and growth in institutions at the river-basin level to promote cooperation and resolve conflicts between states in a basin. Yet, little theoretical and empirical research exists to understand when these institutions are most effective. Here we draw from diverse literatures, including work on social and ecological systems, international institutions, common-pool resources, and international waters, to capture and integrate the design elements associated with effective collaborative management along an international river. We apply and test the validity of our model in a plausibility probe through the analysis of the conflict between Argentina and Uruguay over the construction of pulp mills along the Uruguay River, and the role of the established and functioning river basin organization—the Administrative Commission of the Uruguay River (CARU)—in this conflict. We re-examine our model based on our case findings to highlight the challenge and role of public input and representation in institutional effectiveness along international rivers.

In this article, we build a model that explores the conditions under which institutions are most likely to foster meaningful cooperation in the management of shared rivers. To do so, we draw from a diverse literature on social and ecological systems, international institutions, and common-pool resources to expose the expected relationships between a number of critical variables and cooperative solutions to conflicts in the management of shared waters. We provide an initial test of this model by analyzing the conflict that took place from 2003 to 2010 between Argentina and Uruguay over the construction of pulp mills along the Uruguay River, and assessing the role of the Administrative Commission of the Uruguay River in this conflict and its resolution. Adapted from the source document.