Precursors to Governance

In the Webster lab we study the precursors to governance, or the processes that social-ecological systems have to go through before people can effectively design and implement environmental institutions (rules, norms, laws, policies, etc.). Scholars like Elinor Ostrom and Oran Young have long pointed out that, to be effective, environmental institutions must be designed to fit a given social-ecological context. However, there are often barriers to effective environmental governance, like the panacea mindset, which allows decision makers to believe that a simple policy can solve complex environmental problems across a wide variety of contexts in spite of considerable evidence to the contrary. Like most of the barriers we study, the panacea mindset is a combination of psychological, socioeconomic, and political factors that reinforce each other, making change difficult. Nevertheless, we note that these barriers are lowered or raised at different points in history and so we take historical analysis as starting point for our research on precursors to governance. We also work with colleagues who use computational modeling and quantitative analysis to understand the dynamic processes that can lead to change in response to different types of environmental issues.

The Senate and the Forum in Rome. For better or worse, laws and norms created here still influence environmental governance around the world.

In our current projects and publications, you can read about precursors to governance in fisheries, mining, oil production, nutrient pollution, climate change, and public health. From this research, we’ve drawn three key conclusions:

1. Institutional design cannot be ahistorical. In other words, it is not sufficient to design institutions to fit the current context, we must also understand how the system evolved and differentiate among contexts that may appear similar now but whose antecedents could have major implications for the effectiveness of environmental governance.
2. Shifting to or maintaining effective precursors to governance is a difficult but necessary compliment to institutional design. Most practitioners already realize this and it is recognized implicitly in policy prescriptions such as co-management or adaptive management. Nevertheless, most only focus on shifting some of the precursors to governance (i.e., building trust, increasing political will) and do not address precursors systematically.
3. Synergies among environmental and other social issues are most likely to break down barriers to effective governance and so research on environmental governance needs to encompass these cross-issue linkages. Most important, we need to improve our understanding of how movements for social justice can be an important precursor for environmental governance and vice versa.

What are these precursors exactly? 

If you’ve scrolled this far, you’re probably wondering what exactly are “precursors to governance”. Wilson et al. (2007) use the term to describe how resource users develop institutions for collective action only after learning through experience both with the resource that they utilize and with the costs of conflict over that resource. We extend the definition of precursors to governance to encompass a variety of social processes including learning, norm diffusion, information cascades, social organizations, innovation, entrepreneurship, and the more formal processes of legislation and regulation. As such, we draw on a wide array of literatures to understand how these processes affect societies’ willingness and ability to effectively govern a given environmental issue. Though our work is wide ranging, we focus on how these precursors alter two constructs which bridge theories on the importance of ideas, interests, and institutions in the social sciences: power disconnects and problem narratives (more below).

Most of Dr. Webster’s early research focused on experience with the costs of resource exploitation as an important precursor to governance. In particular, she showed that increasing competition over a dwindling natural resource can make regulation more attractive to fishermen who are vulnerable to competition. When these vulnerable fishermen are politically powerful domestically or internationally, their preference for limiting access can lead to more effective regulation. Without that competitive pressure fishers tend to be unwilling to accept regulation and so even well-designed rules may fail due to the difficulties of enforcing laws that are not accepted by the regulated population.

Webster (2015) explores how changing power disconnects shaped the evolution of fisheries governance globally.

In subsequent work, Dr. Webster generalized these insights, explaining how narrowing power disconnects is an important precursor to governance for fisheries and other environmental issues. Power disconnects occur when the people who have understanding and incentives to address an environmental problem lack the resources to do so, or vice versa. When power disconnects are wide, effective governance is unlikely even if it would benefit large portions of a population. Power disconnects are not the same as power asymmetries. For instance, in the fisheries examples described above power asymmetries were similar across cases but in some fisheries powerful fishermen were vulnerable to economic risks and so had incentives to prefer more effective (and exclusionary) governance. Thus, power disconnects can be narrowed either through changes in the distribution of power OR changes in the distribution of risk. However, the former is preferable for multiple reasons, including the fact that resource-rich people are good at finding ways to insulate themselves from environmental harm without actually solving environmental problems.

More recently, Dr. Webster has been working with students and colleagues to incorporate more insights from social psychology, sociology, and political ecology into her work on precursors to governance. Much of this effort is focused on understanding how changing problem narratives affect environmental governance. A problem narrative can be defined as story or rendering that people refer to when trying to understand an environmental problem, including relevant framing, perceptions of risk, mapping of causal pathways, and assignment of responsibility or blame. It is, essentially, how people make sense of an issue and may be individual or shared via networks and norm diffusion. Fishermen often have a deep understanding of the fisheries they exploit but their problem narratives also include ideas about who should have the rights to access fisheries, who is responsible for overfishing, and (therefore) who should have to pay any costs to combat overfishing.

Problem narratives and power disconnects interact in complex ways. People’s understanding of a problem is often shaped by their incentives and resources and vice versa. When problem narratives change in ways that help to narrow power disconnects, the result is a positive shift in precursors to governance which makes more effective regulation more likely. However, entrenched problem narratives that reinforce wide power disconnects prevent or undermine good governance. What we see in our work on oil production and public health is that experience with a single environmental issue is not sufficient to shift the precursors to governance when power disconnects are entrenched. Rather, inequitable systems create multiple problems that increase in frequency and duration, ultimately mobilizing enough people with enough resources to address fundamental power disconnects and promote new, more equitable, and more effective problem narratives. Such multi-pronged surges do not always lead to improvements in environmental governance, but they do open windows of opportunity for change.

This photo shows how beautiful nature can be, but it also hides a lot. If you were there in person, you’d see (and hear) the highway that is just out of frame to the left and the massive power lines off to the right. You’d also be close enough to realize that what looks like a black rock in the foreground is really a submerged tire and that it’s not just reflections turning the water green near the far bank. There’s an obvious analogy to environmental policy here–looks good on paper, but not in practice–but a more nuanced perspective is to accept that there is no perfect policy. Like ecosystems, governance systems are always changing. Sometimes they change for the better, sometimes for the worse. Systematically exploring the precursors to governance helps us understand how and why these changes occur and may point to new leverage points for improving environmental governance. Ompompanoosuc River, Vermont (c) D.G. Webster 2021.