Allain J. Barnett

Weak feedbacks, governance mismatches, and the robustness of social-ecological systems: an analysis of the Southwest Nova Scotia lobster fishery with comparison to Maine

The insights in Governing the Commons have provided foundational ideas for commons research in the past 23 years. However, the cases that Elinor Ostrom analyzed have been exposed to new social, economic, and ecological disturbances. What has happened to these cases since the 1980s? We reevaluated one of Ostroms case studies, the lobster and groundfishery of Port Lameron, Southwest Nova Scotia (SWNS). Ostrom suggested that the self-governance of this fishery was fragile because the government did not recognize the rights of resource users to organize their own rules. In the Maine lobster fishery, however, the government formalized customary rules and decentralized power to fishing ports. We applied the concepts of feedback, governance mismatches, and the robustness of social-ecological systems to understand the pathway of institutional change in Port Lameron. We revisited the case of Port Lameron using marine harvesters accounts collected from participant observation, informal interviews and surveys, and literature on fisheries policy and ecology in SWNS and Maine. We found that the governments failure to recognize the customary rights of harvesters to organize has weakened feedback between the operational level, where resource users interact with the resource, and the collective-choice level, where agents develop rules to influence the behavior of resource users. This has precipitated governance mismatches, which have led harvesters to believe that the decision-making process is detrimental to their livelihoods. Thus, harvesters rarely participate in decision making and resist regulatory change. In Maine, harvesters can influence decisions through participation, but there is a trade-off. With higher influence in decisions, captains have co-opted the decision-making process. Nevertheless, we suggest that the fisheries of SWNS are more vulnerable to social-ecological change because of weaker feedbacks than in Maine. Finally, we have discussed the potential benefits of polycentricity to both fisheries.

Household bottled water consumption in Phoenix: a lifestyle choice

The demand for bottled water has grown tremendously in recent years, together with concern about its environmental impacts. The authors surveyed individuals in Phoenix, Arizona about their water consumption behaviour, socio-demographic characteristics, perception of water quality and trust in the governments willingness to respond to water quality issues. Using a logit model, the authors then tested the relationship between the respondents characteristics and bottled water consumption for cooking and drinking in the home. Our results indicate that bottled water consumption reflects lifestyle choice not environmental concerns.

Actions towards the joint production of knowledge: the risk of salmon aquaculture on American Lobster

Abstract Joint production of knowledge (JPK) is said to facilitate proactive mitigation of risks in marine resource management. However, lack of consensus on who should be involved, when it is happening and the exact mechanisms of sharing knowledge has precluded the development of an effective implementation framework. Here, we explore one approach to building a post-normal science, one that both includes local ecological knowledge and bridges scientific silos. We first identify several actions of knowledge production and then provide an Atlantic Canadian case study, drawn from an assessment of the impact of aquaculture on American lobster, to illustrate necessary actions on the road to JPK. Key actions include theorizing relationships, agreeing on key concepts, specifying, and interpreting required data, identifying principles and making evaluations. We fill a lacuna in the JPK literature by: first, defining knowledge as the result of a set of actions; second, using knowledge generating actions to explore how different knowledge sets come together to contribute to JPK; and third, identifying how knowledge actions can facilitate or inhibit JPK. We conclude that this list of the essential actions of knowledge production is necessary to the successful development of alternative approaches to risk.

What Scientists Say about the Changing Risk Calculation in the Marine Environment under the Harper Government of Canada (2006-2015)

This paper examines how the Harper Government of Canada (2006-2015) shut down both debate about threats and research into environmental risk, a strategy that Canadian scientists characterized as the “death of evidence.” Based on interviews with scientists who research risks to the marine environment, we explore the shifting relationship between science and the Canadian government by tracing the change in the mode of risk calculation supported by the Harper administration and the impact of this change. Five themes emerged from the interviews: erosion of science research capacity, resulting limitations in understanding risk, declining influence on policy and regulation, redirection of public science funds to support the private sector, and the need to broaden the science knowledge base. The Canadian death of evidence controversy represents a challenge to science and technology studies (STS) scholars who wish to maintain a critical and reflexive perspective on the scientific enterprise without supporting attacks on evidence. While subsequent Canadian governments may simply return science to an unreflexively privileged knowledge status, we view this as equally damaging to broad risk calculation and democratic science. We suggest instead that a broader gathering of matters of concern will always be essential to risk assessment.

Supplementary Material for Challenges and opportunities in coding the Commons: problems procedures, and potential solutions in large-N comparative case studies

On-going efforts to understand the dynamics of coupled socialecological systems and common pool resources have led to the generation of numerous datasets based on a large number of case studies. This data has facilitated the identification of important factors and fundamental principles thereby increasing our understanding of such complex systems. However, the data at our disposal are often not easily comparable, have limited scope and scale, and are based on disparate underlying frameworks which inhibit synthesis, metaanalysis, and the validation of findings. Research efforts are further hampered when case inclusion criteria, variable definitions, coding schema, and intercoder reliability testing are not made explicit in the presentation of research and shared among the research community. This paper first outlines challenges experienced by researchers engaged in a large-scale coding project; highlights valuable lessons learned; and finally discusses opportunities for future comparative case study analyses of social-ecological systems and common pool resources.