Christoph Oberlack

Diagnosing institutional barriers and opportunities for adaptation to climate change

Institutions are one of the decisive factors which enable, constrain and shape adaptation to the impacts of climate change, variability and extreme events. However, current understanding of institutions in adaptation situations is fragmented across the scientific community, evidence diverges, and cumulative learning beyond single studies is limited. This study adopts a diagnostic approach to elaborate a nuanced understanding of institutional barriers and opportunities in climate adaptation by means of a model-centred meta-analysis of 52 case studies of public climate adaptation in Europe. The first result is a novel taxonomy of institutional attributes in adaptation situations. It conceptually organises and decomposes the many details of institutions that empirical research has shown to shape climate adaptation. In the second step, the paper identifies archetypical patterns of institutional traps and trade-offs which hamper adaptation. Thirdly, corresponding opportunities are identified that enable actors to alleviate, prevent or overcome specific institutional traps or trade-offs. These results cast doubt on the validity of general institutional design principles for successful adaptation. In contrast to generic principles, the identified opportunities provide leverage to match institutions to specific governance problems that are encountered in specific contexts. Taken together, the results may contribute to more coherence and integration of adaptation research that we need if we are to foster learning about the role of institutions in adaptation situations in a cumulative fashion.

Polycentric governance in telecoupled resource systems

Recent advances in land system science and in institutional analysis provide complementary, but still largely disconnected perspectives on land use change, governance, and sustainability in social-ecological systems, which are interconnected across distance. In this paper we bring together the emerging concept of telecoupled land systems and the established concept of polycentric governance to support the analysis and the development of sustainable land governance in interconnected social-ecological systems. We operationalize the two concepts by analyzing networks of action situations in which interactions between proximate and distant actors as well as socioeconomic and ecological processes cause land use change and affect the sustainability of land systems. To illustrate this integrated approach empirically, we analyze a case of transnational biofuel investment in Sierra Leone. We identify the characteristics of, and activities in, networks of action situations that affect the sustainability of land systems related to this case. Integration of the two concepts of telecoupled land systems and polycentric governance enables analysts to identify interactions in polycentric governance systems (1) as drivers of telecoupled sustainability problems and (2) as transformative approaches to such problems. The method provides one way for linking place-based analysis of land change with process-based analysis of land governance.

Introduction to the special issue on adapting institutions to climate change

This article introduces the special issue on climate adaptation and institutions. Economic accounts of climate adaptation have stressed its collective action nature and the limitations of standard economic approaches to the matter. Governance accounts, on their part, have shown that adaptation does not always happen when it is expected. Against this background, institutional economics has the potential to shed light on those societal processes and collective mechanisms leading to and shaping adaptation (or the absence of it). The selection of articles contributing to this special issue shows that climate adaptation can indeed be explored successfully through institutional economics, and that doing so fits well within the institutional economics agenda. Some recommendations for future research are provided at the end.

Governance of food systems across scales in times of social-ecological change: a review of indicators

Governance of food systems is a poorly understood determinant of food security. Much scholarship on food systems governance is non-empirical, while existing empirical research is often case study-based and theoretically and methodologically incommensurable. This complicates aggregation of evidence and generalization. This paper presents a review of literature to identify a core set of methodological indicators to study food systems governance in future research. Indicators were identified from literature gathered through a structured consultation and sampling from recent systematic reviews and were classified according to governance levels and the food system activity domain they investigate. We found a concentration of indicators in food production at local to national levels and with less literature investigating how food governance affects food distribution and consumption. Many indicators of institutional structure were found, while indicators capturing social agency and indicators of cross-scale dynamics were moderately represented but critical perspectives on governance were lacking. These gaps present an opportunity for future empirical research to investigatexa0more comprehensively the diverse components of food systems and how governance arrangements at different scales affect them.

How national and local contexts shape the impacts of foreign investment in land: a comparative analysis from three African countries

Recent changes in the global agro–food–energy system – driven in part by consumption trends, climate change-mitigation agendas, and general economic forces – have sparked renewed interest in agricultural investment and a rush to acquire land. The broader socio-economic and ecological impacts of these land use changes are not always clear. Many assessments focus mainly on short-term locallevel effects, failing to link changes to the wider agrarian and socio-economic transformations that are underway. Against this backdrop, the objective of the Belmont Forum-supported AFGROLAND project is to analyze how large-scale investments in land and agriculture impact natural resources, rural livelihoods, food security, and public policies in African countries.

Archetypical barriers to adapting water governance in river basins to climate change

Can we explain barriers to adaptation of collective action to changes in the natural environment? One reason for adaptation is the impacts of climate change. Ample case study evidence shows that such adaptation is rarely a smooth process. However, generalisable patterns of how and why barriers arise remain scarce. The study adopts a collective action perspective and the archetypes approach in a meta-analysis of 26 selected publications to explain how barriers arise in specific conditions. Focusing on adaptation of water governance in river basins, the study finds 21 reappearing patterns. Less well-established patterns relate to water property rights, hydrological standards, adaptation externalities, non-climatological uncertainty and vertical coordination. Results further show how barriers impede collective action in specific ways. The paper precisely introduces the archetypes approach, and shows that reported problems in adapting collective action under climate change arise from attributes of actors and pre-existing institutions rather than biophysical characteristics.

Institutions for sustainable governance of forests: Equity, robustness and cross-level interactions in Mawlyngbna, Meghalaya, India

This study adopts Ostrom’s Social-Ecological Systems (SES) framework in empirical fieldwork to explain how local forestry institutions affect forest ecosystems and social equity in the community of Mawlyngbna in North-East India. Data was collected through 26 semi-structured interviews, participatory timeline development, policy documents, direct observation, periodicals, transect walks, and a concurrent forest-ecological study in the village. Results show that Mawlyngbnas forests provide important sources of livelihood benefits for the villagers. However, ecological disturbance and diversity varies among the different forest ownership types and forest-based livelihood benefits are inequitably distributed. Based on a bounded rationality approach, our analysis proposes a set of causal mechanisms that trace these observed social-ecological outcomes to the attributes of the resource system, resource units, actors and governance system. We analyse opportunities and constraints of interactions between the village, regional, and state levels. We discuss how Ostrom’s design principles for community-based resource governance inform the explanation of robustness but have a blind spot in explaining social equity. We report experiences made using the SES framework in empirical fieldwork. We conclude that mapping cross-level interactions in the SES framework needs conceptual refinement and that explaining social equity of forest governance needs theoretical advances.