Multi-level governance for large marine commons: Politics and polycentricity in Palau's protected area network

By Rebecca L. Gruby, X. Basurto. 2013

195 citations recorded by the source corpus.

a b s t r a c t This paper brings together institutional theories of polycentricity and critical human geography theory on scalar politics to advance understanding of the form and function of nested, polycentric regimes for the governance of large-scale common pool resources. We focus on institutional changes associated with a national marine protected area network in Palau through which national government and NGOs gain influence in local decisionmaking processes. Influence is gained through an attempt to scale up common-pool resource governance to an ecologically-relevant spatial scale in an effort to protect coral reef resilience and biodiversity across Palau. An institutional approach informed by scalar politics brings into focus potential tradeoffs between organizing governance reform around ecologically versus institutionally relevant scales. Our analysis suggests that prioritization of ecologically-relevant scales in institutional reform resulted in more nested but less polycentric institutional arrangements governing the network. We conclude that less distributed decision-making in the overall nested governance system could threaten the sustainability and resilience of coral reefs in the long-term by constraining institutional innovation and diversity. Results demonstrate the potential for interdisciplinary dialog to advance the research frontier on multi-level governance for large common pool resources.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ae7f6461ae5c0daef17aacf48aa5341893221851

How researchers see this paper

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In Ecology

1. Terry P. Hughes
2. D. Bellwood
3. M. Pratchett
4. Peter J. Mumby
5. Sean R. Connolly
6. K. Carpenter
7. Nicholas A. J. Graham
8. A. Hoey

In Global and Planetary Change

1. T. Morrison
2. Terry P. Hughes
3. María Carmen Lemos
4. W. Adger
5. D. Huitema
6. D. Bellwood
7. Peter J. Mumby
8. M. Pratchett

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

1. T. Morrison
2. W. Adger
3. G. Marshall

Citations in the corpus

• Mitigation and adaptation in polycentric systems: sources of power in the pursuit of collective goals (2017, background): “This capacity is also beneficial from a risk management perspective, because a ‘onesize-fits all’ approach may fail and this failure may well have critical adverse implications.(28,44) Third, because the effects of environmental variability and change are location-specific, a polycentric approach pe”