The Political Economy of Cross-Scale Networks in Resource Co- Management

By W. Adger, K. Brown, E. Tompkins. 2005

523 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate linkages between stakeholders in resource management that occur at different spatial and institutional levels and identify the winners and losers in such interactions. So-called cross- scale interactions emerge because of the benefits to individual stakeholder groups in undertaking them or the high costs of not undertaking them. Hence there are uneven gains from cross-scale interactions that are themselves an integral part of social-ecological system governance. The political economy framework outlined here suggests that the determinants of the emergence of cross-scale interactions are the exercise of relative power between stakeholders and their costs of accessing and creating linkages. Cross-scale interactions by powerful stakeholders have the potential to undermine trust in resource management arrangements. If government regulators, for example, mobilize information and resources from cross-level interactions to reinforce their authority, this often disempowers other stakeholders such as resource users. Offsetting such impacts, some cross-scale interactions can be empowering for local level user groups in creating social and political capital. These issues are illustrated with observations on resource management in a marine protected area in Tobago in the Caribbean. The case study demonstrates that the structure of the cross-scale interplay, in terms of relative winners and losers, determines its contribution to the resilience of social-ecological systems.

Subfields: Ecology, Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b425da2667a7cec7261820a6ec61bd90fc871506

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

In Economics and Econometrics

In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

Polycentric Systems of Governance: A Theoretical Model for the Commons (2019, background): “Ensuring that actors in a cross-scale linkage have adequate resources to enable their participation, however, is an important consideration (see Adger et al, 2005).”
Understanding the relationships between ecosystem services and poverty alleviation: A conceptual framework (2014, unknown): “Scholars highlight the importance of cross-scale dynamics (Adger et al., 2006, Cash et al., 2006, Romero and Agrawal, 2011), and the framework supports analysis of these.”
Companion Modelling: A Participatory Approach to Support Sustainable Development (2010, background): “In the analysis of governance systems, it is now largely accepted that scales are social and political constructs (Adger et al. 2005; Lebel et al. 2006; Meadowcroft 2002).”
A framework to diagnose barriers to climate change adaptation (2010, background): “such cross-level relationships may result in barriers in the Planning and Management phases (36, 40).”
Exploring Social Resilience in Madagascar’s Marine Protected Areas (2009, background): “…previous research that identified broad clusters of factors necessary for building social resilience at a range of scales, including the individual (Marshall and Marshall 2007), household (Adger and Vincent 2005), community (Adger 2000, Berkes and Seixas 2006), and nation (Adger and Vincent 2005).”
Multi-level governance for large marine commons: Politics and polycentricity in Palau's protected area network (2013, background): “In less polycentric systems, for example, nested enterprises may engender partial or complete dominance of local groups by government regulators or other powerful actors (Adger et al., 2005; Marshall, 2008; Young, 2006).”