Abstract:Since 2005, there has been considerable international interest in Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+), a program intended to finance protection of tropical forests through the sale of carbon offsets or from donor funding. Requiring the collaboration of local and international civil society stakeholders, firms, and donor and host governments, REDD+ is inherently a mutli-level governance project, but to date participation in REDD+ and coordination across governmental levels has been weak. Combining literature on multi-level and polycentric governance of socioecological systems with transaction-cost economics, we argue that transaction costs structure cross-level information-sharing and collaboration relationships among organizations engaged in REDD+ policy development at the national and provincial levels in Indonesia. Using an exponential random graph modelling approach with data collected from interviews with over 80 organizations between 2010 and 2012, we find that powerful organizations tend to dominate cross-level connections, through this effect is somewhat mediated by organizational similarity, which reduces transaction costs. We suggest that explicit efforts to help local organizations overcome the transaction costs of building cross-level relationships will be a central component of building an effective and equitable multilevel governance system for REDD+ in Indonesia.

ABSTRACT. Students of social-ecological systems have emphasized the need for effective cross-scale governance. We theorized that discursive barriers, particularly between technical and traditional practices, can act as a barrier to cross-scale collaboration. We analyzed the effects of discursive divides on collaboration on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) policy development in Central Kalimantan, an Indonesian province on the island of Borneo selected in 2010 to pilot subnational REDD+ policy. We argue that the complexities of bridging local land management practices and technical approaches to greenhouse gas emissions reduction and carbon offsetting create barriers to cross-scale collaboration. We tested these hypotheses using an exponential random graph model of collaboration among 36 organizations active in REDD+ policy in the province. We found that discursive divides were associated with a decreased probability of collaboration between organizations and that organizations headquartered outside the province were less likely to collaborate with organizations headquartered in the province. We conclude that bridging discursive communities presents a chicken-and-egg problem for cross-scale governance of social-ecological systems. In precisely the situations where it is most important, when bridging transnational standards with local knowledge and land management practices, it is the most difficult.

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