Mark Lubell is professor of environmental science and policy at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on cooperation and institutions in the context of environmental policy. He works on these issues mainly in the context of water management and agricultural decision making, using a mix of quantitative analysis, experiments, computational models, and qualitative approaches.Abstract: This article studies factors affecting how policy actors perceive the effectiveness of political institutions involved in complex water governance systems. The ecology of games framework argues that participants are more likely to perceive institutions as effective when the benefits of solving collective action problems outweigh the transaction costs of developing political contracts within these institutions. The authors hypothesize that transaction costs are a function of conflict, type of participation, political knowledge, scientific knowledge, and actor resources. Survey results suggest that the importance of these different sources of transaction costs varies across study sites in the Tampa Bay watershed in Florida, the Sacramento-San Joaquin River delta in California, and the Paraná River delta in Argentina. Based on the observed differences, some initial ideas are sketched about the evolution of complex governance systems from fairly simple and informal rules and networks to well-established tapestries of many formal institutions. Florida State University. He has published empirical analyses of regulatory and environmental agencies and laboratory studies of cooperative decisions to explore the responsiveness of agencies to changing political and policy environments and their ability to effectively enforce and implement policies.

Does increased militarization of law enforcement agencies (LEAs) lead to an increase in violent behavior among officers? We theorize that the receipt of military equipment increases multiple dimensions of LEA militarization (material, cultural, organizational, and operational) and that such increases lead to more violent behavior. The US Department of Defense 1033 program makes excess military equipment, including weapons and vehicles, available to local LEAs. The variation in the amount of transferred equipment allows us to probe the relationship between military transfers and police violence. We estimate a series of regressions that test the effect of 1033 transfers on three dependent variables meant to capture police violence: the number of civilian casualties; the change in the number of civilian casualties; and the number of dogs killed by police. We find a positive and statistically significant relationship between 1033 transfers and fatalities from officer-involved shootings across all models.

This article examines the relationship between institutional externalities and an actor's ability to achieve their goals in the decision‐making forums that exist in polycentric governance systems. We argue that an actor's performance is largely a function of the transaction costs associated with participation in a variety of forums. Institutional externalities—instances where the decisions made in one forum impact another forum—may increase or decrease transaction costs in linked forums, subsequently impacting actor performance. Using survey data collected from forum participants in the California Delta and Tampa Bay watershed governance systems, we examine how the strength of perceived externalities generated between linked forums affects an individual's perceived performance in the forum receiving the externality. We find that externalities are prevalent in both systems, but have varying effects on performance. Externalities, on average, negatively impact actor performance in the California Delta, but neither increase nor decrease performance in Tampa Bay. Further analyses reveal that in both systems, the effect of externalities on performance in the externality‐receiving forum is largely conditional on their performance in the externality‐generating forum. Externalities are negatively associated with forum performance when actors exhibit low levels of performance in the externality‐generating forum. The negative effect is mitigated when actors exhibit higher levels of performance in the externality‐generating forum.

Public policy generally emerges from interactions among actors embedded within complex governance systems, composed of multiple actors and forums (issue‐based arenas where stakeholders repeatedly interact to resolve collective action problems). Such systems allow actors multiple forums wherein they can influence policy decisions. But actors do not value the decisions made in each forum equally, and it remains unclear how actors allocate resources across forums. This article links actor strategy to their influence within the forums the actors identify as most important (their primary forum). There is theoretical ambiguity about how actors invest their limited resources across the forums that affect their interests to maximize primary forum influence. Do they concentrate all their effort within the primary forum or participate more broadly? To answer this question, we offer two competing theories. First, broad participation may allow actors to develop political capital necessary to influence other actors and thus influence primary forum policies. The second approach notes the opportunity costs of broad participation—actors have fewer resources to invest in their primary forum. An analysis of stakeholder participation in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta and Tampa Bay Watershed governance systems demonstrates that broader participation is associated with greater primary forum influence.

Natural resources are governed by polycentric systems, which can be conceptualized as an “ecology of games” in which policy actors participate in multiple policy forums governing interdependent issues. This article analyzes why actors perceive different payoffs across the forums in which they participate, ranging from mutually beneficial games of cooperation to conflictual zero‐sum games in which one actor's gain means another actor's loss. The authors develop hypotheses at the level of the individual, the forum, and the overall polycentric system and test them using survey data collected in three research sites: Tampa Bay, Florida; the Paraná River delta, Argentina; and the Sacramento–San Joaquin River delta, California. The empirical findings suggest that levels of conflict in policy forums are higher when the actors who participate in them are concerned with hot‐button issues, when the forums have large and diverse memberships, and in systems with a long history of conflict. The results shed new light on the drivers of conflict and cooperation in complex governance systems and suggest ways to manage conflict.