Assessing Action Situation Networks: A Configurational Perspective on Water and Energy Governance in Irrigation Systems

Abstract

The action situation is a core component of actor-centered institutional analysis of natural resource governance. Institutional analysis frameworks have been extended to observe multiple situations structured into networks. If further operationalized, this extension can improve policy diagnosis of human–environmental interactions. This paper proposes two complementary ways to move in that direction. First, we propose the use of qualitative configurational analysis and game theory to study the interactions between situations and assess the contribution of each to a desired outcome. Second, we draw on centrality measures to assess the benefits and risks of implementing policies that aim to change the equilibria in action situations. Both analytical strategies are applied to two cases involving irrigation and energy governance. In the Spanish case, centrality of the water allocation situation justifies a configuration of drought measures that also tackle cooperation in monitoring and infrastructure maintenance. In the Indian case, groundwater governance and adequate infrastructure capacity provision are necessary preconditions to enable coordinated technology adoption, which facilitates incentives for regulated irrigation. In both the cases, some action situations’ positive outcomes are necessary in every configuration to guarantee optimal equilibria in the network. In the context of energy-fed irrigation systems, the proposed analytical strategies permit integrating interactions between water use, energy use and food production decisions in policy diagnoses. The analysis can be extended to identify archetypes, network closure, as well as structural and functional connectivity of networks in social-ecological systems.

Reservoir Governance in World's Water Towers Needs to Anticipate Multi‐purpose Use

“…material and resource flows) (Kimmich, 2013). The analysis of NAS has gained growing interest in recent years (Kimmich et al, 2020;Kimmich & Villamayor Tomas, 2019;Lubell, 2013;McGinnis, 2011b;Villamayor-Tomas et al, 2015). We used the NAS approach rooted in the IAD This article is protected by copyright.…”

Design and quality criteria for archetype analysis

“…To assess the internal validity of a whole suite, the validity of the classification of the components of cases needs to be demonstrated in conformity with methodological standards, e.g., distance measures to assess whether a case belongs to a cluster (Kaufman and Rousseeuw 1990), or the closure criterion in formal concept analysis (Ganter et al 2005;Wang et al 2019), or deductively, or by standards of qualitative methods. In metastudies, the common vocabulary of attributes should be subject to intercoder reliability checks, and the obtained archetypes can be revalidated using primary studies (Oberlack andEisenack 2018, Kimmich andVillamayor-Tomás 2018). In frequency-based meta-analyses, justified thresholds for the minimum number of cases in which an archetype should hold are recommended to be proportional to the size of the case sample (e.g., two cases in Oberlack and Eisenack 2018; A. Gotgelf, M. Roggero, and K. Eisenack, unpublished manuscript).…”

Polycentric governance in telecoupled resource systems

“…particular actors on particular governance issues generating particular outcomes (Lubell 2013). For example, Kimmich and Villamayor-Tomás (2018) show how interactions in a set of linked prisoner dilemma and coordination situations cause differential performance in irrigation systems in India and Spain. Boundaries within an NAS depend on the research purpose, in particular on the outcomes of interest, for which the NAS is developed as an explanation, and on the influence of action situations on the outcome of interest (Kimmich 2013).…”