Understanding the governance of sustainability pathways: hydraulic megaprojects, social–ecological traps, and power in networks of action situations

Abstract

To enable sustainability pathways, we need to understand how social–ecological systems (SES) respond to different governance configurations, considering their historical, institutional, political, and power conditions. We advance a robust methodological approach for the integrated analysis of those conditions in SES traps. Our advancement consists of a novel combination of the networks of action situations approach with an agency-based polycentric power typology and the concept of discursive power. We test the approach by building on previous research on the Doñana estuary–delta SES (Guadalquivir estuary), which is characterized by a rigidity trap in the context of ecosystem and water governance. Specifically, we focus on a recent hydraulic megaproject involving deep dredging in the Guadalquivir estuary, finally canceled due to its broad negative socioeconomic and environmental repercussions. According to our analysis, certain governance, institutional, and informational mechanisms currently prevent further SES degradation in Doñana. However, key governance actors are caught in a lasting coordination failure prone to mutual defection strategies owing to power dynamics and discursive-institutional inertia. Although seemingly stable due to counteractive mechanisms among actors, this situation is at continuous risk of being unbalanced by powerful actors promoting large SES interventions such as deep dredging. Such interventions bear the systemic risk of strong suppression of SES functions, and a regime shift to a lock-in trap. This overall undesirable situation might be escaped through transformative policy designs that take into account meso-level mechanisms, such as discursive power and its role in non-decision-making, pragmatic inaction, and inefficient investment and infrastructure.

Levers for transformative nature-based adaptation initiatives in the Alps

“…In other words, different local contexts can achieve transformative adaptation to one climatic hazard. These findings align with the latest interdisciplinary studies reporting the plurality of stakeholders and governance models involved in NbS implementation (47,(80)(81)(82). Although the NbS types identified from our cases do not discriminate governance models because the interview guideline did not target this aspect, we identified that transformative NbS implemented in multi-scale co-production are co-designed with a large range of stakeholders and are coordinated by one of them without necessarily more power (83,84).…”

Levers for transformative nature-based adaptation initiatives in the Alps

“…This suggests, in line with NbS global standards [106], that NbS interventions should focus on enabling the decision-making context expected to implement the most appropriate NbS for transformative adaptation rather than only focusing on what type of NbS should address a given climatic hazard. These findings align with the latest interdisciplinary studies reporting the plurality of stakeholders and governance models involved in NbS implementation [37,101,107,108]. The NbS types identified from the study cases do not discriminate governance models because the interview guide did not target this aspect.…”

Networks of action situations in social–ecological systems: current approaches and potential futures

“…They show how discourses in other provinces, respectively, the national government, shape discourses about local nonhuman actants. Finally, Méndez et. al.…”

“…The variety of mostly qualitative and mixed methods mainly generate data from interviews and document analysis, followed by survey and secondary data, clearly displaying the pluralist tradition of situation-centred research (Beckmann and Padmanabhan 2009;Poteete et al 2010). Two studies also employ gametheoretic models (Kasymov et al 2022;Méndez et al 2022), and one uses quantitative multilevel network analysis (Hedlund et al 2022). This conceptual network diversity is also in line with the pluralist approach to the ecology of games that currently exists and has been discussed in the review article in this special feature (Kimmich et al 2022), including qualitative approaches (Dutton et al 2012), quantitative network analyses (Mewhirter et al 2018;Berardo and Lubell 2019;Angst et al 2022), the game-theoretic strand of nested (Distefano and D'Alessandro 2021) and connected games (McGinnis 1986; Khachaturyan and Schoengold 2018; Venkateswaran and Gokhale 2019), and the analytic narrative approach (Bates et al 2000;Kimmich 2016), among others.…”

“…A case from Jordan identified an important role of ad hoc ASs founded on informal rules that sit in permanent NAS and reproduce traditional power relations that challenge sustainability in non-democratic systems (Oberhauser et al 2022). Likewise, the combination of an NAS approach with a polycentric and discursive view on power can uncover power relations that undermine sustainability-supporting formal arrangements and knowledge (Méndez et al 2022). The analysis of commoning also suggests that power can be insufficiently attended to, when only devising formal concepts that neglect power (Partelow and Manlosa 2022).…”