16 A Protocol for Practice
Key Concepts
In this chapter, we will:
- Provide a number of examples how to use the lessons learned into practice
- Discuss how to avoid blueprint thinking and stimulate diagnostic inquiry.
16.1 Introduction
There is no simple solution to the many challenges we face to transition towards a sustainable future. There is no silver bullet, a blueprint or a magic pill. The reality is that it will be a struggle, like governance has always been a struggle. We have to try new solutions and initiatives. Some may succeed, and many will fail.
What can we do? How can we be prepared? We can learn from various other domains of expertise that cope with difficult problems. Let’s have a look at medicine. Physicians are trained to have a protocol of systematic testing to diagnose a health problem: what is the most common disease, what is the most severe disease possible with those symptoms. A good physician will not give you a standard pill based on ideology but will do a series of tests. Based on those tests certain diseases will be eliminated, and at a certain point a diagnosis is made. The physician might not be sure, but based on their experience may have confidence on how best to treat the patient. The physician informs the patient about the diagnosis and the patient can consent to the treatment. The patient can ask for a second opinion and may get different advice with another physician. When symptoms disappear and it seems that the patient has recovered, we do not go back to verify it was a correct diagnosis, and the patient was properly treated.
For governance we need to improve our diagnostic capacity and a proper diagnosis should lead to proposed interventions, not ideology. In this chapter we will provide some approaches that could help with the diagnosis of the problem, and the crafting of solutions. The selection of approaches is based on the insights from the material we have presented in this book:
- Humans are cooperative beings who tend to cooperate with people they trust.
- Humans have a long history of living in small communities.
- Communities are able to create effective institutional arrangements that are aligned with the social and biophysical context.
- But it is not the institutional arrangements themselves that make those rules effective. It is because people have been involved in the crafting of those rules themselves, accept the process and implement monitoring and enforcement.
- In a globalizing world, those small scale community findings can partly be scaled up. Key is to nurture participatory processes.
16.2 Participatory approaches
Workshops with stakeholders
When working with stakeholders within a community on a governance challenge of a coupled infrastructure system, one could organize meetings with the stakeholders. Those meetings have different formats. It would be helpful to first scope the action situation of the governance challenge and try to identify the relevant stakeholders from policy documents or by meeting relevant stakeholders individually and try to understand the action situation.
Try to understand the incentive structures facing the different stakeholders. It is natural to focus on one or a few stakeholders, perhaps the one most in line with your desired outcomes, but that will not be helpful for the process. There are likely good reasons why some stakeholders make decisions that are harmful for other stakeholders, and if you want to help to improve the governance solution, you need to understand the logic for the various actors in the action situations.
Some stakeholders might not be very organized via (elected) representatives. In these circumstances you may organize focus group discussions with a number of community members from the same stakeholder group. This may help to understand the diversity of perspectives within the same stakeholder group. Perhaps not all residents in a neighborhood experience the same water availability challenges, or have different information about a campaign the government has rolled out.
If you organize workshops for a diverse set of stakeholders, you may use a professional mediator. At least make sure that there is someone who can keep the meeting on schedule, and moderate potential conflicts between stakeholders. Organize activities, like ice breaker questions, that enable people to socialize. Later in this chapter we discuss activities like scenario planning, game play and model exploration. Workshops are themselves action situations about which there is much research on factors that lead to more effective collaboration and more effective deliberative processes.
It is not unusual if some stakeholder groups do not show up. This could be done for strategic reasons (they could dismiss the outcomes of the workshops since they were not present). You could follow up with those stakeholder groups by individual meetings, to debrief about what happened during the workshops.
How to use design principles
Ostrom proposed a list of design principles, qualitative patterns typically seen in long-term successful communities managing shared resources and shared infrastructures. Ostrom regretted later that she used the term “design principles” instead of “hypotheses”. The reason for this is that many organizations have been using the design principles as a blueprint for what institutional arrangements need to be implemented or a checklist that needs to be followed to ensure good governance. This is an incorrect approach to using insights on the design principles. In fact, going back to case study analysis, we find that there are case studies that are coded to be successful without having met all design principles (Baggio et al., 2016; Barnett et al., 2016). This is possible because of the social and biophysical context that make some design principles irrelevant (for example, isolated resources which have natural protection from costly access).
So how should we use the design principles? In chapter 6 we already discussed a number of questions that could be asked by the community based on the design principles. This will help to get a better understanding of the relevant action situations they participate in. Asking communities to address these questions will help identify underlying processes and diagnose the collective action problem.
Scenario development
One activity that could be done in a stakeholder workshop setting is scenario development. What are 3 to 5 possible scenarios of the future of the coupled infrastructure system of interest? What is a scenario where the future is a continuation of the past, and what is an alternative pathway to very different outcomes? To be productive, the workshop participants should explore what those scenarios mean or imply for the different stakeholders. Who are the winners and losers? What bottlenecks do these scenarios need to overcome? Scenarios are not predictions. The goal is not to be correct, but to explore alternative futures which may reveal potential conflicts between stakeholders or new opportunities no one had thought of before.
To prepare for a scenario development exercise, it is helpful to have historical trends of the past available in a visually engaging way. This may help identify the boundaries of expected and potential changes. Participants may develop better insight into the conflicts and alignments of activities they do or desire. Closing coal plants is a good idea to reduce CO2 emissions, but what future is there for those people in those coal plant industries? A reduction of biodiversity may seem a distant problem, but how will one cope with a lack of pollinators impacting agricultural production?
Using games
Games are commonly used as an activity to provide an active learning environment to understand complex concepts. Games can be individual or with multiple players. Since we focus on workshops with stakeholders, we focus on multi-player games. Games can address general issues, or are tailored to the specific case of the community. A widely used example of a general game is Fishbanks in which players represent fishers and need to make decisions which boats to buy and where to fish. A common outcome is that without coordination, this leads to overfishing of the shared resources. It is actually a good learning experience for a group to end up in a failure of resource governance. Debriefing after the game what happened and why individuals may reveal different strategies and assumptions.
In recent years, games have started becoming used as intervention tools. For example, in rural India, NGOs are using a groundwater game with communities who are experiencing extreme ground water depletion. The NGOs have been working with those communities for a number of years and had engineers coming to villages to discuss technical solutions, or teach water budgeting, but that had no effect on the day to day experience of the villages. But using the groundwater game led to a measurable change in engagement in the communities to find solutions.
In the groundwater game, players make a decision each round which crop to plant. One crop leads to more monetary outcomes, but also uses more water, while the other crop is less profitable and uses less water. If the players all use the water intensive crop this will lead to a complete depletion of the shared resource in 5 rounds. Better cooperation and coordination, where not all players use the water intensive crops each round, lead to better long term outcomes. After the game, there is a community wide debriefing where the results are discussed, and connections are made with water governance in the village. The moderators of the game do not impose a particular solution, but empower villagers with insights and an exploration tool to craft their own solutions.
Using models
Another common tools used in stakeholder workshops are computational models, such as system dynamics and agent-based models, that could be used to explore quantitatively the consequences of different scenarios. Models are by definition simplifications of reality and will thus not include all the details of the coupled infrastructure system under consideration. This can lead sometimes to tensions since some stakeholders may not trust a model if it does not include certain details. It is therefore important to have stakeholders involved in the design of the model from the start, so that they know what the model is about and why certain assumptions were made.
Once a model is designed and implemented, it can be used to implement different scenarios. This provides quantitative outcomes of the qualitative scenarios and can help provide additional ways to visualize future scenarios. One will get confronted with choices to be made, e.g. what is the expected level of investment in solar energy, and the results of those choices. Those scenarios provide a way to concretely visualize the different outcomes stakeholders may envision in their minds.
16.3 Critical reflections
To implement the lessons learned in this course in practice, a key takeaway is to work with stakeholders, typically at the local level. There is no guarantee for success, and the process can be slow and can be a struggle. It will be important to provide activities for stakeholders to empower them with skills to craft and implement their own solutions. Don’t impose solutions, which are likely not to be adopted because they are imposed, but develop activities to co-create solutions.
We focus our lessons learned on local level activities. Even when we want to address global issues like climate change, we will have to make changes at the local level.
16.4 Make yourself think
- What would be a problem in your community you would like to help to address? Who are the main stakeholders, and what are the main bottlenecks to solve this problem?
16.5 References
Barnett, A.J., J.A. Baggio, H.C. Shin, D.J. Yu, I. Perez-Ibarra, C.A. Rubiños, U. Brady, E. Ratajczyk, N. Rollins, R. Aggarwal, J.M. Anderies, M.A. Janssen (2016), An iterative approach to case study analysis: insights from qualitative analysis of quantitative inconsistencies. International Journal of the Commons 10(2): 467-494.
Meinzen-Dick, R., M.A. Janssen, S. Kandikuppa, R. Chaturvedi, K. Rao, and S. Theis (2018), Playing Games to Save Water: Collective Action Games for Groundwater Management in India, World Development 107: 40-53.
