Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Policymaking in modern democracies is characterized by polycentric systems where decisions are made in multiple, relatively independent arenas. One approach developed to understand governance dynamics in polycentric systems is the Ecology of Games Theory (EGT). As a theory of polycentricity, the EGT argues that policy decisions occur in multiple policy forums, where stakeholders with often-conflicting goals and authorities participate. Policy forums perform a critical role in an ecology of games by providing mechanisms to address conflict among stakeholders. Forums provide spaces where stakeholders interact, learn, and collaborate, all while attempting to influence policy decisions. In this paper we study the role of policy forums in channeling conflict among stakeholders involved in water governance issues. Our goal is to assess the systemic role of forums for addressing conflict in a weakly institutionalized governance system, characterized by short-lived forums that congregate myriad stakeholders who often have opposing interests regarding environmental problems. We study the role of those forums, focusing on whether they attract actors with similar perceptions about the types of problems they face. We argue that perceptions of the types of collective action problems that stakeholders face will influence forum selection dynamics, thus creating structural conditions in the governance system that could result in cascades of cooperation, or conflict. Our study is the first in including explicit measures of the perceived intensity of collective action problems among relevant stakeholders. The empirical setting of our study is the Lower Valley of the Chubut River, in Patagonia, Argentina. This is a medium-size social-ecological system that provides freshwater to multiple jurisdictions in the dry Patagonian steppe. Studying this case is useful to assess forum participation dynamics in a context of weak institutions where policy problems (in this case, water policy problems) are becoming increasingly complex and difficult to manage in the face of growing population and climate change. Our findings show that it’s not the perceived intensity of collective action problems what affects a stakeholder decision to participate in more forums, but rather whether the stakeholder can be joined in those forums by others that share those perceptions. We discuss the implications of this finding for understanding under which conditions complex governance systems may self-organize in ways that makes the solutions to collective action problems more likely.