From campaign-style response to positive response: how local actors’ behaviors affect the effectiveness of polycentric water governance

Abstract

Resolving complex social-ecological challenges requires many actors to coordinate and collaborate to take concerted governance actions. This is consistent with the concept of polycentricity, which focuses on self-governance. Yet polycentric governance does not always perform well. This study analyzes how polycentric principles can be effectively deployed on the ground by multiple local actors when governance systems exhibit the traits of polycentricity. An attractive case study for this research is the polycentric approach to the water governance of China’s Wanfeng Lake, which gradually transitioned from failure to success since the end of 2018. Combining Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) and social-ecological system (SES) frameworks, we capture complex multi-level interactions and local actors’ informal behaviors before and after the Wanfeng Lake governance transformation. The research finding shows that the evolution in behavior from campaign-style response to positive response promoted the polycentric governance transformation from failure to success through enhancing the degree of self-governance and improving the coordination mechanisms. This study contributes to a deeper and broader understanding of polycentricity in the following ways: (i) it identifies the barriers and conditions to effective polycentric water governance when there are multiple governance actors; (ii) it displays a polycentric pattern with both formal and informal operations in developing countries.