Explore the vast range of titles available.

Multi-level collective actions and institutions play an important role in natural resource governance and rural development; however, the origins and transformations of these institutions have only recently begun to receive systematic research attention. To address this gap, we trace and analyse the historical processes driving formation and change of Mexican inter-community forestry associations over time, drawing on survey data and in-depth case studies from two Mexican states, contextualised within the national and international political-economic landscapes over time. While we initially categorise whether an association is grassroots (‘bottoms-up’) or state-mandated (‘top-down’), the fifty-year historical review reveals a contested dynamic over political, economic and technical changes in multi-level commons governance. In this political-economic process, the line between self-organised and top-down is blurred, hybrid and continually evolving on multiple scales, driven by both cooperation and conflict across governance levels from the local to the global, and embedded in broader struggles over land, democratic institutions and market participation. Mexican forestry associations mediate between social movements; member needs such as political representation, economic cooperation and forestry services; conflicting political interest from a diversity of community and non-community actors including foresters, political party leaders and timber corporations; and state mandates and market forces. These findings fill a gap in institutional commons theory and practice, elucidating the political dynamics of polycentric and multi-level governance.

The increasing scale and interconnection of many environmental challenges - from climate change to land use - has resulted in the need to collaborate across borders and boundaries of all types. Traditional centralized, top-down and sectoral approaches to governance of single-issue areas or species within social-ecological systems often have limited potential to alleviate issues that go beyond their jurisdiction. As a result, collaborative governance approaches have come to the forefront. A great deal of past research has examined the conditions under which collaborative efforts are likely to achieve desired outcomes. However, few studies have analyzed how the means to achieve successful collaborative outcomes differ based on context when examined across multiple studies. In this research, we begin to chart a means for doing this. Building onto a Context-Mechanism-Outcome (CMO) Framework, we provide a coding manual to analyse how contextual variables mediate the effects of mechanism variables on outcomes of the collaborative governance of social-ecological systems. Through the examination of four cases, we provide a proof-of-concept assessment and show the utility of the CMO framework and coding manual to draw comparisons across cases for understanding how collaborative outcomes are contingent on the social-ecological context in which they occur.

Since the 1980s, an alternative environmental governance model has been unfolding in Puerto Rico, led by marginalized communities. In this paper, we focus on this model and its link with environmental justice struggles. Drawing on the political ecology framework, we analyze the experiences of ten community-led environmental initiatives. Our analysis shows that Puerto Rico is a paradigmatic case in global community-based environmental governance. Contrary to other places, where the management of protected areas began as a neoliberal project \"from above,\" Puerto Rico shows a model developed mainly \"from below,\" in resistance to the industrialization and urbanization policies promoted by the state and corporations. We thus argue that community governance has become one of the most important platforms of struggles for socio-environmental justice in Puerto Rico. [Keywords: community-based environmental management, commons, autogestion, social movements, environmental justice]

We develop an analytic framework for the analysis of robustness in social-ecological systems (SESs) over time. We argue that social robustness is affected by the disturbances that communities face and the way they respond to them. Using Ostrom's ontological framework for SESs, we classify the major factors influencing the disturbances and responses faced by five Indiana intentional communities over a 15-year time frame. Our empirical results indicate that operational and collective-choice rules, leadership and entrepreneurship, monitoring and sanctioning, economic values, number of users, and norms/social capital are key variables that need to be at the core of future theoretical work on robustness of self-organized systems.

While Common Pool Resource (CPR) theory has been widely applied to forestry, there are few examples of using the theory to study large-scale governance. In this paper we test the applicability of CPR theory to understanding forest governance and outcomes in Indonesia between 1965 and 2012. Indonesia contains one of the world’s largest tropical forests, and experienced rapid deforestation during this time frame, with forest cover dropping from close to 85% to less than 50%. Using a mixture of within case comparison and process tracing methods, we identify key variables that influenced the levels of deforestation during two time periods: before 1998, when governance was dominated by the dictatorship of President Suharto, and after 1998, when democratic governance and political decentralization were initiated, and deforestation rates fell and then rose again. Our results point to the value of CPR theory in identifying important variables that influence sustainability at large scales, however they also illustrate important limitations of CPR theory for the study of forests with large spatial extent and large numbers of users. The presence and absence of key variables from CPR theory did emerge as important causes of deforestation. However, some variables, such as strong leadership and local rule-making, appeared to work in the opposite direction as predicted by CPR theory. In addition, key variables that may have influenced deforestation rates are not well captured in CPR theory. These include the intention of the governance system, the presence of clientelistic politics, the influences of international politics and markets, and the influence of top-down governance. Given that CPR theory does not fully explain the case at hand, its applicability, as is, to large-scale commons should be treated with some caution.

This paper analyzes the local-level impacts of cross-scale linkages in Mexican community forestry by evaluating the operation of four inter-community forest associations (FAs). Based on 1 year of fieldwork in Durango, Mexico, the paper focuses on two inter-related issues: (1) the services that each association provides to their member communities and how they impact forest management and the development of communities’ forestry enterprises, and (2) the differences in services and impacts between top-down and bottom-up FAs. The findings show that FAs, as a form of cross-scale linkage, can be crucial for the provision of services, goods and infrastructure related to the protection and enhancement of community forests, the economic development of community enterprises, and the political representation of these communities. At the same time, the study finds important differences between top-down and bottom-up FAs, while pointing to some of the disadvantages of each type of linkage.

In this essay I analyze corruption as a recurrent element in environmental decision-making associated with strategies of colonial capital accumulation through urbanization in Puerto Rico. I focus on the \"de-conservation\" of protected areas (i.e. \"un-green grabbing\"), from the Northeastern Ecological Corridor to the 2019 Zoning Map. Drawing on green criminology, political ecology, critical urban studies and decolonial approaches, I broaden the definition of environmental corruption to go beyond the typical legalist/institutionalist accounts, with the concepts of the \"colonial growth machine\" and \"accumulation by corruption\". In this growth machine, the treadmill of production is followed by a treadmill of law which increasingly deregulates environmental exploitation for profit accumulation. I situate the deepening of environmental corruption in the last decades within the expansion of a colonial neoliberal regime characterized by state-corporate crime and a permanent state of exception, deepened in the debt crisis and hurricane Maria. The analysis pays particular attention to actors and strategies used in corruption schemes, the structures that facilitate and reproduce these, as well as the resistance movements that counter them. I show how a coalition of state-corporate actors and institutions enables and legalizes corruption through a diversity of tactics including electoral campaign donations, bribes, lobbying, and revolving doors, sustained by a hegemonic colonial ideology that equates \"progress\" with construction, private \"investment\" and US interventionism, and which presents environmental and human rights as \"barriers\" to economic development. The article concludes with reflections on the role of social movements in countering this corruption machine. [Keywords: colonial growth machine, treadmill of production, treadmill of law, accumulation by corruption, environmental corruption, un-green grabbing]

This paper compares lessons drawn from five case studies of large scale governance of common-pool resources: management of forests in Indonesia, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, the Rhine River in western Europe, the Ozone layer (i.e. the Montreal Protocol), and the Atlantic Bluefin Tuna (i.e. the International Convention on the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna). The goal is to assess the applicability of Ostrom’s design principles for sustainable resource governance to large scale systems, as well as to examine other important variables that may determine success in large scale systems. While we find support for some of Ostrom’s design principles (boundaries, monitoring, sanctions, fit to conditions, and conflict resolution mechanisms are all supported), other principles have only moderate to weak support. In particular, recognition of rights to organize and the accountability of monitors to resource users were not supported. We argue that these differences are the result of differences between small and large scale systems. At large scales, other kinds of political dynamics, including the role of scientists and civil society organizations, appear to play key roles. Other variables emphasized in common-pool resource studies, such as levels of dependence on resources, group size, heterogeneity, disturbances, and resource characteristics also receive mixed support, pointing to the need to reinterpret the meaning of common-pool resource theories in order for them to be applicable at larger scales.

This paper aims to expand current understandings on the relationship between forest commoning, citizenship and democracy. For doing so, it presents a case study of a community forest in the periphery of Vigo city (Galicia, Spain). Using interviews and historical records of the city and the neighborhood, the paper tells the story of the emergence of a forest commons in relation to citizenship claims and struggles. Through time, communal practices of care for forest forge care-tizens, a self-organized form of citizenship performed through mutual care and care for the commons. This care-tizenship was enabled by commoners’affective relations to forests and more-than-human subjectivities. The conclusion underlines the mutually reinforcing relationship between commoning forests and citizenship, suggesting the importance of community forests as arenas to nurture alternative, expanded more direct, and ecological forms of democracy.

This special issue of the CENTRO Journal seeks to open a critical space for understanding and debating corruption in Puerto Rico, away from neoliberal, colonial, and legalistic representations, offering new questions, narratives, and political imaginaries. Building on critical scholarship, anticolonial and postcolonial traditions, and on conversations that emerged during and after the summer of 2019 anti-corruption protests, this introductory essay frames corruption and anti-corruption as a narrative mobilized across time and space with varying effects, shaped by colonial and racist structures. Rather than providing a narrow definition of corruption, this critical approach aims to center the analysis of sociopolitical implications of corruption narratives in a colonized, impoverished, and racialized country enduring the consequences of colonial capitalism for the past two centuries. To articulate this critical approach, this introductory essay offers an overview of the 15 articles within the special issue, and highlights the wide array of disciplinary approaches and methodologies deployed to underscore the social structures, power dynamics, and knowledges that have traditionally constituted corruption and anti-corruption narratives in PR. In the introduction to the special issue, we offer suggestions for a future research agenda on corruption in Puerto Rico, pointing to the need for further investigation of the connections between corruption narratives and coloniality/imperialism, race/whiteness/anti-blackness, gender and sexuality, arts and popular culture; the relation between corruption and migration/diaspora; and alternative anti-corruption narratives and futures. Overall, this introductory essay aims to articulate a call for the development of critical corruption studies within Puerto Rican studies.