获奖作品推介 | 国际公共事物学会(IASC)2021年会最佳学生报告揭晓

A growing proportion of global food consumption is obtained through international trade. Yet whether increased reliance on trade benefits or hinders food security is an ongoing debate, specifically with respect to the resilience of global food systems in the face of shocks. Understanding the factors that contribute to the resilience of local food systems is essential to ensuring food security and the long-term sustainability of human populations. The COVID-19 pandemic represents an enormous shock to globalized food systems and thus an opportunity to investigate the factors contributing to resilience. In this paper, we investigate how rural village food systems in the Pacific responded to the first wave of shocks associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, from April to August 2020. Based on over 300 key informant interviews in over 200 villages across seven Pacific island nations–Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), Fiji, Palau, Papua New Guinea (PNG), Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Tuvalu–our rapid assessment shows high diversity in the resiliency and response of rural village food systems. Region-wide, the majority of respondents reported no change in food security in their communities. People in communities with greater in-migration and in countries more reliant on imports suffered greater food insecurity than others. People in communities across the Pacific adapted to food systems challenges by increasing local production of agricultural products and by sharing foods with one another, a customary practice that was maintained in most places to keep families fed. Local seafood markets proved relatively stable during this period, though communities in countries with higher reliance on tourism experienced decreased sales and prices of fresh fish. We draw lessons for building resilience against future food systems shocks to ensure food security in the Pacific islands context.

Charcoal production supports livelihood diversification and reduces poverty, but also causes 7% of deforestation and forest degradation worldwide. A governance transition may be necessary to foster sustainable use of forest resources and equitable distribution of benefits for charcoal producer livelihoods. In several regions in the tropics, transitions from open access systems to community-based natural resources management (CBNRM) are being attempted. The expected success of such a transition is based on several assumptions. One assumption is that CBNRM creates strong social networks within communities and thus results in better governance of natural resources. The necessary characteristics of these social networks are the presence of strong links between equals (i.e. bonding) and across governance levels (i.e. linking). We examine this hypothesis for charcoal production systems in the Kilosa district of Tanzania, by studying the social networks of charcoal producers in three villages with CBNRM and three villages with open access. We conducted 160 livelihood interviews, and our results show that charcoal producer networks in villages with CBNRM have significantly stronger bonding than those in open access villages. Charcoal producer networks under CBNRM are, furthermore, dense and decentralized with a multitude of nested communities. The strong bonding results from the active facilitation of charcoal producer interactions through associations, training schemes, and harvesting protocols, which were more common in villages with CBNRM, stimulating collaboration between charcoal producers in these villages. Therefore, our findings suggest that through charcoal producer associations, training sessions, and harvesting protocols in the context of participatory forest management strong charcoal producer networks emerge. This could potentially enhance social cohesion in open access systems, positively influencing rule of law, access to resources, equality of opportunity, and the efficiency of governance.

According to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), biodiversity conservation must be socially equitable. This is a crucial imperative, yet, how to bring it to practice in contexts of contrasting interests, diverging knowledge systems and entrenched power structures, remains a challenge in many cases. Towards the twin-goal of ecological effectiveness and social equity, conservation governance arrangements have become diverse: engaging an array of local, sub-national and national actors, but also global level players across the public, private and civil society sectors. In this paper, we propose taking a polycentric lens to studying how equity is constructed within ‘top-down’, ‘middle-ground’ and ‘bottom-up’ conservation governance settings. The well-established conceptualisation of equity in recognition, procedure and distribution can be integrated to the polycentric framing of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework as an outcome, and so theoretically related to the role of included (and excluded) actors/centres and their interactions through authority, information and resources. Due to their uttermost importance for equity, the political ecological concepts of diverging interests, ontologies, and power are treated as crosscutting themes. A desk-based comparative analysis of a ‘top-down’ biodiversity offsetting program in Madagascar, a ‘middle-ground’ community-based wildlife management area in Tanzania, and a ‘bottom-up’ locally managed marine area in Kenya applies the proposed combination of theoretical frameworks. This exploratively illustrates how polycentric governance characteristics may enable certain outcomes across the different equity dimensions. This paper is not to build generalisable theory on which ‘top-down’ to ‘bottom-up’ approach is per se better to achieve social equity. Rather, it offers a useful tool to contextually help digest and operationalise complex governance arrangements to improve social equity in conservation. This is work in progress, and we would be very keen to receive suggestions and constructive critique from the audience.

More than 100 million people in India work as farmers and directly depend on land resources. The livelihood of this huge population is threatened by increasing land degradation-desertification in the country. Institutions, by regulating and shaping land use patterns-practices, are considered a potential mechanism to improve resource conditions and decentralization is acknowledged a promising institutional arrangement in this regard. With 73rd Constitutional Amendment Act and through several schemes, management of land resources is devolved to the local government in India. However, there is limited work on how local government engages with these functions and what factors influence their land management interventions at the ground level. We, therefore, conduct a critical inquiry into the resource management interventions of local government in Madhya Pradesh, India and analyze what factors influence local government to take up land management activities. As local government functions within the opportunities-constraints presented by higher tiers-scales of the government, we look into these factors with a polycentric approach by exploring how the identified factors connect to the other levels-scales of the government.
We use primary data collected through – the household qualitative survey, the focus group discussions with local government representatives and the semi-structured interviews with the officials of Panchayat and rural development department and forest department. Following the trajectory of critical inquiries, the analysis goes through three stages. First, we present a detailed description of empirical experiences of the participants on the issue. Second, we theoretically re-describe these experiences by applying the Institutional Analysis and Development framework. Lastly, we identify the underlying structures and the core causal mechanisms influencing local government’s engagement with land management. We find that though a multitude of factors cast their influence, institutional force and actors’ rational incentives are the core causal mechanisms that explain local government’s land management interventions.