What makes institutional crafting successful? Applying the SES to case studies from India and the greater Mekong Region

Using two very different empirical settings, this paper emphasizes the required conditions for the successful crafting of sustainable institutions. In the first setting, different farmer groups in Cambodia and Vietnam try to establish a collective approach for small-scale community-based aquaculture and fail. In the second setting, the collective initiatives of urban women in India are analysed. The Indian women succeed in their objective of a fuel transition from firewood to gas cookers using a cooperative approach. Ostrom's variables identified in the “Multitier Framework for Analyzing Social–Ecological Systems (SES)” (Ostrom, 2007) are applied to local collective action initiatives in both settings to understand which factors make some of the groups succeed in their objectives and others fail. This research highlights the complexity as well as the uniqueness of different SESs. At the same time, the paper contributes to demonstrating the usability of the SES and certain variables to estimate the likelihood of success of self-organisation and crafting of rules. It highlights the relevance of certain conceptual variables for sustainable or unsustainable outcomes for different cases.     

Knowledge co-production in practice: Enabling environmental management systems for ports through participatory research in the Dutch Wadden Sea

Coastal zone management is inconceivable without the mobilization and integration of different types of knowledge – that is, without knowledge co-production practices. This article applies the concept of knowledge co-production to analyze the process of emergence, standardization, and enculturation of environmental management systems (EMSs) within port communities in the Dutch Wadden Sea. Moreover, it is a report from the field in which we reflect on the participatory practices conducted to facilitate the knowledge arrangements required to develop EMSs for a group of ports. The article concludes that this type of knowledge arrangement and co-production practices (involving different types of actors and knowledge) might become mandatory in the near future to stabilize the EMS phenomenon in the practices of ports.