The New Geo-Governance: A Baroque Approach

Chapter 10: Polycentric Governance and Technologies of Collaboration

Chapter 10 Polycentric Governance and Technologies of Collaboration" "We must learn that in complex systems we cannot do only one thing" Dietrich Dorner Introduction While important, the principles cited in the last chapter may appear to be insufficient for effective ocean stewardship. This is ascribable to a general distrust of self-governance, and to the dual challenge of (1) the ocean governance design not being approximated by a single game framework, and (2) it not being presumed that all the informationavailable to the stakeholders canbe synthesized in game-type matrices. As a result of the first challenge, ocean governance must be conceived of as a set of multi-level games, in which the stakeholders must operate simultaneously and concurrently at several levels. As we shall see, this means that the game is polycentric and must be resolved by a set of integrated social contracts.. For the purposes of our preliminary exploration, it may be sufficient to consider only three levels: the global level, the specific ocean level, and the intra-ocean level. As a result of the second challenge, ocean governance cannot be modelled as a game with complete information.It must be recognized that, in such a world, each stakeholder is a Bayesian rational actor who continually updates his/her beliefs on the basis of whatever information they find useful from whatever source, * In collaboration with Kevin Wilkins. 211 The New Gee-Governance including the behaviour of other actors. This is important because Bayesian rational actors, in a non-cooperative game with incomplete information, must find some way to implicitly correlate their behaviour. To effect such coordination, the different actors must make use not only of their rationality and preferences but also of the rich repertoire of their historical experiences. Such a repertoire serves them well as basic references and focal I points when all else fails. For instance, when participants in experimental games| are asked tosuggest, where inNewYork, acquaintances (who have agreed to meet ^ on a certain day, at a certain time, but with the location for some reason having I remained unclear) will tend to converge on Grand Central Station. In Paris, it i might be the Eiffel Tower; in other capital cities, the characters' embassy. Such 1 dimensions are impossible to model, and yet they provide "effective responses" 1 to seemingly unsolvable conundrums. Such decisions are echoes of conventions or conventional wisdom that remain contingent on personal history. To understand how best to meet these challenges, it is useful to examine polycentric games, design principles, and evolving priority rules (Schelling 1960; Ostrom 1990; McGinnis 2000). We deal with these issues in the first section of this chapter. In the second section, we examine some of the key levers, or families of mechanisms that might be used to ensure the requisite degree of collaboration. Polycentric games, institutional design, and priority rules (a) Polycentric games A polycentric system is a label used to refer to "a political order in which multiple authorities serve overlapping jurisdictions". It is made up of a wide array of concurrent games, linked into complex networks of interactions. In such a system, it is presumed that "actors in any single game can draw on a vast array of informational cues and strategic interactions to help them understand the behaviour of other participants in that particular game. To do so, they can draw on commonly understood norms or rules, and they can use institutional procedures to organize their interactions" (McGinnis 2000:2). Polycentric games connote animage of anetwork of overlapping and interlinked arenas of choice: operational choice (the world of action where individuals take action or adopt a strategy), collective choice (the world of collective decisions taken by officials, and enforceable against non-conforming individuals), and constitutional choice (the world of decisions about decision rules). Obviously the arenas of choice are nested in broader games and constrained by them: constitutional choices defining broad orientations constrain collective 212 Polycentric Governance and Technologies of Collaboration choices by social groups, and collective choices constrain operational choices at the community level. But there is also apowerful learning feedback: as aresult of operational level initiatives to meet local challenges, pressure is brought bottomup on collective choice, and even on the constitutional framework, and forces them to evolve. Indeed, this is the sort of two-way learning loop that shapes all three arenas of choices over time. In chapters 3 and 7,different images havebeen provided ofthisprocess of social...