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Droughts can affect people's political trust positively, through rallying effects, or negatively, through blame attribution. We examine how drought conditions affect political trust in the context of Africa. We link high-precision exogenous climate data to survey respondents, 2002-2018, and report moderate negative effects of drought conditions on people's trust in their president. These negative effects increase with the severity of drought conditions. The political economy of favoritism, where some regions are preferentially treated by rulers, should result in heterogeneous effects across territories. We find that trust increases in capital regions and in leader birth regions during dry conditions. In contrast, when droughts take place in such regions, trust levels fall in other regions. This is in line with the idea that capital regions and leader birth regions could be preferentially treated in the aftermath of droughts. Understanding these processes further is important given their salience because of global warming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: While trust is proposed as a key concept to understand people's compliance in natural resource governance, research would benefit from being more precise. Our aim is to test whether more specific survey measures of people's tendency to violate rules and the degree to which law enforcing rangers are seen as corrupt trumps more commonly used items on intra‐personal trust and trust in institutions. Methods: We analyze an original survey of residents within the boundaries of the Great Limpopo Park, straddling Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. Results: While general trust items predict compliance intentions in a first model, these effects largely disappear when we introduce more specific measures. We find consistent negative effects from perceived corruption among rangers. We also report negative effects from perceptions of other people's noncompliant behavior. Conclusion: Compliance to natural resource regulations hinges on specific perceptions of how rule enforcing agents and other resource users act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rulers of weak states face a predicament. They lack capacity to monitor crime and need citizens to partake in intelligence-sharing. Yet, agents of such authorities are seldom trusted, raising doubts about whether locals will provide information. The case of wildlife poaching in African countries illustrates this tension, where rangers are few and offenders on good terms with locals. Why do some locals choose to assist rangers and report on poachers, while others refrain from doing so? We surveyed 2300 residents in and near the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park in Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. We find that people that are afraid of rangers and perceive them as corruptible are less willing to assist in information-sharing. Seeing poaching as condemnable also matters. In contrast, individuals' stakes in conservation and perceptions of wildlife as threatened do not predict our outcome. For effective community policing, policy needs to change how officials are seen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent and how do men and women differ in their attitudes about poaching? Although research suggests that women can be more concerned about environmental degradation than men, inquiries about communities in protected areas are ambiguous: women are disproportionately affected by anti‐poaching laws and can have greater motivations to violate rules. We conducted a large‐scale survey in communities within the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park in Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe and explored attitudes regarding; concern about resources, rule compliance, poaching, and anti‐poaching activities. Although women's attitudes generally are not divergent from men's, we find some differences among nonelectrified households and those with a dependence on resources; these women are less likely to condemn commercial poaching and less willing to engage in anti‐poaching activities. Men in poorer households are more likely to know a poacher. We identify a need of further understanding the causes behind gender differences in conservation attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes its point of departure in the rapidly expanding field of research focusing on governance of large and complex systems and argues that this research should more explicitly recognize ongoing theoretical debates within contemporary and more mainstream governance research in order to fulfill all of its potential. This includes explicitly recognizing the fundamental and inherently political nature of governance as well as the potential contributions to be made from incorporating more of institutional theory in governance research. In addition, the article shows how research on large, complex systems can inform existing research on governance and institutional theory. Recent research on governance of large and complex systems could, for example, help governance research regain its relevance by explicitly focusing on the "big questions." Focusing on large and complex systems is certainly of paramount real‐world importance, but it also highlights theoretical and empirical puzzles at the core of traditional disciplines such as political science or economics. Finally, the explicit systems perspective with its focus on nonlinearity and limited predictability could also help institutional theory move away from its underlying assumptions about functionalism and voluntarism and could, as such, contribute to existing research on institutional creation, reproduction, and change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A declared commitment in international development assistance is to promote donor co-ordination. Yet, how this objective plays out in practice, or how feasible and realistic it is, have rarely been evaluated. Using the fisheries sector as a critical case, this article explores whether two major international actors, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization ( FAO) and the World Bank, meet the demands of policy harmonization as spelled out in the Paris Declaration on aid effectiveness. Through a systematic qualitative analysis, the article investigates whether the policies of these actors are complementary or contradictory. It also assesses how the potential challenges to harmonization can be understood and what the broader implications for aid and development policies in general might be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extent to which resource users abide by rules is a fundamental question in the governance of conservation efforts, such as national parks, often challenged by poaching. While a large literature studies the factors fostering regulatory compliance in national settings, we know less about these processes in transboundary conservation areas, an increasingly common type of park that straddles the borders of several countries. This study aims to explore how the previously identified dynamics associated with achieving compliance play out in transboundary settings. Focusing on the world's largest transboundary conservation area -- the Kavango Zambezi Tranfrontier Conservation Area -- the study uses interviews with elite actors involved in the management of the area to provide insights in the process of fostering compliance in transboundary conservation areas. As in nationally governed parks, it appears crucial that efforts in sharing the benefits from conservation and involving stakeholders in management are successful. Yet, the empirical analysis reveals that transnational settings provide even further challenges: the governance of such parks depends critically on trust-building efforts among a larger number of actors positioned at different levels. It also involves the need for harmonizing policy between the involved states, both in terms of the design of regulations and as regards the sanctions imposed on rule violators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although previously sharing many ecological and institutional conditions, the fisheries reform processes undertaken in South Africa and Namibia in the early 1990s have produced highly different institutional trajectories. In Namibia, the institutional arrangements governing fisheries management have turned Namibia into a regional success case with relatively low degrees of illegal fishing and poaching, but in South Africa, the institutional arrangements are generally considered to be weak and characterized by noncompliance – and poaching is widespread. The overall objective of this article is to provide an institutional perspective on how to understand the dynamics of these different trajectories. In particular, the article concludes that the notion of path dependence, historical legacies, and distributional struggles provide important insights to the observed developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small island states have in recent decades been identified as particularly vulnerable to natural disasters and climate change. Violent winds, floods, and draughts have had severe consequences for millions of people and currently present an increasingly significant challenge for development and poverty alleviation in small islands. However, although islands tend to have similar geographical features, natural hazards produce widely different outcomes in different island states, indicating great variation in resilience. While some islands seem to cope and adapt fairly well, others suffer tremendously. That is the impact of natural hazards of the same physical magnitude ranges from going more or less unnoticed or causing only small disturbances to resulting in severe catastrophes. The overall objective of this paper is to explore the suggested sources of this variation further. More specifically, with the point of departure in theories about how institutions and social contracts affect collective action and adaptive capacities, this paper sets out to investigate how political institutions such as democracy, corruption, and government effectiveness impact the overall resilience of island states. While claims over the importance of institutions are well abound in the literature, there is a serious lack of systematic empirical accounts testing the validity of such claims. This shortcoming is addressed by this study's quantitative, time series cross-sectional analysis using data from the International Disaster Risk database and the Quality of Government dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world's fisheries are under severe pressure. Yet, according to the marine trophic index, the health and stability of marine ecosystems vary greatly across countries. The argument developed and tested in this article holds that some of the sources of this variation can potentially be derived from differences in the character of two fundamental relationships in society - a horizontal one between resource users and a vertical relationship between the government and the resource users. The empirical analysis focuses on sub- Saharan Africa and finds that levels of ethnic and linguistic heterogeneity and levels of democracy in the year that each country declared its exclusive economic zone have a close relationship with ensuing marine exploitation patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The international community has in recent decades supported the installment of formal regulations and institutions for monitoring, control, and surveillance to decrease illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing in African nations. Yet, few studies have investigated the effectiveness of these reforms. By conducting a systematic comparison of the enforcement of fisheries regulations in five Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries, we illustrate how the effectiveness of international agreements and regional commitments is fundamentally conditioned by national capacities. The empirical investigation also provides some tentative insights into the general dynamic process and mechanisms through which this can be understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY Although recent years have witnessed substantial changes in the global aid architecture, less effort has been devoted to investigating the process of implementing those changes. By using the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) as an illustrative and critical case, this article shows how a donor development priority-gender-travels from Stockholm and headquarters to a Paris Declaration-infused aid practice in three cases with different aid modalities: Tanzania, Zanzibar, and Cambodia. More specifically, the qualitative empirical investigation conducted here shows that the implementation of the new aid architecture puts severe and competing demands on development practitioners. At the core of this tension is the fact that although all donors are supposed to promote partner country ownership, harmonize their efforts with other donors, and align themselves with partner country priorities, results-based management simultaneously implies not only a focus on continuously measuring and reporting results but also stricter prioritizations on behalf of donor governments. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is an impressive amount of research - theoretical propositions as well as empirical results - focusing on how ecosystem services can contribute to poverty reduction and resilience, it is less clear how this knowledge is operationalized and applied among development agencies and development practitioners. This article investigates this by using the Swedish International Development Agency, Sida, as an illustrative case study comparing how the link between ecosystem services and poverty reduction is conceptualized at different levels within the organization, and also the extent to which those conceptualizations correspond to an 'ideal' conceptualization, that is, using the global Millennium Ecosystem Assessment as a baseline. The results indicate that ecosystem services first and foremost are perceived as a crucial input for economic development, but linkages between ecosystems and issues of security, health and empowerment are to some extent also recognised.Bien qu'une quantité impressionnante de recherches - apportant des propositions théoriques ainsi que des résultats empiriques - aient été menées sur la manière dont les services écosystémiques peuvent contribuer à réduire la pauvreté et renforcer la résilience des populations, la manière dont ces connaissances sont rendues opérationnelles et sont appliquées par les agences et praticiens du développement est moins claire. Nous examinons cette question sur la base du cas de l′Agence Suédoise du Développement International (SIDA) qui illustre comment est conceptualisé, aux différents niveaux de l′organisation, le lien entre les services écosystémiques et la réduction de la pauvreté. Nous évaluons dans quelle mesure ces conceptualisations correspondent à une conceptualisation 'idéale', en référence au programme mondial d′ Évaluation des Écosystèmes pour le Millénaire. Les résultats indiquent que les services écosystémiques sont d′abord et avant tout perçus comme un facteur essentiel au développement économique, mais les liens entre les écosystèmes et la sécurité, la santé, et l′autonomisation sont dans une certaine mesure également reconnus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses a research project which explores the relationship between the perceived threat of losing power without compensation, institutional quality and economic development. The project uses a process-tracing method to compare independent variables involve in the relationship. It analyzes the threats to leaders in Botswana, Ghana, Chile, Bolivia, South Korea and Cambodia. It covers the strength of civil society, the degree of inter-group inequality and the political role of the middle class.

Although subsistence poaching is a large threat to wildlife conservation in Southern Africa, this behavior is seldom researched. Our understanding of individual and community level factors that drive such behavior is limited because of both lack of data and the literature's predominant focus on commercial poaching. The main objective of this study is to contribute to this scanty literature by examining the factors that are correlated to subsistence poaching in the Great Limpopo, a transfrontier reserve spanning across Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. We use collected primary data from a sample of 2282 respondents and 85 villages that are part of the transfrontier conservation area. We focus on two features, reported subsistence poaching incidences in the community and the previous hunting of individuals, a behavior that is now forbidden in this area. We find through multivariate regression analysis that the likelihood for reported poaching incidences was higher in communities with a larger proportion of young men, plenty of wildlife, and experiencing wildlife conflict. In addition, our survey results illustrate that there is less poaching in communities where local people trust each other, respect institutions, perceive that the management of the park is good, and view wildlife as an asset. Some of these variables can be influenced by appropriate interventions; our findings suggest that capacity building in local institutions, use of community-based crime prevention approaches, training related to wildlife management, and public awareness campaigns could be used by policy makers to affect individuals' perceptions and behaviors in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]