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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]

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 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]

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]