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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]

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]

Small island developing states (SIDS) have been identified as particularly vulnerable to natural disasters and climate change. However, although SIDS have similar geographical features, natural hazards produce different outcomes in different states, indicating variation in vulnerability. The objective of this article is to explore the sources of this variation. With the point of departure in theories about how political institutions affect adaptive capacities, this article sets out to investigate whether government effectiveness has an impact on the vulnerability of SIDS. While claims over the importance of institutions are common in the literature, there is a lack of empirical accounts testing the validity of such claims. This shortcoming is addressed by this study’s time-series cross-sectional analysis using data from the International Disaster Risk database and the Quality of Government data set. The results show that government effectiveness has strong and significant effects on the number of people killed and affected by natural disasters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Why do some locals choose to assist rangers and report on poachers, while others refrain from doing so? • We surveyed residents in and near the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP) in Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. • People that are afraid of rangers and perceive them as corruptible are less willing to assist in information-sharing. • Seeing poaching as condemnable increases people's propensity to report on illegal activities. • To effectively involve locals in rule enforcement, policy needs to change how communities perceive both officials and rules. Conservation rules – e.g. protected area regulations that aim to reduce wildlife poaching – often have an inherent challenge: while relying on that locals should share intelligence about observed crime to authorities, such rules tend to be weakly supported by these communities. Enforcement officials of conservation authorities (such as rangers) are seldom trusted, and this in turn raises doubts about whether locals will provide sufficient information about conservation crime, which is not the least needed in all those settings where a small number of rangers are tasked to monitor vast areas. The case of wildlife poaching in African countries illustrates this tension, where rangers are few, sometimes have a dubious record, and where offenders often are on good terms with locals. This article asks: Why do some locals choose to assist rangers and report on poachers, while others refrain from doing so? We conducted a survey in the years 2017–2018 directed towards 2300 residents in and near the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park in Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, where a major challenge is both subsistence and commercial forms of poaching. Our focus was primarily on subsistent poaching. We also conducted in-depth interviews with rangers and park officials to corroborate that our quantitative insights point to the same description of the situation. Our survey demonstrates that people that are afraid of rangers and perceive them as corruptible are less willing to assist in information-sharing. Seeing poaching as condemnable increases people's propensity to report on illegal activities. In contrast, individuals' stakes in conservation and perceptions of wildlife as threatened do not predict our outcome. Our findings suggest that to achieve a more thorough involvement of locals in the enforcement of conservation laws, policy needs to change how communities perceive both officials and rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resilience thinking has in recent decades emerged as a key perspective within research and policy focusing on sustainable development and the global environmental challenges of today. Originating from ecology, the concept has gained a reputation far beyond its original disciplinary borders and now plays a key role in the study and practice of environmental governance in general. Although I fully support the interdisciplinary ambitions of resilience thinking, I argue that if the resulting scholarly insights and policy advice are to be of any true added value, resilience thinking should take existing social scientific advances more seriously. In particular, I argue that resilience thinking does not give sufficient recognition to the already existing accounts of, for example, institutional change trajectories, the dynamics of path dependence, the distributional character of institutions, or the fundamental political determinants and drivers of institutional design and diversity. A resilience theory truly recognizing social scientific advances in these areas, however, has substantial chances of truly furthering our understanding of and practical abilities in facing the fundamental environmental challenges of today. [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]

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]

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]

Abstract: The argument developed and tested in this paper contends that the lack of success in past decades when it comes to increasing water coverage levels – particularly in sub-Saharan Africa – is attributable to the institutional arrangements under which land is managed. In short, the starting point is that if water coverage levels are to increase, some form of investment in land, housing, water infrastructure, or wells needs to be undertaken – primarily by citizens themselves. However, in order for such investments to take place, citizens need some certainty that they will reap the rewards from their investments. This certainty is suggested to result from property rights to land, i.e., land tenure. This argument is tested through a mixed methodological approach including quantitative analysis and a comparative review of land policies of the two contrasting cases of Botswana and Zambia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Focuses on state capacity in general and on states' efforts to foster collective action and compliance in particular. • Improves our understanding of recent decades' increased militarization of wildlife management. • Builds on unique interview data with park rangers and public officials. • Coercive capacities are necessary but needs to be complemented with cooperative assurances in order to ensure compliance. This article focuses on social control and states' broadcasting of power over inhospitable terrains. It uses the case of conservation of wildlife in two African Peace Parks to explore how the involved states strike the balance between cooperation and coercion in their efforts to mold citizen behavior toward quasi-voluntary compliance. The case of wildlife management highlights pertinent issues related to compliance and collective action and have the potential to contribute substantially to the general literature on state capacity. More specifically, while the increased militarization of wildlife management has been criticized for justifying coercive and repressive policies, it can be seen as a result of the involved states' lack of social control and ensuing inability to foster quasi-voluntary compliance through other means than coercive ones. Yet, while coercion is not a sufficient condition for fostering compliance, it is still important to recognize that it is indeed a necessary one. Building on unique interview data from two major transboundary parks – Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area and Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park – we explore how existing theoretical arguments play out in practice and how the challenge to foster quasi-voluntary compliance is being addressed. The results show that actors given the task to implement wildlife policy certainly show awareness about that coercion needs to be complemented with cooperative assurances in order to foster quasi-voluntary compliance. Furthermore, the study provides insights into how other social organizations such as traditional leaders might challenge the state in terms of being the predominant actors in setting up rules governing wildlife. We thank the Swedish Research Council for supporting this research. We would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editor for constructive comments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The phenomenon of collective action and the origin of collective action problems have been extensively and systematically studied in the social sciences. Yet, while we have substantial knowledge about the factors promoting collective action at the local level, we know far less about how these insights travel to large-scale collective action problems. Such problems, however, are at the heart of humanity's most pressing challenges, including climate change, large-scale natural resource depletion, biodiversity loss, nuclear proliferation, antibiotic resistance due to overconsumption of antibiotics, and pollution. In this paper, we suggest an analytical framework that captures the theoretical understanding of preconditions for large-scale collective action. This analytical framework aims at supporting future empirical analyses of how to cope with and overcome larger-scale collective action problems. More specifically, we (i) define and describe the main characteristics of a large-scale collective action problem and (ii) explain why voluntary and, in particular, spontaneous large-scale collective action among individual actors becomes more improbable as the collective action problem becomes larger, thus demanding interventions by an external authority (a third party) for such action to be generated. Based on this, we (iii) outline an analytical framework that illustrates the connection between third-party interventions and large-scale collective action. We conclude by suggesting avenues for future research. [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]

The purpose of the United Nations-guided process to establish Sustainable Development Goals is to galvanize governments and civil society to rise to the interlinked environmental, societal, and economic challenges we face in the Anthropocene. We argue that the process of setting Sustainable Development Goals should take three key aspects into consideration. First, it should embrace an integrated social-ecological system perspective and acknowledge the key dynamics that such systems entail, including the role of ecosystems in sustaining human wellbeing, multiple cross-scale interactions, and uncertain thresholds. Second, the process needs to address trade-offs between the ambition of goals and the feasibility in reaching them, recognizing biophysical, social, and political constraints. Third, the goal-setting exercise and the management of goal implementation need to be guided by existing knowledge about the principles, dynamics, and constraints of social change processes at all scales, from the individual to the global. Combining these three aspects will increase the chances of establishing and achieving effective Sustainable Development Goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]