Transnational Water Quality and Subsistence Hunting: Modeling Interlocal Natural Resource Institutions Under Both Complex and Remote Conditions.

Most studies concerning North American environmental management focus on international regimes and nation-to-nation agreements. A smaller number have examined the local contexts affected by such arrangements. However, there exist a series of transboundary commons that have developed bounded rule structures combining both local and international elements. In times of federal devolution across North America of environmental responsibilities to states and provinces, it is crucial to understand the policy alternatives to traditional command and control management. Aided by the theory of institutional rational choice, this paper focuses on localized transnational natural resource management by examining the design and implementation of seven such interlocal organizations. The environmental contexts are the Great Lakes Basin and the Northwestern border region between Alaska and the Canadian territories. Canada and the United States, in the province of Ontario and the state of Michigan, share three rivers that have been severely polluted. In the late 1980s three localized binational plans were created to further the recovery of these waters. In the Northwest, there are four cases since the 1980s of interlocal arrangements to manage stocks of polar bears, beluga whales, caribou, and salmon. Each of the cases share the following features: the resource has been transnational; the participants and decision-making remain highly localized though international; local, state/provincial, and federal authorities have worked in concert to provide grants of authority and money; policy implementation capacity has been driven by resource users, and there is a bounded rule structure that includes the populations and resources of two countries, states/provinces and localities. Using lessons from the fifteen-year plus histories of these cases, I develop the concept of interlocality; design a model for effective interlocal cooperation; catalog variables that promote or hinder the successful policy delivery of such institutions; and analyze the contextual differences between interlocal institutions in the complex highly nested policy circumstances of the Great Lakes and in the remote sparsely populated Arctic. In brief, all seven local transnational institutions have played a valuable role in both the policy-making and policy-implementing phases of international coordination of shared resources in both landscapes. However, variability in local leadership capacity, perception of risk to a common pool resource, clear conflict resolution mechanisms, and agency stability has caused some cases to be more successful than others. While my research has been in the American-Canadian context, its focus is to determine fundamental variables that any interlocal context may present and highlights Mexican-American cases for further study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]