Governance and institutions as drivers of NCP supply and management

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Andreas Thiel
• Subject Area: Agricultural Economics, Agricultural Policy, Agricultural Sociology
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 428658210

Institutions and governance are key mediating factors between human choices or activities and the broader socio-economic, technological, political, and cultural context. Their importance for shaping human-environment relations in general, and NCP in particular, has been recognized by the IPBES framework. The very diverse Kilimanjaro region provides an excellent opportunity to investigate institutions and governance ‘producing’ a very heterogeneous ‘landscape’ of land-uses. Against this background, SP 5 investigates the dynamic relationships between land use, NCP, institutions, and governance and performance of institutions and governance. In recent years, governance in complex social-ecological systems (SES) like Kilimanjaro has often been conceptualized and analysed as polycentric. Still, agricultural land use has not been addressed from this perspective although polycentric governance suggests fruitful entry points to the study of institutional change and performance in relation to the co-production of agricultural land use by diverse private, public, and civil society actors. Further, while the role of power in understanding natural resource governance and land-use decisions has already been recognized in the IPBES framework it has hardly been introduced into empirical analyses in a systematic manner. While land use on Kilimanjaro has been investigated previously, studies comprehensively combining and comparing governance aspects across stakeholders, land-use types, elevations, and ecosystems are missing. SP 5 will close these gaps by assessing how institutional change and performance shape land use on Kilimanjaro. It will identify stakeholders and land-use types shaping NCP; it will address the role of institutions and governance arrangements in affecting the formation of different land-use types throughout the last twenty-five years, and why institutions and governance arrangements changed; and it will assess the distribution of power among actors and its effects on land-use types. Further, it wonders how we can evaluate the performance of governance of issues that biophysically interconnect land use on Kilimanjaro, such as water, and to what extent performance, understood as coordination of water use in relation to land uses, can be explained through various dimensions of institutional fit. To this end, SP 5 conducts a stakeholder analysis, contributes to the survey of land uses to be carried out in SPs 3-5, and carries out a document and literature review as well as a large number of Key Informant Interviews and Focus Group Discussions. Qualitative data is collected and a social network analysis and cognitive mapping is undertaken in order to assess the scalar and functional institutional fit of governance. That way, throughout four Work Packages, SP 5 closes crucial gaps in our integrated understanding of Kilimanjaro SES and makes a vital contribution to the RU, particularly in collaboration with SPs 1, 4, 6 and 7.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5064: The role of nature for human well-being in the Kilimanjaro Social-Ecological System (Kili-SES)
• International Connection: Tanzania
• Co-Investigators: Professor Dr. Peter Manning; Professorin Dr. Berta Martín López; Professor Dr. Ulrich Schmidt
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Kassim Kulindwa Kulindwa