Actors’ Strategies in an Ecology of Games: The Case of Water Management in Brazil

Current environmental governance is characterized by its fragmented character, a multiplicity of venues overlap and compete to capture institutional spaces and actors’ commitments across administrative boundaries. The case of integrated water management is paradigmatic in this sense since the implementation of basin-based governance arenas inevitably crosses pre-existing administrative divisions. While this kind of administratively overlapping arrangements are typically conceived as leading to inefficient redundancy, others have explored the possibilities of such redundancy contributing to more effective long-term management of issues burdened with high levels of uncertainties and interdependencies. More recently, the resuscitated Ecology of Games framework has called further attention to the intertwined character of different venues. Departing from the Ecology of Games framework, this paper seeks to explore how actors struggle to advance their interests through strategically investing their engagement (or lack thereof) across different local-, regional and national decision-making venues for water management and use. The paper empirically focuses on the case of the Paraiba do Sul river in Brazil. Following the 1990s international trends advocating for integrated water management approaches, Brazil implemented a number of participatory venues in the area of water management. Besides basin-level institutional arrangements, the federal and state administrations set up their own participatory councils for water resources management. All these instances have decision-making power, and thus can implement their own projects, put forward directives and in the case of states, state-level laws. This builds up to a complex institutional web leading to a situation where various actors are confronted with the challenge of deciding where they should engage, how, and potentially in alliance with whom, to ensure they are able to pursue their interests. The paper methodologically departs from a multilevel network modelling approach where actors’ engagement in different venues are captured as actor-venue links, and where actors’ collaborations with other actors are captured by actor-to-actor links. The model is used to empirically investigate actors’ engagements across venues and if and how those engagements relate to their position in their collaborative (social) networks. Further, by drawing on extensive semi-structured interviews with these actors, the paper explores actors’ intentions and rationales behind their strategic choices in terms of where to engage, and together with whom. Preliminary findings indicate that actors skillful in maneuvering this Ecology of Games have indeed been able to exert influence in decision-making processes that seemingly go above and beyond what could be expected given their more ‘traditional’ capacities in terms of available funding and formal authority.