Governance in Telecoupled Land Systems: The Case of Thilawa Special Economic Zone, Myanmar

The emerging lens of telecoupled social-ecological systems offers new opportunities for social scientists to refine the analysis of interdependencies among actors in networks that cross established boundaries of social-ecological systems (e.g. interregional commodity trade and investment flows). Changing interdependencies among local and distant actors give rise to changing governance needs and entice novel governance responses in an increasingly networked world. However, debates about networked or polycentric governance and telecoupled land systems remain largely disconnected despite a need to understand performance and change of governance in telecoupled systems. As a consequence, it remains unclear what kind of governance responses are suited to address what kind of sustainability problems in telecoupled systems. This paper is guided by two objectives. Methodologically and theoretically, it shows opportunities and challenges of using the networks of action situations (NAS) approach rooted in institutional analysis to investigate governance in telecoupled systems. Empirically, the paper presents a case study that analyzes the polycentric governance in a telecoupled system in Myanmar. It assesses how governance interactions triggered telecoupled sustainability problems manifested as negative livelihood and environmental outcomes in concrete places. Further, it locates the action situations, in which actors transformed some of those sustainability problems. We chose the Thilawa Special Economic Zone in Myanmar as a representative case for this purpose. Data were collected in three field missions between 2016 and 2018. We analyse the data by process tracing and qualitative content analysis. Tentative results show that, first, the NAS approach is a suitable methodological tool to identify networked spaces of decision-making in telecoupled systems and their critical roles in shaping sustainability outcomes. However, we need to advance common standards in the scientific community for drawing analytical boundaries of action situations and the linkages in between them. Second, problems of livelihood and environmental destruction in the early phase of the Special Economic Zone can be attributed to a lack of linkages between distant action situations and local social-ecological contexts. Subsequently, community resistance in local and distant action situations lead to the creation of new governance spaces, which contributed to transform some of those sustainability problems. We conclude with discussing conditions under which polycentric governance systems actually do and do not support the sustainability of telecoupled social-ecological systems.