Creating Agency to Develop Effective Natural Resource Policy: A Comparative Analysis of Social Structure

Policy-making in modern governance systems triggers complex interactive processes among diverse organized entities pursuing specific (and often different) political agendas. This empirical research aims to advance understanding of the social structure creating agency in such governance processes. The notion of agency generally describes the capacity of performing a task for a specific purpose (such as advancing a specific agenda) and is closely intertwined with power as the main driving force behind effective social action for steering social processes. Network scholarship distinguishes between two types of agency, i.e. agency that accrues to (a small number of) individual actors (actor-level agency), and agency on the group level (collective agency). High collective agency is commonly associated with high degrees of cohesion and low power asymmetries. For high actor-level agency, in contrast, scholars argue that structural holes create advantageous network positions associated with the power to exert high influence on the outcome of the governance process. On the overall network level, this results in high network centralization. Given the commonly acknowledged requirement of collective action to successfully institutionalize policy for effectively dealing with common-pool resource problems, this study proposes that effective natural resource policy is found where the overall network structure favors the creation of collective agency to facilitate collective action. This proposition is tested in a comparative investigation of the social structure in the context of marine resource governance based on data from eight case studies in two regions in Brazil and Indonesia. “Effective policy” is operationalized in this study to satisfy the two central conditions: i) existence of rules for a geographically defined area, and ii) high compliance with the rules. In each of the two regions, four communities in close vicinity were selected as study sites. In two communities in each region rules exist and are complied with. No effective policy are found in the other two communities in each of the regions but the resource users are involved in highly unsustainable use practices. Data on the interaction between governance actors within each of the eight communities was collected through 194 face-to-face interviews. The results provide support for the proposition that collective agency favors the institutionalization of effective natural resource policy. While the densities of the analyzed networks are surprisingly similar, the cases with effective policy show that structural holes are more equally distributed among the actors implying lower power inequalities. The networks in the cases without effective policy are characterized by high Betweenness-Centralization indicating that high degrees of power accrue to only a few actors creating high actor-level agency derived from high concentration of structural holes. These results hold across countries. Lending additional support to the proposition, information from expert interviews conducted in the areas indicate that the natural resource governance processes in the areas without effective policy involve powerful actors pursuing strong economic rent-seeking agendas who obstruct the development of effective policy. In the other areas, developing effective policy was enabled by the actors’ engagement in collectively finding locally viable solutions to the common natural resource problems.