When Is Polycentric Governance Sustainable? Comparing Its Dynamic Stability in Different Settings

In polycentric governance a diverse array of public and private authorities with overlapping domains of responsibility interact in complex and ever-changing ways that can, in some circumstances, impart a resilient form of social order. Originally introduced by Vincent Ostrom (and colleagues) to describe positive consequences of governmental fragmentation in U.S. metropolitan areas, it became more widely known through later applications to community-based management of local resource commons and, most recently, to complexes of local to global policies being implemented in reaction to global climate change. Experts have identified examples of this type of governance in a range of substantive policy areas. This paper draws upon our on-going research on comparative analyses of the variants of polycentric governance found in different policy sectors, including multi-level governance, adaptive governance, collaborative governance, cross-sector network governance, marble-cake federalism, among others. We explore an aspect of polycentric governance that has rarely been considered, namely, the conditions under which this complex form of governance remains sustainable over time. We seek to understand the conditions under which polycentric governance exhibits dynamic stability – that is, in what institutional and social-ecological settings does polycentric governance instill fruitful pathways of policy choices that reinforce its capacity to support high levels of policy performance, and in what settings does its complexity generate pressures that eventually undermine its ability to perform effectively? Like any form of governance, polycentric governance can have both positive and negative consequences. Its high level of institutional diversity makes it highly resilient, but its pervasive complexity may make it difficult for citizens to hold leaders accountable. Potentially problematic dynamics may generate “failures” of polycentric governance, such as bias towards incremental change, reinforcement of structural inequities, frequent failures of coordination, and over-reliance on experts isolated from direct oversight by the public. At the same time, polycentric systems of governance should also provide actors with continued access to multiple mechanisms for improvement that hold out the hope that these negative tendencies may be ameliorated. To explore the sources of these potential governance failures, and prospects for self-correction, we will look at both structural and process-level factors. We will consider the potential effects of changes in structural conditions (e.g. the number and diversity of decision centers engaged in policy-making and the extent of overlap in their respective responsibilities) and endogenously driven trends towards further complexification or increased distance from the experiences of ordinary citizens (and other factors related to the ability of citizens to make effective use of the diverse options available to them). We will endeavor to untangle the complex interplay among exogenous shocks and endogenous drivers that determine the longevity of the different forms of polycentric governance found in different policy settings. To this effect we undertake a meta-analysis of work on polycentric governance in which we particularly scrutinize if and how dynamics of change and performance in polycentric governance were theorized and what the findings were.