Edited by Yvonne Rydin and Eva Falleth, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., Cheltenham, UK, 2006, pp. xi, 248 Numerous institutional designs for managing natural resources have been implemented and attempted throughout the world to achieve sustainable management of especially common pool resources or public goods. Networks and Institutions in Natural Resource Management, edited by Yvonne Rydin and Eva Falleth, reports on the results of original fieldwork focusing on how networks and institutions in natural resource management (NRM) work in practice. The starting point for the research is the increasingly fragmented institutional setting for NRM and natural resource planning. With fragmentation (a high number of participants involved in NRM, each with their own agenda, preferences, norms, and working routines) arises a need for collective action (the setting of rules for individual use of natural resources). Without such collective action, free-riding can become a problem as long as resources are common pool or public goods. How can such collective action be enabled? A possible answer, analyzed in this book, is networking. To examine all of these concepts, the book presents nine case studies: three in Norway; three in England; and one each in Sweden, Spain, and Zimbabwe. The collaborative research framework presented in the book is said to be based on an institutionalist approach, in which two elements are identified as central: network analysis and attention to the norms, values, routines, and everyday working practices of those within networks. The book states that the concepts of institutions, networks, social capital (bonding: intercommunity ties; bridging: horizontal ties; and bracing: both vertical and horizontal ties within a delimited set of actors), and institutional capacity (particularly the role of knowledge resources) will be used "to investigate how collective action over natural resource management is fostered (or not) in situations of fragmentation" (p. 32). The emphasis on both the formal and the informal within institutionalism is mentioned as a strength. The components of the network analysis (social capital and institutional capacity) seem to receive more attention than the formal side. As a result, with the formal side of institutionalism less visible at times, the definition of institutions becomes a bit uncertain and unclear as the book progresses.
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