Frank Van Laerhoven

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at Utrecht University

Academic and non-academic societal actors alike are seeking to optimize the ways in which scientific research may contribute to sustainable development, for which a diverse range of research uptake strategies have been developed. Yet, while the literature emphasizes that the appropriateness of research uptake strategies depends on the context in wh...

Scholarship shows that community forests can be sustainably self-governed through collective action. In the Western Ghats (India), many NGOs have risen to support communities with this task. Few scientific studies explore NGO interventions in CPR governance. As a result, we observe a risk of over-generalising scientific knowledge over many differen...

Tidal river management (TRM) is a building-with-nature practise which was locally developed to tackle the problems of polderization in the south-western delta of Bangladesh. This practise was subsequently adapted by public agencies. However, all TRM sites are associated with violent conflict. While law-enforcement agencies have often struggled to b...

Coastal communities are prone to crises. Repeated exposure to crises constrains the ability of residents to access basic needs such as health, water and food, and may increase their vulnerability levels. In response, communities develop coping strategies such as depoldering (temporary breaching of embankments for TRM: tidal rivers management) and a...

Rural drinking water systems (RDWS) in Bangladesh and elsewhere fail more often than we would want. The acknowledgment that pure community management models will not reverse this trend is growing: RDWS users need support. In an attempt to further understanding what this support could look like we in particular zoom in on the role of public agencies...

In this article, we link NGO-supplied drinking water infrastructure projects with collective action development approaches. Although governing local, shared drinking water systems (DWS) requires users to act collectively, users rarely organize such collective action successfully by themselves. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are therefore fre...

Over the last few decades processes of water governance have been characterized by a gradual evolution from “governance by unitary state” to “governance by partnerships.” However, there is limited understanding of how such shifts take place. The case of Bangalore's lakes is an interesting example of such a transition. In the past Bangalore's lakes...

Coastal regions are most susceptible to the effects of climate change. To increase infrastructure-resilience of such regions, reduce livelihood-vulnerability of people living in such regions and equip them with appropriate livelihood strategies, governments have invested heavily in coastal infrastructure such as polders. This research is focused on...

Studies on stability and change in modes of environmental governance often remain implicit regarding the conceptualisation, nature and causes of stability and change. Moreover, they are selective in the addressed explanatory factors. Theorising of stability and change in modes of environmental governance could be brought to the next level by enhanc...

We present a research approach that seeks to develop and strengthen participatory action research (PAR) when applied in social-ecological systems (SES) by combining it with critical systems thinking (CST). This research approach responds to the urgent societal need to move beyond predefined project framing in development projects. While PAR acts as...

In this editorial we assess 50 years’ worth of peer-reviewed publications to establish traditions and trends in the study of the commons. Based on this assessment, we provide a sketch of how IJC and its editors can continue to contribute to the development of the field.

Participatory action research (PAR) is an approach for fully co-creating research into environmental problems with the public. We argue this is mostly done for manifest environmental problems that clearly threaten livelihoods and have highly predictable impacts. But the conventional PAR approach is not suitable when the impacts are poorly understoo...

Communities living in coastal regions are vulnerable to flooding, salinity intrusion, and natural hazards. This is aggravated by climate change. In order to reduce this vulnerability, governments have invested heavily in developing coastal infrastructures. One type of infrastructure development regards polders (i.e., pieces of land previously subje...

Rather than committing exclusively to one drinking water option, households in Bangladesh often use a portfolio of sources that, in varying ways, to varying extents satisfy one or more out of several preferences they hold with regard to their drinking water. What happens if a new option is added to that mix? In communities of Bangladesh’ Southweste...

Rather than committing exclusively to one drinking water option, households in Bangladesh often use a portfolio of sources that, in varying ways, to varying extents satisfy one or more out of several preferences they hold with regard to their drinking water. What happens if a new option is added to that mix? In communities of Bangladesh' Southweste...

Applying a discursive institutional analysis, we aim to explain the interaction among policy actors and the influence thereof on the extent to which adaptation policy in response to climate change becomes gender responsive. The empirical basis of our study regards Ethiopia’s Climate Resilient Strategy for Agriculture and Forest. Data was collected...

From a participatory governance perspective, managing changes in ecosystems requires involvement of stakeholders. However, when the impacts of such changes are unclear or unknown, problem perceptions are latent and stakeholders cannot be identified. To elicit perceptions of an ecosystem change despite unknown impacts, we employed Q methodology rega...

Using the notion of institutional interplay, which refers to situations where the operation or consequences of one regime influence another regime, the article explores the interplay between planned adaptation and farmer households’ autonomous adaptation. Drawing empirical data from two drought-prone districts in Northeastern Ethiopia (Kobo and Ray...

We address the development of policy by polycentric governance configurations, taking Caribbean overseas territories and their advancements on invasive alien species (IAS) policy as an example. The British, Dutch, and French islands in the Caribbean address this matter to different degrees, which we analyzed through differences in their type of pol...

Reindeer herding (RDH) is a livelihood strategy deeply connected to Sami cultural tradition. This article explores the implications of two theoretical and methodological approaches for grasping complex socio-environmental relationships of RDH in Subarctic Sweden. Based on joint fieldwork, two teams – one that aligns itself with political ecology (P...

External actor interventions in community forest management (CFM) attempt to support communities with developing forest institutions and/or improving their livelihoods portfolio. Common pool resource (CPR) scholars argue that forest institutions are required to prevent overharvesting of the forest resource stock (appropriation dilemma), and to enco...

While adaptation has received a fair amount of attention in the climate change debate, barriers to adaptation are the focus of a more specific, recent discussion. In this discussion, such barriers are generally treated as having a uniform, negative impact on all actors. However, we argue that the precise nature and impact of such barriers on differ...

The spectre of regulatory reform carried out in a range of Western countries has generated concern amongst parts of the environmental policy community. Quality and effectiveness are said to be at stake, but empirically there is a dearth of data on the relationship between provisions for quality control and the effects on quality and effectiveness....

Considerable attention has been given to the effectiveness of environmental impact assessment (EIA) since the 1970s. Relatively few research studies, however, have approached EIA as an instrument of environmental governance, and have explored the mechanisms through which EIA influences the behaviour of actors involved in planning processes. Consequ...

The spectre of regulatory reform carried out in a range of Western countries has generated concern amongst parts of the environmental policy community. Quality and effectiveness are said to be at stake, but empirically there is a dearth of data on the relationship between provisions for quality control and the effects on quality and effectiveness....

This article considers how competing interpretations of rights upon forestland affect indigenous peoples' ability to derive benefits from forests, using interviews and an evaluation exercise in 13 First Nations communities in New Brunswick, Canada. We asked first what First Nations expect from provincial forest governance arrangements, and second,...

International bureaucracies influence global governance processes as independent agents. Biermann and Siebenhüner (Managers of global change: the influence of international environmental bureaucracies. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2009) have developed an analytical framework to measure and explain the degree of autonomous influence of bureaucracies. We te...

In this paper we use a case study of the Rhine River to examine the relevance of Common Pool Resource (CPR) Theory for two conditions in which it has not been extensively tested: large scale international water management and pollution problems. For that purpose, we link variation in pollution abatement to a set of explanatory variables proposed by...

The commons literature tends to treat community development as one of the independent variables that can explain variation in commons governance outcomes. The community development literature treats community development as its primary dependent variable, and studies how it can be achieved. We feel that the obvious complementarity between both trad...

Why is local environmental governance in Brazil shaped through the collective action of many, frequently interacting actors in some municipalities, whilst in others it does not take the form of deliberative and inclusive decision-making? I address this question by zooming in on Brazil's Conselhos Municipais de Meio Ambiente (participatory municipal...

Conflict may simultaneously help and hinder the local governance of community forests. Based on 499 observations of forest user groups included in the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) database, it is shown here that variables which are associated with good community forestry outcomes also correlate positively with the occurr...

The governance of community forests requires that resource appropriators overcome collective action dilemmas. Often, forest communities appear unable to do this. External actors then present themselves to help. Inducing the organization of communities through external actors is common practice in development efforts in general, and in community for...

The European Union (EU) Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Directive which was introduced some 25 years ago has had a major impact on decision-making practices in EU member states. In the professional literature, this impact has mostly been discussed under the heading of "effectiveness", with an emphasis being given in particular to procedural e...

Conflict may simultaneously help and hinder the local governance of community forests. Based on 499 observations of forest user groups included in the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) database, it is shown here that variables which are associated with good community forestry outcomes also correlate positively with the occurr...

The European Union (EU) Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Directive which was introduced some 25 years ago has had a major impact on decision-making practices in EU member states. In the professional literature, this impact has mostly been discussed under the heading of "effectiveness", with an emphasis being given in particular to procedural e...

In the last decade, many authors have observed shifts from government to governance in the environmental policy domain. However, a clear conceptual framework to differentiate between modes of environmental governance is lacking and our understanding of when, how and why environmental governance changes from one mode to another is limited. In this p...

http://www.thecommonsjournal.org/index.php/ijc/article/view/325/232

See http://www.thecommonsjournal.org/index.php/ijc/issue/view/19

See: http://www.thecommonsjournal.org/index.php/ijc/issue/view/17

The effectiveness of forest governance practices has consequences that range from the local to the global level. In general, the study of community forest governance relies heavily on case-study materials. The strength of single case and small-N comparative studies is related to the ability to uncover the nuances of time and place specific particul...

http://www.amazon.com/Local-Governments-Rural-Development-Comparing/dp/0816527016

Governments are increasingly devolving governance of natural resources from central administrations to subnational levels. Researchers routinely document the complexity and contradictions of this process, but policy prescriptions and their underlying theoretical models remain overly simplified. Going beyond classical statements in the policy litera...

http://www.thecommonsjournal.org/index.php/ijc/article/view/76/7

Efforts to engage citizens in democratic forms of governance in developing societies are complicated by deeply rooted socioeconomic and political inequalities. In this article, the authors analyze the conditions under which local politicians in rural areas of Latin America are likely to open up to citizen participation in governance decisions. The...

http://www.thecommonsjournal.org/index.php/ijc/issue/view/18

"Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2010. Since its appearance, the book has changed the agenda of commons research and practice. True to its title, it has sparked a search for ways to actually govern the commons--rather than simply declaring them anachronisms, for which there is no place in a world that looks...