Krister P Andersson

University of Notre Dame | ND · Keough School of Global Affairs

Incentives are a widely used tool for addressing deforestation and are often implemented as collective contracts. Local institutions are crucial to the solution of collective action problems associated with forest conservation, but we still have little knowledge of how to encourage institutional creation through policy. Since collective contracts d...

How can global megacities respond to increased threats from natural hazards? Looking at hazard events that produced drinking water crises in Bogota, Colombia, and Mexico City, Mexico, we compare these cities’ efforts to decrease potable water consumption. We ask how and why the socioeconomic and biophysical contexts shape city policymakers’ respons...

The complexities of many environmental problems make the task of identifying potential solutions daunting. We present a diagnostic framework to help guide environmental policy analysts and practitioners to think more systematically about the major types of environmental problems and their possible policy responses. Our framework helps the user clas...

Decentralization reform has both advantages and risks. Bringing service delivery “closer to the people” can improve information flows and strengthen accountability, but it may also leave systems vulnerable to elite capture and corruption by municipal government officials. While past research has acknowledged the possibility of corruption under dece...

The Amazon has a diverse array of social and environmental initiatives that adopt forest-based land-use practices to promote rural development and support local livelihoods. However, they are often insufficiently recognized as transformative pathways to sustainability and the factors that explain their success remain understudied. To address this g...

The introduction of formal collective property rights to forest lands appears to have improved both environmental and economic outcomes, but there is limited evidence on how these reforms affect cooperative behavior among local resource users. We propose that when national governments issue collective land rights, they strengthen the collective psy...

We present the results of a hybrid research design that borrows from both experimental techniques—experimental games—and observational techniques—surveys—to examine the relationships between basic human values and exposure to natural ecosystems, on the one hand, and collective action for resource governance, on the other. We initially hypothesize t...

While monetary incentives may be a promising tool for encouraging tropical forest conservation in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the equity implications of such incentives are drawing scrutiny. Furthermore, little is known about how program design shapes perceptions of fairness and equity among program participants, and it remains unclea...

Designing adaptive institutions for achieving sustainable groundwater use is a central challenge to local and state governments. This challenge is exacerbated by the growing impacts and uncertainty of climate change on water resources. Calls to reform water governance systems are often made in the context of these challenges, and reform efforts inc...

India has been hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the context of a larger quasi-experimental impact assessment, we assess the pandemic’s effects on household coping behavior in 80 villages spread across four districts and three states (n = 772). Half of these villages were targeted by a largescale common land restoration program spearheaded by a...

This research chapter (available at https://www.mdpi.com/books/book/5605) investigates the causes and consequences of municipal institutional arrangements for the provision of resilient critical infrastructure in municipalities. The study explains how the municipal organizational robustness and external institutional dynamics moderate the relation...

Scholars and practitioners often promote direct engagement between policymakers, health workers, and researchers as a strategy for overcoming barriers to utilizing scientific knowledge in health policy. However, in many settings public health officials rarely have opportunities to interact with researchers, which is a problem further exacerbated by...

Governance reforms like decentralization and performance-based management aim to improve public services by increasing accountability among street-level bureaucrats: bureaucrats may be held to account by communities, supervisors, intermediary organizations, or all of these. To assess the relationship between accountability and bureaucratic effort,...

This research article investigates the causes and consequences of municipal institutional arrangements for the provision of resilient critical infrastructure in municipalities. The study explains how the municipal organizational robustness and external institutional dynamics moderate the relation between capacities, leadership, and local government...

Collective action among public officials is necessary for the effective delivery of many social services, but relatively little is known about how it can be fostered through policy reforms. In this article, we compare cooperation among public officials within decentralized versus centrally‐administered municipalities in Honduras. Leveraging a quasi...

The purpose of this review is to assess the extent to which the research outputs of Flagship 5 of the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM5) have been used to inform decisions and behaviors of representatives of government organizations, development agencies, researchers, donors, private firms, nongovernment organizati...

Introduction Public policies are institutional arrangements that set the official rules of the game for society as we work together to provide public goods and solve complex social dilemmas, such as maintaining orderly and healthy communities, educating the public, protecting vulnerable populations, and sustaining natural resources. Designing polic...

This chapter reviews why people design institutions to solve shared problems and what makes institutions work, focusing on Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) research. It extracts practical insights and research strategies from IAD scholarship framework and provides a brief background of the IAD's foundational concepts and the framework's...

From state-based developmentalism to community-based initiatives to market-based conservation, the Brazilian Amazon has been a laboratory of development interventions for over 50 years. The region is now confronting a devastating COVID-19 pandemic amid renewed environmental pressures and increasing social inequities. While these forces are shaping...

Public service delivery improves when civil servants work together effectively as teams. While decentralization reforms are common strategies for enhancing health services delivery in developing countries, most studies emphasize their effects through rational‐choice mechanisms. Fewer studies consider the behavioral implications of decentralization...

Community-based conservation (CBC) is essential to promoting biodiversity protection and livelihood development. Despite significant financial and institutional investment, performance of CBC interventions is mixed, with shortcomings especially evident in wildlife-based CBC in Africa. CBC outcomes are typically evaluated through household livelihoo...

Significance We offer evidence on the role of local, voluntary leaders during the initial stages of the self-governance process. Our findings, which show that unselfish leadership actions can foster self-governance under conditions that are unfavorable for collective action, provide hope for efforts to address creeping environmental degradation pro...

Health systems strengthening is at the forefront of the global health agenda. Many health systems in low-resource settings face profound challenges, and robust causal evidence on the effects of health systems reforms is lacking. Decentralization has been one of the most prominent reforms, and after more than 50 years of implementation and hundreds...

This article draws on health sector reform in Honduras to examine the mechanisms through which governance reforms shape the behavior of street‐level bureaucrats. It combines insights from behavioral public administration with original data from lab‐in‐the‐field workshops conducted with more than 200 bureaucrats to assess the relationship between de...

Despite considerable advances in developing new and more sophisticated impact evaluation methodologies and toolkits, policy research continues to suffer from persistent challenges in achieving the evaluation trifecta: identifying effects, isolating mechanisms, and influencing policy. For example, evaluation studies are routinely hampered by problem...

Social, biophysical, and institutional contexts affect forest users’ incentives to work together to restore forests. With renewed government commitments to support such activities, we argue that effective interventions need to consider several context-specific factors – such as the user groups’ future discount rates, opportunity costs, and collecti...

Interventions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions strive to promote gender balance so that men and women have equal rights to participate in, and benefit from, decision-making about such interventions. One conventional way to achieve gender balance is to introduce gender quotas. Here we show that gender quotas make interventions more effective and l...

Sustainability scientists argue that in order to make better use of scientific knowledge in public problem solving and decision making, researchers need to engage directly with decision makers. The problem in many policy settings, especially in developing countries, is that the local-level actors tasked with policy implementation are spread throug...

In this study, we identify institutional factors and processes that foster local government decisions about disaster risk reduction, especially critical infrastructure investments and maintenance. We propose that municipal institutional capacities, organization, leadership, and multilevel governance will affect critical infrastructure investments b...

Most of our research is about figuring out why some local governments more than others decide to invest their scarce public resources in infrastructure improvements. In this short essay, we share some of our most surprising results.First, and perhaps most surprisingly, we have found little evidence in support of commonly held notions about what mak...

Research that employs the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework offers a theoretically rich approach for diagnosing and assessing public policies. However, the complexity of the framework, and its related theories, can challenge researchers interested in its application. This article offers a novel synthesis of the IAD literature a...

Interventions to strengthen forest conservation in tropical biomes face multiple challenges. Insecure land tenure and unequal benefit sharing within forest user groups are two of the most important. Using original household-level survey data from 130 villages in six countries, we assess how current wealth inequality relates to tenure security and b...

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) represent a popular strategy for environmental protection, and tropical forest conservation in particular. Little is known, however, about their effectiveness. Many argue that even if PES increase conservation while payments last, they may adversely affect other motivations for pro-environmental behaviour in th...

Many globally important groundwater aquifers are under considerable stress as withdrawals, predominantly for irrigation, outpace recharge. Meanwhile, groundwater policy to address the common-pool resource losses remains in its nascent stage. This study analyzes a recent and unique bottom-up effort to self-impose a groundwater pumping fee in San Lui...

We study how the local institutional context shapes local government decisions about responses to perceived threats of natural disasters and climatic change. We draw on institutional theories and field observations to develop hypotheses about the effects of municipal institutional arrangements, social capital, and multilevel governance. To test the...

We study how the local institutional context shapes local government decisions about responses to perceived threats of natural disasters and climatic change. We draw on institutional theories and field observations to develop hypotheses about the effects of municipal institutional arrangements, social capital, and multilevel governance. To test the...

We draw on neo-institutional theories to understand the impact of local governance performance, government decisions, social capital, and their role in driving local efforts to reduce risks associated with climate change and future disasters. We propose that institutional municipal arrangements and characteristics such as national policies, multile...

Cities are key sites of action for adaptation to climate change. However, there are a wide variety of responses to hazards at the municipal level. Why do communities take adaptive action in the face of weather- and climate-related risk?We studied what cities are doing in response to existing natural hazards, such as floods, droughts, and blizzards...

Concerned with the challenges of sustainable development, policy makers and scholars often urge nongovernmental organizations to increase their efforts to support governance of natural resources in developing countries. How does funding from external NGOs influence the responsiveness of local government policy to the sector-specific needs and polic...

Why do some local governments successfully address issues related to environmental disaster risk management (EDRM), while others do not? This research contributes to a growing literature about the relationships between institutions, multilevel governance, and EDRM at the local level in developing countries. Supported by the frameworks of institutio...

The purpose of this study is to identify institutional factors and processes that foster local government decisions about disaster risk reduction, especially critical infrastructure investments and maintenance. We propose that municipal institutional capacities, organization, leadership, and multilevel governance will affect critical infrastructure...

Significance Decentralization is one of the most important innovations in environmental policy during the past 30 years. Despite the pervasiveness and large amounts of resources invested to implement these reforms, little is known about their environmental effects. Given worldwide interest in forest conservation, this lack of knowledge hampers effo...

The book may be ordered directly from the publisher at http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10777.html Sustainability is a global imperative and a scientific challenge like no other. This concise guide provides students and practitioners with a strategic framework for linking knowledge with action in the pursuit of sustainable development, and serve...

Sustainability is a global imperative and a scientific challenge like no other. This concise guide provides students and practitioners with a strategic framework for linking knowledge with action in the pursuit of sustainable development, and serves as an invaluable companion to more narrowly focused courses dealing with sustainability in particula...

In this handbook, we investigate the effects of payment for forest conservation on the forest and on users’ by implementing a set of activities simulating the use of a forest by a forest community. We look at the effectiveness of four different ways of providing the payment in four different variations of the activity, with an aditional variation i...

Shifting cultivation is a traditional agricultural practice in most tropical regions of the world and has the potential to provide for human livelihoods while hosting substantial biodiversity. Little is known about the resilience of shifting cultivation to increasing agricultural demands on the landscape or to unexpected disturbances. To investigat...

Tree plantations play a controversial role in many nations' efforts to balance goals for economic development, ecological conservation, and social justice. This paper seeks to contribute to this debate by analyzing the socioeconomic impact of such plantations. We focus our study on Chile, a country that has experienced extraordinary growth of indus...

Tree plantations play a controversial role in many nations’ efforts to balance goals for economic development, ecological conservation, and social justice. This paper seeks to contribute to this debate by analyzing the socioeconomic impact of such plantations. We focus our study on Chile, a country that has experienced extraordinary growth of indus...

Un articulo traducido del original, publicado como Andersson, K. 2013. Local Forest Governance and the Role of External Organizations: Some Ties Matter More than Others. World Development 43 (1): 226-237) Los esfuerzos locales por gobernar los bosques pueden beneficiarse del apoyo de organizaciones que operan en escalas de gobernanza más amplias....

In the discourses on who should benefit from national REDD+ implementation, rights-based approaches are prominent across various countries. Options on how to create viable property rights arrangements are currently being debated by scholars, policy makers and practitioners alike. Many REDD+ advocates argue that assigning carbon rights represents a...

In the discourses on who should benefit from national REDD+ implementation, rights-based approaches are prominent across various countries. Options on how to create viable property rights arrangements are currently being debated by scholars, policy makers, and practitioners alike. Many REDD+ advocates argue that assigning carbon rights represents a...

Skewed distributions of benefits from natural resources can fuel social exclusion and conflict, threatening sustainability. This paper analyzes how user-group property rights to harvest forest products affect the distribution of benefits from those products within user groups. We argue that groups with recognized harvesting rights share benefits mo...

Efforts to promote forest conservation have focused on two separate types of policy reforms. Decentralization reforms have attempted to make local forest governance more accountable to demands from voters. Meanwhile, Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes like the REDD program (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) hav...

Efforts to promote forest conservation have focused on two separate types of policy reforms. Decentralization reforms have attempted to make local forest governance more accountable to demands from voters. Meanwhile, Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes like the REDD program (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) hav...

Under what conditions are irrigators able to develop adaptive governance arrangements? This paper addresses this question by developing an empirically-grounded theory of self-governance of a snowmelt commons in Southern Colorado. Drawing on previous work in collective action and institutional theory, we argue that self-regulation of the hydro-commo...

Tree plantations play a controversial role in many nations’ efforts to balance goals for economic development, ecological conservation, and social justice. This paper seeks to contribute to this debate by analyzing the socioeconomic impact of such plantations. We focus our study on Chile, a country that has experienced extraordinary growth of indus...

The world's forests and forestry sector are facing unprecedented biological, political, social and climatic challenges. The development of appropriate, novel forest management and restoration approaches that adequately consider uncertainty and adaptability are hampered by a continuing focus on production of a few goods or objectives, strong control...