Martin Sjöstedt

University of Gothenburg | GU · Department of Political Science

Conservation rules – e.g. protected area regulations that aim to reduce wildlife poaching – often have an inherent challenge: while relying on that locals should share intelligence about observed crime to authorities, such rules tend to be weakly supported by these communities. Enforcement officials of conservation authorities (such as rangers) are...

Objective While trust is proposed as a key concept to understand people's compliance in natural resource governance, research would benefit from being more precise. Our aim is to test whether more specific survey measures of people's tendency to violate rules and the degree to which law enforcing rangers are seen as corrupt trumps more commonly use...

The destruction of the Amazon is a major global environmental issue, not only because of greenhouse gas emissions or direct impacts on biodiversity and livelihoods, but also due to the forest's role as a tipping element in the Earth System. With nearly a fifth of the Amazon already lost, there are already signs of an imminent forest dieback process...

This article focuses on social control and states’ broadcasting of power over inhospitable terrains. It uses the case of conservation of wildlife in two African Peace Parks to explore how the involved states strike the balance between cooperation and coercion in their efforts to mold citizen behavior toward quasi-voluntary compliance. The case of w...

Although subsistence poaching is a large threat to wildlife conservation in Southern Africa, this behavior is seldom researched. Our understanding of individual and community level factors that drive such behavior is limited because of both lack of data and the literature's predominant focus on commercial poaching. The main objective of this study...

The phenomenon of collective action and the origin of collective action problems have been extensively and systematically studied in the social sciences. Yet, while we have substantial knowledge about the factors promoting collective action at the local level, we know far less about how these insights travel to large-scale collective action problem...

To what extent and how do men and women differ in their attitudes about poaching? Although research suggests that women can be more concerned about environmental degradation than men, inquiries about communities in protected areas are ambiguous: women are disproportionately affected by anti‐poaching laws and can have greater motivations to violate...

Local communities’ perceptions of protected areas are important determinants of the success of conservation efforts in Southern Africa, as these perceptions affect people’s attitudes and behaviour with respect to conservation. As a result, the involvement of local communities in transboundary wildlife conservation is now viewed as an integral part...

This article takes its point of departure in the rapidly expanding field of research focusing on governance of large and complex systems and argues that this research should more explicitly recognize ongoing theoretical debates within contemporary and more mainstream governance research in order to fulfill all of its potential. This includes explic...

The advent of ‘Peace Parks’ on the African continent is puzzling from the perspective of institutional theory. We focus on the world’s largest transfrontier conservation cooperation that exists to date, the Kavango–Zambezi Treaty, which was ratified by Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe in 2011. The collaboration seeks to foster sustai...

An outspoken commitment in international development assistance is to promote donor coordination. Yet, how this ambition plays out in practice, or how feasible and realistic it is, has rarely been evaluated. Using the fisheries sector as a critical case, this article explores whether two major international actors, the United Nations Food and Agric...

Small island developing states (SIDS) have been identified as particularly vulnerable to natural disasters and climate change. However, although SIDS have similar geographical features, natural hazards produce different outcomes in different states, indicating variation in vulnerability. The objective of this article is to explore the sources of th...

Island states have been shown to outperform continental states on a number of large-scale coordination-related outcomes, such as levels of democracy and institutional quality. The argument developed and tested in this article contends that the same kind of logic may apply to islands' environmental performance, too. However, the empirical analysis s...

Resilience thinking has in recent decades emerged as a key perspective within research and policy focusing on sustainable development and the global environmental challenges of today. Originating from ecology, the concept has gained a reputation far beyond its original disciplinary borders and now plays a key role in the study and practice of envir...

In this article, we explore the process of economic change following the NGO-led implementation of a small-scale off-grid hydropower system in Tanzania. We examine how the implementing actor deals with economic challenges and local ownership in order to achieve sustainable electricity supply. The qualitative case study shows that the NGO, ACRA-CCS,...

An influential scholarship holds that the behavior of political elites – that is, elected and non-elected public officials – is of key importance for achieving quality of government (Klitgaard, 1988; Goldsmith, 2001; Acemoglu and Robinson, 2006, 2012; North, Wallis, and Weingast, 2009; Fukuyama, 2011). The influence of political elites is assumed t...

The purpose of the United Nations-guided process to establish Sustainable Development Goals is to galvanize governments and civil society to rise to the interlinked environmental, societal, and economic challenges we face in the Anthropocene. We argue that the process of setting Sustainable Development Goals should take three key aspects into consi...

This chapter examines enforcement and compliance in the fisheries of sub-Saharan Africa, with particular emphasis on the dynamic interaction between ruler and ruled. The theoretical starting point in this chapter is that while fisheries management, as well as wildlife management in general, highlights two fundamental relationships in society—a hori...

The world's fisheries are under severe pressure. Yet, according to the marine trophic index, the health and stability of marine ecosystems vary greatly across countries. The argument developed and tested in this article holds that some of the sources of this variation can potentially be derived from differences in the character of two fundamental r...

The international community has in recent decades supported the installment of formal regulations and institutions for monitoring, control, and surveillance to decrease illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing in African nations. Yet, few studies have investigated the effectiveness of these reforms. By conducting a systematic comparison of the...

SUMMARY Although recent years have witnessed substantial changes in the global aid architecture, less effort has been devoted to investigating the process of implementing those changes. By using the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) as an illustrative and critical case, this article shows how a donor development priority—g...

While there is an impressive amount of research - theoretical propositions as well as empirical results - focusing on how ecosystem services can contribute to poverty reduction and resilience, it is less clear how this knowledge is operationalized and applied among development agencies and development practitioners. This article investigates this b...

Policy makers and policy-oriented scholars concerned with development and reform commonly appeal to “political will” as a cornerstone of development. We question the circular and voluntaristic view of leadership behavior inherent in such an approach, and argue that—to be more useful for the analysis of development outcomes, as well as for policy de...

The argument developed and tested in this paper contends that the lack of success in past decades when it comes to increasing water coverage levels – particularly in sub-Saharan Africa – is attributable to the institutional arrangements under which land is managed. In short, the starting point is that if water coverage levels are to increase, some...

Despite the importance of high-quality institutions for successful development outcomes, there is great variation in levels of institutional quality across countries. In other words, while the leaders of some countries promote the development of good government, others do not. The aim of this paper is to contribute to an increased understanding of...

During the past decades, the worldwide spread of the human immuno-deficiency virus (HIV) has created one of the deadliest epidemics in history. In 2006, a total of 39.5 million people were living with HIV. Sub-Saharan Africa is clearly the most affected area of the world with more than 24 million people estimated to be infected with HIV in 2006 (UN...

Food insecurity has been widely claimed as a causal factor behind recent revolutions and political uprisings such as the Arab spring. However, although there are strong, intuitive, reasons to believe that food insecurity poses a severe challenge to the stability of political systems and the elite’s hold on power, such popular claims and anecdotal e...