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Socioeconomic inequalities complicate the local governance process, especially in low- and middle-income countries. With limited public resources and high socioeconomic inequalities, local governments can find themselves in a vicious circle of increasing inequalities, declining ability to address needs, and mounting social problems. Here, we investigate a possible way out of the vicious circle: policy interventions that help reduce the strain of inequality on local government responsiveness. We argue that interventions are effective in dampening the strain when these recognize the leadership role of local government officials. To test our arguments, we analyze longitudinal data on how citizen satisfaction with local governments varies in 56 Chilean territories over a 15-year period. We find that high socioeconomic inequality is associated with lower overall citizen satisfaction with local government performance, but exogenous interventions can dampen this association when local politicians take the lead in planning and implementing the interventions. 

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 gap, this paper proposes that local initiatives that pursue three particular pathways are more likely to generate improvements in social-ecological outcomes: (1) maintaining close connections with local grassroots, (2) pursuing diversity in productive activities performed and partnership choices, and (3) developing cross-scale collaborations. To test these ideas we collected and analyzed observations of 157 initiatives in Brazil and Peru, applying a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses. Our results show that initiatives maintaining groundedness in representing the interests and concerns of local actors while partnering with other organizations at multiple scales are more likely to develop joint solutions to social-ecological problems. Partnerships and support from external organizations may strengthen and enhance local capabilities, providing a platform for negotiating interests and finding common ground. Such diversified pathways demonstrate the power of local actors to transcend their own territories and have broader impacts in sustainability objectives. Our findings highlight the need to make governmental and non-governmental support (e.g., financial, technical, political) available according to local needs to enable local initiatives’ own ways of addressing global environmental change. 

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, we utilize data from a lab-in-the-field behavioral experiment conducted with Honduran health workers across decentralized and centrally administered municipalities. We presented health workers with an incentivized effort task that included instructions that were neutral, had a bottom-up political accountability prompt, or a top-down bureaucratic accountability prompt. Our results show that administrative context moderates the accountability-to-effort relationship. With neutral instructions, civil servants in decentralized systems exert greater quality effort than their counterparts under centralized administration. Importantly, both accountability prompts increase quality effort in centrally administered settings to levels comparable with those in decentralized settings. These findings support multiple accountability as a potentially important mechanism linking decentralization reform to improved service delivery. 

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 investment decisions. We examine hypotheses on moderating effects with regression methods, using data from 345 Chilean municipalities over a nine-year period, and analyzing the evidence with support of qualitative data. Our results reveal that municipal organizational robustness—operational rules, planning, managerial flexibility and integration, and accountability—is the most quantitatively outstanding moderating factor. The evidence leads us to deduce that efforts to support local governments in the emerging policy domain of resilient critical infrastructure require special attention to the robustness of municipal institutional arrangements. The results are valid for countries where the local governments have responsibilities to fulfill and their decisions have consequences for the adaptation. Since one of the objectives of the Special Issue “Bringing Governance Back Home—Lessons for Local Government Regarding Rapid Climate Action” is to explore how action is enabled or constrained by institutional relations in which the actors are embedded, this study contributes to achieving the goal. 

Strong local institutions are important for the successful governance of common-pool resources (CPRs), but why do such institutions emerge in the first place and why do they sometimes not emerge at all? We argue that voluntary local leaders play an important role in the initiation of self-governance institutions because such leaders can directly affect local users’ perceived costs and benefits associated with self-rule. Drawing on recent work on leadership in organizational behavior, we propose that voluntary leaders can facilitate a cooperative process of local rule creation by exhibiting unselfish behavior and leading by example. We posit that such forms of leadership are particularly important when resource users are weakly motivated to act collectively, such as when confronted with “creeping” environmental problems. We test these ideas by using observations from a laboratory-in-the-field experiment with 128 users of forest commons in Bolivia and Uganda. We find that participants’ agreement to create new rules was significantly stronger in group rounds where voluntary, unselfish leaders were present. We show that unselfish leadership actions make the biggest difference for rule creation under high levels of uncertainty, such as when the resource is in subtle decline and intragroup communication sparse. 

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 col­lec­tive-ac­tion ca­pa­bil­i­ties – be­cause these fac­tors will help de­ter­mine the ef­fec­tive­ness of such in­ter­ven­tions. To test the ef­fects of a suite of con­tex­tual fac­tors, we an­a­lyzed ob­ser­va­tions from 184 dif­fer­ent groups in 133 forests across eight de­vel­op­ing coun­tries. We find that the com­bi­na­tion of cer­tain en­abling fac­tors in­creases the prob­a­bil­ity of users un­der­tak­ing for­est im­prove­ment ac­tiv­i­ties, and that so­cial con­texts can con­di­tion the ef­fect of in­sti­tu­tional and bio­phys­i­cal con­texts. Our find­ings carry im­pli­ca­tions for the de­sign and im­ple­men­ta­tion of fu­ture in­ter­ven­tions to re­store forests in de­vel­op­ing coun­tries.