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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. 

At the turn of the century, irrigators in San Luis Valley (SLV), Colorado confronted a reality of precipitously dropping water levels of their shared groundwater resource stemming from their collective overextraction. Rather than continuing with business as usual—risking further declines and potential state intervention—they decided to self-organize and agreed to adopt a pumping fee, substantially increasing the cost of water—one of their key agricultural inputs. This innovative approach to conservation departs from those commonly championed by many groundwater stakeholders, who tend to favor conservation policies that decrease—not increase—costs, such as subsidizing more efficient irrigation technology or paying farmers to fallow their land. Despite few empirical examples of the introduction of a pumping fee, there are sound economic reasons to consider this approach. In this article, we review the adoption of this home-made policy, discussing the process and reasoning behind the stakeholders’ choices, the economic theory that supports it, and some of the agricultural, hydrological, and social outcomes that have resulted from it. The case study illuminates the potential benefits of a groundwater fee but also highlights that policy choices are multifaceted and what works in one scenario does not imply it is a panacea. The article concludes with a discussion of a recent and surprising policy move: SLV farmers have decided to increase the primary groundwater pumping fee exponentially to $500 per acre-foot (10 times the original fee in 2009). We discuss how this new policy represents a shift from a Pigouvian tax structure to what resembles more of a cap-and-trade system. While the results of this latest policy innovation are still unknown, the eventual results promise to be instructive not only to SLV but also to other areas facing similar water scarcity issues. 

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’ responses to water crises and consider the immediate and lasting impacts of technical and behavioral interventions. Leveraging our 2 case studies in Latin America, we identify how the unique policy contexts affected the interventions used and helped determine their outcomes. Four factors are identified as particularly relevant as follows: the differential roles of scientific and technical perspectives in each context, the role of ideology, the complexity of the environmental policy problems in each setting, and the varied roles of policy entrepreneurs in Bogota and Mexico City. 

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 classify a problem into 1 of the 3 main problem categories, and then for each of the problem types think about contextual factors that will influence the choice of policy responses. The main problem types are (1) common-pool resource (CPR) problems (e.g., overfishing, groundwater depletion, and forest degradation); (2) pollution problems (e.g., greenhouse gas emissions, eutrophication, acid rain, and smog); and (3) hazards (natural and human-made hazards, including hurricanes, wildfires, and levy collapse). For each of these problems, the framework asks users to consider several contextual factors that are known to influence the likely effectiveness of different policy responses, particularly fast-thinking behavior. The framework is a heuristic tool that will help novice analysts develop a deeper understanding of the problems at hand and an appreciation for the complexities involved in coming up with workable solutions to environmental challenges. The proposed framework is not prescriptive but analytical in that it asks users guiding questions to assess multiple aspects of a problem. The resulting problem assessment helps to narrow down the number of viable options for environmental policy responses, each of which may, in turn, be assessed with an eye toward their legal, political, and social viability. 

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 that more frequent exposure to forests, and more pro-environmental values will be associated with more conservation action. However, we find that other values—tradition and conformity—are more important than pro-environmental values or exposure to nature. Our results imply that resource governance is likely to be more successful where resource users hold values that facilitate cooperation, not necessarily strong pro-environmental values. 

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. 

Abstract 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 the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. One prominent theory argues that policy actors will trust and utilize research findings when they perceive them to be salient, credible and legitimate. We draw on this theory to examine the conditions facilitating greater uptake of new knowledge among health officials when engagement is out of reach and they are instead exposed to new ideas through written mass communication. Using data from a survey experiment with about 260 health workers and administrators in Honduras, we find that messages from a technocratic sender based on statistical evidence improved perceptions of salience, credibility and legitimacy (SCL). Additionally, perceptions of SCL are three contextual features that operate as joint mediators between knowledge and action, and several individual characteristics also influence whether officials trust research findings enough to apply them when formulating and implementing health policies. This research can help inform the design of context-sensitive knowledge translation and exchange strategies to advance the goals of evidence-based public health, particularly in settings where direct engagement is difficult to achieve. 

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.