By Tolera Senbeto Jiren
The sustainable governance of interdependent policy goals such as food security and biodiversity conservation is often facilitated or constrained by the broader political economy of a country. This is true because institutional configurations are shaped by the underlying premises of the chosen political economy. For instance, while numerous countries currently pursue a market based neoliberal institutional arrangement, Ethiopia has adopted Democratic Developmentalism as its paradigm – a developmental state thesis with a strong state dictation both in the human and economic development of the country. While the qualitative study around this unique form of political economy is interesting, it is also important to understand how institutions are aligned or networked to address two pertinent development agendas, namely ensuring food security and biodiversity. Understanding the governance network for these two agendas is important because it lays the foundation for how different interests, policies, and strategies can be integrated.
Under Joern Fischer’s ERC funded project, social-ecological system properties benefiting food security and biodiversity, I am looking at the governance dimension of food security and biodiversity conservation, looking at the case study in Ethiopia. Here, we want to share the findings of our recent paper published in Land Use Policy that uncovered the governance structural pattern for the integrated governance of food security and biodiversity in a multi-level governance context. For this, using the snowball sampling technique, we identified and collected relational data from 244 stakeholders (a group of individuals and organizations), from the local to the national governance level. Through a social network analysis, we mapped the structural pattern, integration mechanisms and stakeholders’ roles in the integration of food security and biodiversity.
Of the 244 stakeholders, we found that 80% of them were governmental organizations, and 71% were simultaneously involved in the governance of both food security and biodiversity. These stakeholders maintained 1884 collaborations in total, of which approximately half were about food security alone. Concerning the structural pattern, we mapped the stakeholders pattern of interaction in both sectors (see Fig. 2 in the paper). We found that stakeholders were hierarchically structured, with no reported direct interaction spanning two levels of governance, only ever to the same or the nearest level up or down the governance hierarchy. Moreover, despite sharing geographical boundaries, no horizontal linkages were reported between stakeholders in the adjacent three districts (“woredas”). This could create structural gaps and consequently lead to an implementation deficit and institutional misfit.
Importantly, we identified two mechanisms through which stakeholders integrated food security and biodiversity goals. One the one hand, individual stakeholders – mostly at the implementation governance level – integrated the two goals through forming interactions with other partners separately for the food security and biodiversity issues. That means, individual stakeholders held both policy goals but with interaction separately either about food security or biodiversity, which we termed individual integration. On the other hand, few stakeholders – mostly administrative sector stakeholders – had integrated the two policy goals by forming interaction with other partners simultaneously about food security and biodiversity. Here, an interaction between stakeholders simultaneously carried both food security as well as biodiversity issues, which we termed collaborative integration. We argue that individual integration could help a specific stakeholder to pursue their own respective goals in a coherent fashion, while collaborative integration facilitates the system-level integration of food security and biodiversity conservation.
Interestingly, we found that stakeholders with connecting roles (measured in terms of high betweenness centrality, and liaison brokerage) were largely from administrative sectors, who held formal authority, key structural positions, and popularity. While this could help these stakeholders effectively exercise their roles, however, unless properly managed, there is a high risk of power capture by these stakeholders. In general, we concluded that sustainability could be enhanced through multiple horizontal and vertical connections. Thus, a governance network that fosters stakeholders’ multi-level ties across jurisdictions, and enhances multi-sector interaction would likely improve integration outcomes, social learning, and provide opportunities to identify integration problems.
