Modes of Coordination and Performance in Polycentric Governance: Disentangling Complexity

Governance becomes ever more interconnected and multilevel, and polycentric governance has been developed as a lens to analyze this complexity. At an aggregate level, it explores whether multiple autonomous actors are able to coordinate across interdependent sectors, scales, and decision-making arenas. It remains unclear, however, which factors shape polycentric governance in a particular social-ecological context, and what performance results from this governance; there has been no systematic way of mapping the shape that coordination adopts in polycentric governance. This volume develops and illustrates an approach to disentangling hybrid modes of coordination in polycentric governance, its determinants and outcomes. The authors build on the Institutional Analysis and Development framework, the flagship analytical tool of the Bloomington School of institutional analysis, and on the idea of governance hybrids. They propose that polycentric systems can be systematically characterized by looking at how competitive, cooperative, and hierarchical governance solutions coexist in providing multi-level coordination among actors. The framework is applied across five empirical chapters that explore diverse cases of water, energy, infrastructure, and mining governance in the United States, Switzerland, Mongolia, and Uganda, leading to the suggestion of context-dependent types of hybrids. The analytical approach, its ontological underpinnings, and its methodological implications are further reflected in two chapters suggesting alternative perspectives on the analysis of hybrids.

Transformations in Governance is a major academic book series from Oxford University Press. It is designed to accommodate the impressive growth of research in comparative politics, international relations, public policy, federalism, and environmental and urban studies concerned with the dispersion of authority from central states to supranational institutions, subnational governments, and public-private networks. It brings together work that advances our understanding of the organization, causes, and consequences of multilevel and complex governance. The series is selective, containing annually a small number of books of exceptionally high quality by leading and emerging scholars.

The series is edited by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Walter Mattli of the University of Oxford.

Andreas Thiel, Chair of International Agricultural Policy and Environmental Governance, University of Kassel,Elizabeth Baldwin, Associate Professor, School of Government and Public Policy, University of Arizona,Mark Stephan, Associate Professor of Political Science, Washington State University,Sergio Villamayor-Tomas, Research Professor, Environmental Sciences and Technology Institute and Department of Political Science and Public Law, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Andreas Thiel is Full Professor and Head of Section of International Agricultural Policy and Environmental Governance at the University of Kassel, and affiliated faculty of the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. He is an institutional economist with a Ph.D. from Oxford Brookes University and a Habilitation from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he also served as temporary professor. He has held senior fellowships of Käte Hamburger Kolleg of Global Cooperation Research of University of Duisburg-Essen and Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM) of the University of Marburg.


Elizabeth Baldwin is Associate Professor in the University of Arizona's School of Government and Public Policy. She received her PhD from Indiana University. Her research uses the tools of institutional analysis to study complex environmental governance, with a current focus on invasive species policy in the United States and natural resource governance in Ghana and Kenya. She is a former Fulbright Fellow to Ghana and an affiliated faculty of the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University.


Mark Stephan is Associate Professor of Political Science at Washington State University Vancouver. He received his PhD from Princeton University. His research is in the areas of governance reforms, climate change, environmental justice, transparency policy, and environmental policy. He has mostly worked in the US context but recently helped to edit a book with chapters focused on multiple countries including Mongolia, Uganda, and Switzerland. He works in mixed methods, combining quantitative skills with survey and interview research. He worked with colleagues on an NSF-funded, multi-year study on climate change governance that analyzes state-local connections through a polycentric lens.


Sergio Villamayor-Tomas is Research Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Institute of Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He is an environmental social scientist trained in political science (Sciences Po Paris), and in institutional ecological economics (Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University). His research, carried out in Spain, Mexico and Colombia, Germany, and Switzerland, involves water governance, community-based natural resource management, climate change adaptation, and environmental justice movements. He is affiliated faculty of the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, and co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of the Commons.