Sometimes Christmas comes a bit early: witness this picture of three critters Mary Frances gave me that now adorn our tree.
Here they were engaged in horseplay (scorpion-play?) with the arachnid trying to devour the frog until the lizard intervened. Off to the tree, guys!
The scorpion is made of bark - a bark scorpion (haha), albeit a very large one.
But another early gift is an abstract of an article Tweeted by John Fleck:
Heikkila, T. and Gerlak, A. K. (2005), The Formation of Large-scale Collaborative Resource Management Institutions: Clarifying the Roles of Stakeholders, Science, and Institutions. Policy Studies Journal, 33: 583–612. doi: 10.1111/j.1541-0072.2005.00134.x
The article is behind a paywall but the abstract is below.
This article explores the emergence of collaborative institutional arrangements for managing natural resources in large-scale and complex resource settings, among numerous political jurisdictions and stakeholders. It examines four regional institutions in the United States: the Northwest Power and Conservation Council's Fish and Wildlife Program, the Chesapeake Bay Program, the CALFED Bay-Delta Program, and the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. While a wealth of literature has looked at the emergence of smaller-scale resource management institutions, and some literature has begun to look at the characteristics and successes of these regional institutions, theory is lacking to explain the formation of these regional institutions. We first introduce three relevant streams of literature—on common pool resources management, on policy entrepreneurs and social capital, and on science and information in policy change—to frame our analysis. The comparisons of the cases point to the importance of integrating key insights from the literature for understanding the formation of collaborative resource governance. We emphasize how science, leadership, and prior organizational experience interact in facilitating institutional change, particularly in the process of raising awareness about resource management problems. In tracing the formation of these institutions, we also identify how external institutional triggers can help spur collaborative governance.
Collaborative resource governance? Policy entrepreneurs (both Fleck and I like that term)? I'm going to get the full paper and see what the implications are for the Bay-Delta imbroglio. Who knows?
And if that doesn't work, I'll turn my scorpion loose.
"The outstanding scientific discovery of the 20th century is not TV or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism." - Aldo Leopold (thanks to @River_Restore)
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