Towards Integrated Management of Regional Marine Protected Area Networks

Marine protected areas (MPA s) are an important tool for protecting marine ecosystems both within and beyond national jurisdiction, but the integrated management of MPA s is challenging due to the institutional fragmentation that exists in international ocean governance at global and regional levels. In the absence of fundamental reform of international ocean governance, integrated management of MPA s can at present only be achieved through cross-sectoral cooperation and coordination between relevant international institutions. Understanding regime interaction in this context requires an analysis of both the relevant legal framework and the manner in which coordination mechanisms operate in practice. This article carries out a case study of regime interaction between the Antarctic Treaty and the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, as well as other relevant institutions, in order to identify the key opportunities and challenges for promoting the integrated management of regional MPA networks in practice. It will also consider how the cooperative arrangements for the regional management of the Southern Ocean may provide lessons for the development of a new legally binding instrument for the conservation and management of biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction.

Institutional fragmentation of peat fire management in Indonesia: a knowledge management perspective

The importance of intersectoral collaboration in policy implementation has been widely accepted. Concepts of intersectoral collaboration and policy coordination are theoretically appealing; however, it is challenging to implement in practice, including in forest fire management. This paper aims to map the institutions on forest fire management and analyze the rationality in using knowledge in their duties and authorities. Using stakeholder mapping combined with the Concern-Knowledge-Action approach, this study is conducted at the national level in Indonesia, and takes two sub-national levels, South Sumatera and Central Kalimantan, as the case study. There are many institutions involved in fire management in all governance levels, including at the provincial-district level, as well as at the sub-district-village level, but the institutional fragmentation in peat fire management is still found. In managing fire in South Sumatera and Central Kalimantan, it is not handled by a specific institution having the most influential and important positions. They have different authorities but the same potential power to prevent and combat fire. A complex interconnection among them indicates the need for effective institution integration. Less connectivity among the knowledge pool is also found, especially between private – community, NGO – academia, and government – community. Finally, knowledge improvement on fire prevention method especially in defining a community livelihood offset, as well as the ex-post fire management (measuring the level of fire impact and its recovery methods) is needed to fill the gap of knowledge. A stakeholder Forum is one of the options to improve intersectoral coordination in managing forest fire in peatland and enhance the effectiveness of knowledge sharing. At community level, conducting informal discussion and capacity-building programs would be feasible options for better coordination and improving knowledge.

Varieties of Arbitrary Governance

This chapter uses sub-national variation to probe alternative explanations for arbitrary governance. Evidence from three additional research sites in Uganda—Mbarara, Moroto, and Soroti—shows that violent conflict and political leanings shape how institutionalized arbitrariness manifests, exaggerating certain components and attenuating others. Such differences result in ‘varieties’ of institutionalized arbitrariness that, taken together, bolster and nuance the argument that arbitrary governance is a distinct type of authoritarian rule. The results are presented in a typology of four varieties of institutionalized arbitrariness, each corresponding to a different study location. The typology illustrates some of the different outcomes produced by changing combinations of state violence, fluid state jurisdiction, unpredictable state presence, and institutional fragmentation. The chapter then uses these variations to examine some limitations of the theory, including questions about the regime’s intent and citizens’ agency.

Violence, Sovereignty, and the Uganda Police Force

How does the Ugandan state produce and sustain the perception among citizens that it commands overwhelming violence? Through a study of the Uganda Police Force, this chapter examines four elements that blur the distinction between lawful and exceptional violence: first, institutional fragmentation obscures the source of violence and undermines accountability; second, the militarization of state and society confuses who can legally purvey violence on behalf of the state; third, the regime engineers law to mask exceptional acts of state violence as lawful; and finally, spectacular and public acts of violence, such as elite assassinations, create widespread speculation about and fear of exceptional state violence. As a result, state violence is unpredictable both in its intensity and its accountability. The manipulation of the relationship between lawful and exceptional violence produces and sustains both fear and hope, making it difficult for ordinary citizens to manage or ignore the possibility of state intervention.

Risking Border Instability: the Russian-Estonian Case

In international relations, the last three decades have been marked by national and institutional fragmentation. The fate of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, and the regrettable way that events played out (especially in the former case), could befall other federative entities as well. Canada and Belgium come to mind, as do countries like Spain, all of which effectively function as federations. However, while federations usually have dispute settlement and mechanisms for secession embedded in their constitutions, sub-constitutive territories are often excluded from such considerations. What territories such as Kosovo, Sandjak, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, etc. have in common is that they share a desire for independence from their parent country. However, achiveing independence would present risks to the territorial integrity of other countries (what can be termed the domino principle), as well as risks to the endurance of flexible international law. The cases we have alluded to above culminated in the Crimean crisis. The problems between Estonia and the Russian Federation stem from the choice of precedent and founding text on which to base the former’s renewed independence. While Estonia was founded on the basis of the 1920 Tartu Peace Treaty that put an end to the country’s War of Independence, its experience as a Soviet Republic added another legislative filter in the form of the 1977 Constitution of the Soviet Union. However, the principle of uti possidetis had evolved to apply to more than cases of colonialism. Thus, when Estonia seceded from the USSR with the borders it had been since 1945, it was doing so under the principle of uti possidetis. The current dispute stems from the fact that the Estonian political elite seek to have the 1920 Tartu Peace Treaty recognized as the foundational document for the country’s renewed independence. Under the Treaty, Estonian sovereignty applied over a much larger territory. By insisting that any new border arrangement with Russia be based on that Treaty, Estonia is invalidating the principle of uti possidetis and the validity of the Constitution of the Soviet Union as a vehicle for independence. It implies a latent Article 5 situation between NATO and Russia, and threatens the legitimacy of other post-Soviet secessions.

Dualism or solidarity? Conditions for union success in regulating precarious work

This article summarizes and reviews research on union responses to precarious work in Europe, based on a systematic coding of 56 case study-based articles published between 2008 and 2019. Analyses of these cases suggest two paths to labour market dualism, with the first involving institutional fragmentation and union division, and the second a combination of weak structural power and partnership-oriented union identities. The authors also identify two paths to solidarity, with the result of reduced precarity for peripheral workers: a conflict-based path and a social partnership-based path. Campaigns to organize migrant workers present distinctive institutional and structural challenges to unions, with studies involving migrants most often finding ‘failed solidarity’, in which inclusive organizing fails to reduce precarity. The article integrates these findings with past frameworks on union responses to precarious work and concludes with recommendations for future research.

The Law of the Network Society and the Problem of Hybridity Management

The network society, which is relevant to the social landscape of the 21st century, determines the building of a new architecture of law. The current legal map of the world is extremely heterogeneous and often does not coincide with the political map of the world. It is full of a variety of normative arrays that collide with each other, layered on top of each other, while the traditional legal methodology is not always able to resolve conflicts that arise. The problem of controversy between law and not law is gaining considerable potential due to the rapid growth of non-legal matter and the emergence of legitimizing institutions. The situation is complicated by the simultaneous existence of several institutional dispute resolution systems (state, non-state, alternative, platform-based) that refer to completely different, relatively autonomous subsystems of norms as applicable law. Such material and institutional fragmentation, the emergence of hybrid regulatory and institutional regimes has provoked an active search for new principles of building a legal architecture that is adequate to such a rapidly changing society. Globalization is transforming into networking, which redefines the geography of the world, the well-known and traditional principles of affiliation of legal entities, and then exacerbates the debates about legal taxonomy. The marked evolution of the legal superstructure also generates new types of conflicts, prompting the search for a new or adaptation of the known methodology in order to overcome them.The paper attempts to explore the new normativity in the context of a new sociality, to identify key trends in the development of the law of a network society, to predict the development of individual legal and sub-legal institutions, and to model legal ways of managing hybridity.

Exploring the Politics of Institutional Fragmentation in Transboundary River Basins

Institutional fragmentation has been less addressed by research when considering the specific context of transboundary river basins, settings that are often characterized by multiple regulatory frameworks as well as by a great range of uses and users of the river that intervene at different institutional levels. Considering that such contexts represent fertile ground for reinforced use rivalries and exacerbated power relations, it is key to focus on the very nature and results of such institutional fragmentation; in other words, it is necessary to explore the politics of institutional fragmentation in transboundary rivers. Three main bodies of literature are suggested as insightful perspectives to provide enhanced understanding of such contexts: (a) institutional fit literature: challenges of fits between institutions and ecosystems, (b) legal pluralism: interplay and co-existence of different normative orders, (c) polycentric governance: coordination modalities between different and independent decision-making centers.