Doctoral Dissertation Research: Multi-Stakeholder Perceptions of Legitimacy in a Decentralized Governance System

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Doctoral candidate, Laura Kowler (University of Florida), supervised by Dr. Christopher McCarty, will investigate the interaction among diverse stakeholders in a decentralized natural resource governance system. The research will be conducted in Bolivia where forums called "platforms" are organized to address the challenges of Bolivia's evolving forest governance system. Platforms are deliberative spaces that enable the discussion and negotiation of disparate, and often conflicting, interpretations of state-sponsored approaches to natural resource management. The overarching research question is: how does the structure of interactions among multiple and distinct stakeholders in platforms impact their individual perceptions of the legitimacy of the deliberative process? This research examines how governance is constructed at the meso (platform) level, while incorporating the effects of the micro (local or community) and macro (national) levels. Platforms represent governance experiments and are analyzed based on the principles of deliberative democracy, which is claimed to secure legitimacy for policies by giving citizens access to previously remote decision-making processes.Kowler will collect social network data and observe four different platforms organized around land use, access, and management issues in the northern Bolivian Amazon region. Whole network data collected in these platforms will be used to operationalize the interactions at the meso level while personal network analysis will be used to measure the scalar influences among platform participants and individuals at the micro and macro levels. Ethnographic methods will contextualize the social network data and enable a more robust understanding of the multi-level interactions shaping governance processes.This research is important because it will provide evidence to natural resource governance and development scholars and practitioners about the governance arrangements, mechanisms, and the socio-political processes that explain these relationships. Findings from this work will also contribute to the larger question of how interaction across levels or organizational borders impacts information flow and coordination through particular individuals located at different levels. Funding this research also supports the education of a graduate student.