2018 Conference

Individual Paper Presentation

Monitoring and enforcement has been long recognized as key to the emergence of common pool resource self-governing arrangements. With a few notable exceptions, however, it has not received thorough examination in common pool resource studies. This is especially evident when governments are the primary actors devising intergovernmental agreements to address regional scale common pool resource dilemmas in which multiple public goods are being produced and provided. In this paper we explore the design of monitoring and enforcement mechanisms that governments adopt to limit opportunism and support compliance among governments and resource users. We examine the design of monitoring and enforcement in a complex governing arrangement, the New York City Watershed Memorandum of Agreement and watershed regulations. Furthermore, we test how the design of such mechanisms differ between rules that govern core water quality protection versus tangential economic development program rules. The results indicate that accountability is maintained via highly prescribed horizontal and vertical monitoring and enforcement mechanisms that differ across rule types, rather than simple hierarchies. This primary empirical research may be useful for further understanding how to design formal instituional arrangments that allow governance actors to truly hold each other to account. In complex watershed governing arrangements, where many public goods are being produced and provided beyond simple controls over water quality, this takes on significant importance as a means of maintaining a web of accountability that can distribute authority among the broad group of stakeholders.