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Structuring institutional analysis for urban ecosystems: A key to sustainable urban forest management

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Abstract

A decline in urban forest structure and function in the United States jeopardizes the current focus on developing sustainable cities. A number of social dilemmas—for example, free-rider problems—restrict the sustainable production of ecosystem services and the stock of urban trees from which they flow. However, institutions, or the rules, norms, and strategies that affect human decision-making, resolve many such social dilemmas, and thus, institutional analysis is imperative for understanding urban forest management outcomes. Unfortunately, we find that the definition of institutions varies greatly across and within disciplines, and conceptual frameworks in urban forest management and urban ecosystems research often embed institutions as minor variables. Given the significance of institutional analysis to understanding sustainable rural resource management, this paper attempts to bring clarity to defining, conceptually framing, and operationally analyzing institutions in urban settings with a specific focus on sustainable urban forest management. We conclude that urban ecologists and urban forest management researchers could benefit from applying a working definition of institutions that uniquely defines rules, norms, and strategies, by recognizing the nested nature of operational, collective choice, and constitutional institutions, and by applying the Institutional Analysis and Development framework for analysis of urban social-ecological systems (SESs). Such work promises to spur the desired policy-based research agenda of urban forestry and urban ecology and provide cross-disciplinary fertilization of institutional analysis between rural SESs and urban ecosystems.

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Notes

  1. According to Sanesi (query2011: 35), “The term ‘Community forestry’ (CF) includes all the forest management types that provide both economic and social goals, under the control (or property) of a local community or larger social group. CF management is often set in a larger ecological landscape with other land uses.” Urban forests, set in a landscape of variable land use, also include forest management that provides economic and social benefits which are largely controlled by the local community as the majority of the urban forest is privately owned (Clark et al. 1997).

  2. It is important to emphasize here that institutions have been studied in urban areas in general; the urban planning and smart-growth literature emphasize policy solutions, such as zoning and urban growth boundaries, as tools for sustainable development (see Duany et al. 2009). Our point is that in-depth institutional analysis is underutilized and seldom linked to understanding ecological outcomes in research framed as “urban ecosystem” or “urban forest management research,” in particular.

  3. This does not mean that the IAD framework cannot address rapidly changing circumstances. The framework assumes that the action situation is a holon, “[a] nested subassembly of part-whole units in complex adaptive systems” (Ostrom 2005: 11). Holons cannot be reduced to stand alone, but can be dissected for analysis to composite holons that allow for explanations at multiple levels and various spatial and temporal scales. Thus, in a rapidly changing environment for which urban systems are often characterized, iterative analyses may be required, particularly as outcomes may quickly influence and change the exogenous variables that must be fixed to determine outcomes.

  4. As presented in the figures, the action situations produce optimal outcomes, however, we outline textually the potential for sub-optimal outcomes given theoretical disconnects between exogenous rules and actual components of the action situations.

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Acknowledgments

This research was funded in part by Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs Sustainability Grant, and Indiana University’s Center for Research in Environmental Science (CRES) Sustainability Grant. The first author was also supported by The Garden Club of America Zone VI Fellowship in Urban Forestry. The authors would like to thank Kerry Krutilla, Michael McGinnis, Michael Cox and Elinor Ostrom for their reviews of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change (CIPEC), Indiana University, 408 N. Indiana Ave, Bloomington, IN, 47408, USA

    Sarah K. Mincey & Jessica M. Vogt

  2. USDA Forest Service Northeastern Area, 271 Mast Rd, Durham, NH, 03824, USA

    Miranda Hutten

  3. School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University, 1315 E. Tenth Street, Bloomington, IN, 47405, USA

    Burnell C. Fischer

  4. Department of Geography, Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change (CIPEC), Indiana University, Student Building 120, 701 E. Kirkwood Ave, Bloomington, IN, 47405, USA

    Tom P. Evans

  5. USDA Forest Service, Northern Research Station, 1033 University Place, Suite 360, Evanston, IL, 60201, USA

    Susan I. Stewart

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  1. Sarah K. Mincey
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Mincey, S.K., Hutten, M., Fischer, B.C. et al. Structuring institutional analysis for urban ecosystems: A key to sustainable urban forest management. Urban Ecosyst 16, 553–571 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11252-013-0286-3

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