Environmental governance: A practical framework to guide design, evaluation, and analysis

Governance is one of the most important factors for ensuring effective environmental management and conservation actions. Yet, there is still a relative paucity of comprehensive and practicable guidance that can be used to frame the evaluation, design, and analysis of systems of environmental governance. This conceptual review and synthesis article seeks to addresses this problem through resituating the broad body of governance literature into a practical framework for environmental governance. Our framework builds on a rich history of governance scholarship to propose that environmental governance has four general aims or objectives – to be effective, to be equitable, to be responsive, and to be robust. Each of these four objectives need to be considered simultaneously across the institutional, structural, and procedural elements of environmental governance. Through a review of the literature, we developed a set of attributes for each of these objectives and relate these to the overall capacity, functioning, and performance of environmental governance. Our aim is to provide a practical and adaptable framework that can be applied to the design, evaluation, and analysis of environmental governance in different social and political contexts, to diverse environmental problems and modes of governance, and at a range of scales.


INTRODUCTION
While environmental problems are often viewed as having technical, managerial, or behavioral dimensions, increasing attention has been paid to environmental governance as an overarching means to address these complexities. Indeed, interest in environmental governance has led to research at all scales from the local to the global and focused on issues such as resource scarcity and conflicts, allocation and access, and biodiversity conservation in forest, agricultural, freshwater, marine, and even atmospheric systems. One broad and enduring insight from this research is that governance is one areas of common-pool resource governance (Agrawal, 2003;Ostrom, 1999), adaptive governance (Armitage, Berkes, & Doubleday, 2010;Brunner, 2005;Folke et al., 2005), anticipatory governance (Boyd, Nykvist, Borgström, & Stacewicz, 2015), institutional governance (Adger, Brown, & Tompkins, 2005;Paavola, 2007), good governance (Graham, Amos, & Plumtree, 2003;Lockwood et al., 2010), and global environmental governance (O'Neill, 2009;Young, 1997) to name but a few subfields. A prevailing sentiment across these literatures is that of "good" governance -or that the evaluation of environmental governance is inherently normative. Our particular aim then is to garner from these diverse areas of theory to characterize key features of governance (i.e., objectives and attributes) that can be applied to the design, evaluation, and analysis of environmental governance. We do so while accepting that it is beyond the scope of this article to provide a detailed review of this extensive theoretical literature.
Several notable challenges to the uptake and application of insights from governance scholarship are evident and need to be addressed if this body of work is to improve conservation and environmental management. First, the field as a whole can be quite theoretical, and thus seem overwhelming and inaccessible to many policymakers, managers, practitioners, and scientists from other fields who might wish to apply governance concepts, theories, or frameworks to help ameliorate real-world environmental problems. Second, there is often a lack of conceptual and analytical clarity about the difference between governance and management in much of the recent applied research on the topic (Lockwood, 2010). Third, many of the past studies that focus on evaluating or analyzing environmental governance often focus on a limited set of features rather than considering the wider array of governance objectives and related attributes (Table 1). This may be due to the adherence by different researchers to different governance theories (e.g., adaptive governance, good governance) or frameworks (e.g., the social-ecological systems framework) and the application of the specific factors or particular indicators that they propose. While there is significant overlap, lack of integration across governance theories has meant that a more comprehensive analytical framework is still needed. Finally, past research has often focused on normative or procedural considerations (e.g., participation, recognition, access to justice) rather than substantive concerns (e.g., ecological and social outcomes) related to different governance regimes. This has meant that the links between governance capacity, functioning, and performance are often not clear -though some recent empirical research has emerged to examine and clarify the links between governance inputs and processes and social and ecological outcomes (Bodin, 2017;Cohen, Evans, & Mills, 2012;.
This conceptual review and synthesis article seeks to address these problems through resituating the broad body of governance literature -including the languages, terms, methods, and metrics -to provide a much needed comprehensive and practical framework and a common lexicon for future engagements. Our aim is to provide a framework that can be adapted and applied to the design, evaluation, and analysis of the capacity, functioning, and performance of environmental governance in diverse contexts and at a range of scales.

Methods
Our first step was to reduce the complexity of the main analytical elements, objectives, and related attributes that pertain to environmental governance while still being comprehensive ( Figure 1). When developing the framework, we first reviewed the literature to ascertain clear definitions and conceptualizations of the analytical elements (i.e., institutions, structures, and processes) of governance (see below). We then reviewed the academic literature on environmental governance to develop a comprehensive list of considerations (alternately termed principles, attributes, or indicators of governance by different authors) associated with the capacity, functioning, and performance of governance. As our aim was to be comprehensive, we reviewed the literature until thematic saturation was achieved -that is, no new themes were emerging. To develop a summary list of attributes and objectives from this long list, we combined commensurate terms into a set of 19 attributes, which we checked against the literature to ensure comprehensive thematic coverage. Finally, we assigned these attributes to four overarching categories that encompass the general aims or objectives of environmental governance. In so doing, we sought to evaluate and construct each category according to guidance on designing clear and appropriate attributes and objectives. That is, we ensured they were: distinct, comprehensive, direct, operational, understandable and unambiguous (Keeney, 2007;Keeney & Gregory, 2005). A summary of this review of the literature is in Table 1 with supporting references provided throughout the text, whereas a more succinct representation of the primary objectives and attributes as they relate to the elements of governance is in the framework in Figure 1.

Definition and conceptual elements of environmental governance
Governance is generally defined as the institutions, structures, and processes that determine who makes decisions, how and for whom decisions are made, whether, how and what actions are taken and by whom and to what effect (Graham et al., 2003;Lockwood et al., 2010). An important conceptual Polycentric Decision-making and action taking centers in multiple places, across jurisdictions and at multiple scales interact and cohere towards a common goal. Institutions are present that are diverse and redundant -that serve similar purposes and have overlapping jurisdictions and functions.
Helps to buffer against change in one location.
Ensures that the governance system does not collapse when faced with adversity or crises.
distinction needs to be made between governance and management: the latter refers to the resources, plans, and actions that result from the functioning of governance (Lockwood, 2010). The aim of environmental governance, in particular, is to manage individual behaviors or collective actions in pursuance of public environmental goods and related societal outcomes (Armitage et al., 2012;Termeer, Dewulf, & Van Lieshout, 2010). To comprehend environmental governance is to understand how decisions related to the environment are made and whether resultant policies and processes lead to environmentally and socially sustainable outcomes. The analysis of environmental governance focuses on the capacity, functioning, and/or performance of the institutional, structural, and procedural elements of governance ( Figure 1) Drawing first on early work by North (1990), we further define institutions as both the formal (e.g., constitutions, laws, policies, tenure systems) and informal rules (e.g., cultural context, social norms, prevailing power structures) that shape human interactions (e.g., in the form of decision-making structures and processes) and that guide, support, or constrain human or management actions. The term structures refers to the formalized bodies or entities (e.g., decision-making arrangements, comanagement bodies) and organizations (e.g., levels of government, private sector organizations, civil society organizations) as well as informal networks of actors and organizations that embody governance capacities (e.g., efficiency, participation) and perform different functions (e.g., producing rules and decisions, enabling management actions). Governance processes, which are the means for realizing the functions and the performance of governance, include articulation of institutional mandates, negotiation of values, conflict resolution, law making, policy formation, diffusion of information, and application of policy. These processes, then, play an important role in both decision-making and the implementation of those decisions. Environmental governance structures and processes can come together in different ways -for example, governance can be driven from the top by governments or private individuals or actors, from the bottom by local communities, or via shared decision-making and authority through formal comanagement arrangements or informal networks of actors and organizations. Moreover, the institutional, structural, and procedural elements of governance are understood to occur at various scales from local to global, to interact across scales, and to have an effect on the capacity, performance, and outcomes of environmental governance (North, 1990;Young, 1997).

Objectives and attributes for environmental governance
Previous governance scholarship and frameworks tend to prioritize or even neglect certain fundamental objectives of environmental governance. It is not surprising, for example, that the literatures on adaptive and anticipatory governance emphasize features that enable responsive-ness, such as learning, innovation, foresight, and adaptation (Armitage et al., 2010;Boyd et al., 2015). Good governance frameworks, on the other hand, focus heavily on normative concerns related to equity, such as participation, fairness and justice, as well as transparency and legitimacy, but tend to give less attention to effectiveness (Graham et al., 2003;Lockwood, 2010). The research applying institutional and network governance theories have tended to concentrate on institutional robustness (Cudney-Bueno & Basurto, 2009;Morrison, 2017) and the functional effectiveness of governance at practices and processes such as knowledge sharing or collaboration (Cárcamo, Garay-Flühmann, & Gaymer, 2014;Wyborn, 2015a). Problematically, across much the environmental governance literature, effectiveness at achieving ecological outcomes is often assumed or relegated to discussions of management.
Some authors have put forward various proposals for more integrative sets of governance objectives. For example, Adger et al. (2002) proposed that four broad integrated and indivisible criteria be taken into account in environmental governance and decision-making: efficiency, effectiveness, equity, and legitimacy. Recent literature on protected areas governance use evaluative indicators under the broad but vague categories of quality, diversity, and vitality . Alternately, while not focused on the environment, North (2010) suggests that economic change depends on having societal institutions that are productive, stable, fair, broadly accepted, and flexible. There are numerous other proposals. Yet, we felt there was no framework or set of objectives that adequately captured the entirety of potential aims and attributes of governance, nor that was easily applied to diverse contexts, problems, scales, and types of governance.
Thus, our framework builds on a rich history of governance scholarship but proposes a different set of overarching objectives supported by a more comprehensive set of attributes. Our literature review and categorization suggests that environmental governance has four generalizable and distinct objectives -to be effective, to be equitable, to be responsive, and to be robust -that ought to be considered simultaneously across institutional, structural, and procedural elements ( Figure 1). We define the four objectives as follows: (1) effective governance supports the maintenance of system integrity and functioning; (2) equitable governance employs inclusive processes and produces fair outcomes; (3) responsive governance enables adaptation to diverse contexts and changing conditions; and (4) robust governance ensures that functioning institutions persist, maintain performance, and cope with perturbations and crises. Below, we briefly review the attributes that correspond with each objective (see Table 1 for a summary).

Effective environmental governance
A central objective of environmental governance is maintaining or improving the ability of environmental systems to function and to produce ecosystem services through the persistence of species, habitats or biodiversity (see Figure 1). Attributes of the first objective effective environmental governance -include: direction, coordination, capacity, informed, accountable, and efficient. Clear direction is provided through precision in the articulation of vision, goals, aims, and the establishment of clear boundaries on action and scope (Graham et al., 2003;Lockwood et al., 2010;Wyborn, 2015b). This establishes what effective action encompasses and sets milestones for achieving success. Coordination of the roles, functions, and mandates of different governments and organizations, perhaps through a coordinating body or comanagement unit, helps instead to establish systems of rules, ensure the adequacy of management actions, and resolve trade-offs (Abe, Brown, Ajao, & Donkor, 2016;Wyborn, 2015a). The presence and active development of capacity, including skills (e.g., leadership, conflict resolution) and resources (e.g., financial, infrastructure), enables the initiation of planning processes and implementation of management actions (Armitage et al., 2010;Lockwood et al., 2010;Wyborn, 2015b). When planning and management decisions are informed by the best available knowledge -which includes diverse and integrated knowledge types (natural and social) and of systems (scientific, local, and indigenous) -this can increase the likelihood of effective outcomes (Charnley et al., 2017;Tengö, Brondizio, Elmqvist, Malmer, & Spierenburg, 2014). Clear mechanisms to hold governors accountable can help to ensure that mandated decisions are followed and effective actions are being taken (Lockwood, 2010;Lockwood et al., 2010;Secco, Da Re, Pettenella, & Gatto, 2014). Transparency, in communicating the means and rationales for decisions and the outcomes of potential future or past actions, makes accountability possible. Efficient governance requires that time requirements of actors are reasonable, that efficacy guides the choice of management actions and deployment of public resources, and that costs and actions are commensurate with system productivity (Ostrom, 1990;Secco et al., 2014).

Equitable environmental governance
Second, to achieve the objective of being socially equitable, environmental governance should engage decision-making processes and produce socioeconomic outcomes that might be characterized as: inclusive, participatory, fair, and just. Equitable environmental governance begins with policies and processes that recognize, respect, and are inclusive of the perspectives, knowledge systems, values, cultures, and rights of diverse stakeholders Lockwood et al., 2010;McDermott, Mahanty, & Schreckenberg, 2013), including the views of groups who are often marginalized (e.g., women, indigenous peoples, or minority groups) or vulnerable (e.g., impoverished communities). Effective participation requires context and scale-specific spaces, processes, and structures to enable inclusion, representation, and engagement of stakeholder groups in collective decision-making processes (Lockwood, 2010;Reed, 2008). This facilitates the sharing of power, democratically debated decisions, maintenance of dignity, and the creation of representative plans and actions. Power-and benefit-sharing mechanisms can help ensure that the socioeconomic benefits and burdens of conservation and environmental management are distributed in a fair manner, and that rights and responsibilities are shared and assigned commensurate to circumstances (Bennett, Teh et al., 2017;Pascual et al., 2014;Zafra-Calvo et al., 2017). Finally, equitable governance is safeguarded when laws and policies are present to protect local rights and tenure, ensure that consent is freely given, and groups have access to justice to defend against incursions F I G U R E 1 A practical framework for understanding the objectives, attributes, and elements of environmental governance or facilitate reparations and/or compensation for past wrongs (Bennett, Teh et al., 2017;FAO, 2012).

Responsive environmental governance
Third, the objective of being responsive ensures that environmental governance is adaptable both to changing environmental and social conditions and to diverse contexts. Responsive environmental governance arrangements exemplify: learning, anticipation, adaptability, innovation, and flexibility. Institutional and social learning is realized through ongoing monitoring and evaluation, communication, and reflection on the social and ecological performance of environmental governance (Armitage & Plummer, 2011). Collective memory, and consequently the ability to effectively manage and adapt to change, is enhanced through practices such as documentation and sharing of lessons learned, knowledge coproduction, and developing communities of practice (Berkes & Turner, 2006;Maida & Beck, 2016). The knowledge and capacity to address disturbances can also be improved through the institutionalization of anticipation or foresight, including consideration, analysis, and planning for the consequences of both chronic and acute risks (Boyd et al., 2015;Tschakert & Dietrich, 2010). Adaptive environmental governance is enabled by institutionalized spaces for dialogue, reflection and deliberation, and clear processes and steps to ensure that policies, institutions, and management actions are periodically revisited and actively updated or changed when required (Armitage et al., 2010;Dietz, Ostrom, & Stern, 2003). A culture of innovation, coupled with a higher risk tolerance, encourages experimentation with new ideas and the monitoring and documentation of successes and failures to enable effective management actions to emerge (Chaffin et al., 2016;Dietz et al., 2003). Rather than promoting one-size-fits-all approaches, flexibility in institutions and policies allows for the calibrating of environmental management and conservation models to diverse local realities (Epstein et al., 2015;Gaymer et al., 2014). This requires that efforts are made to understand and document the social, cultural, political, economic. and environmental contexts where interventions are being implemented and to deliberate on necessary adjustments to idealized models.

Robust environmental governance
The final objective of environmental governance is to be robust -that is, functioning institutions -persist over time, maintain performance, and cope with perturbations and crises. Robust environmental governance institutions are legitimate, connected, nested, and polycentric. Legitimate institutions are guided by a collective vision, conferred with formal legitimacy (e.g., through law or policy) and perceived to be legitimate by constituents and stakeholders (Lockwood, 2010;Lockwood et al., 2010). This ensures both strong political justification and local support. Robust networks of institutions and actors are structurally connected horizontally and vertically, often enabled by bridging organizations, and characterized by positive social relations (e.g., trust and social capital; Bodin, 2017;Bodin & Crona, 2009;Folke, Hahn, Olsson, & Norberg, 2005). Functional networks facilitate collaboration, knowledge and information exchange. and diffusion of innovations (Barnes, Lynham, Kalberg, & Leung, 2016;Blythe et al., 2017;Cohen et al., 2012). In nested governance, decision-making authority, responsibility, and tasks are devolved to the lowest-possible and most administratively appropriate level, which enables the proper entity to self-organize, make decisions, and take actions (Lebel et al., 2006;Marshall, 2007;Ostrom, 1990). Responsibility and authority at lower scales need to be matched with adequate support and oversight from higher levels. Polycentric systems of governance have semiautonomous decision-making and action-taking centers in multiple locations, across jurisdictions, and at multiple scales that interact and cohere toward a common goal (Carlisle & Gruby, 2017;Ostrom, 2010). Polycentricity, through providing institutional diversity and redundancy in purpose and function, helps to buffer against change and avoid institutional collapse when faced with adversity (Morrison, 2017).

Summary
In this article, we present a framework that aims to be both practical and comprehensive for environmental governance that might be applied to diverse contexts, problems, and scales. For example, it might be adapted and applied to examine or evaluate the governance of a locally managed community forest, a national system of marine protected areas, a transboundary fishery or efforts to conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services at regional or global scales (Díaz et al., 2015). However, we are neither naïve to the challenges of environmental governance nor the potential limitations of this framework. First, the ability of the governance system (structures, institutions, and processes) to achieve desired objectives -whether this is in a fishery, a marine protected area, a watershed, a forest, an agricultural landscape, or other system -is also determined by the complexity of the context and the problem being addressed (Bavinck, Chuenpagdee, Jentoft, Kooiman, 2013). Governance systems that are more responsive -that emphasize learning, anticipation, adaptation, innovation, and fit -may be better able to address this complexity (Armitage et al., 2010;Epstein et al., 2015). Second, issues related to power and politics can challenge or undermine the functioning and performance of any system of environmental governance. For example, some actors or groups might have greater access to or influence over decision-making or policy creation processes with repercussions for both social and environmental performance (Boonstra, 2016). The ability of environmental governance to handle power rests, in part, in how well governance structures, institutions, and processes fulfill the objective of equity, which can facilitate recognition of diverse groups and worldviews, inclusion of stakeholders in decision-making, fairness in the allocation of costs and benefits, and access to justice when principles are violated. Third, as all ecological systems and social contexts are unique, systems of environmental governance need to be locally grounded. Indeed, the framework that we offer is not intended as a "one-size-fits-all" approach, but rather a guide to be adapted to fit diverse realities and governance challenges. Finally, we recognize that the depth of treatment given to each attribute is somewhat limited by the scope and length of the article. There are certainly more sophisticated treatments of each of these considerations in the literature, to which those engaging with these ideas should turn if they desire more information. Local perspectives on these considerations may be different yet. We definitely encourage building on and from the foundation of objectives and attributes provided by the framework.
Our particular goal is a framework that advances governance in several ways. First, our aim is to provide clarity on the elements of governance and so a useful reference for future research that seeks to characterize systems of environmental governance. Second, we provide a broader and more comprehensive set of attributes than has any particular theory or framework alone -which will provide a useful reference for the design of indicators for evaluation of environmental governance. Third, we suggest that future evaluations of environmental governance need to better address the four general objectives that we propose here -(1) to be effective, (2) to be equitable, (3) to be responsive, and (4) to be robust -across the institutional, structural, and procedural elements of governance. We suggest that it is important to engage with all four objectives simultaneously as there can be interactions -both synergies and trade-offs -between them. For example, equity (in decision-making processes or outcomes) can support perceptions of legitimacy and thus the robustness of institutions (Bennett, 2016;Ostrom, 1999;Turner et al., 2016). Similarly, effectiveness relies on the responsiveness of institutions to changing environmental and social conditions (Weeks & Jupiter, 2013) and the flexibility of environmental governance models to fit or match diverse contexts (Epstein et al., 2015;Sarkki, Rantala, & Karjalainen, 2015). On the other hand, when too much emphasis is placed on one objective over others in systems of environmental governance, unintentional trade-offs and negative consequences can follow. For example, when primary importance is placed on environmental effectiveness over equity, this might have unintended social consequences and negative feedbacks for ecosystems (Larrosa, Carrasco, & Milner-Gulland, 2016). Institutions that are ineffective or inequitable might also persist when robustness is not balanced with features that enable responsive, equitable, and effective environmental governance. Thus, research on and the practice of environmental governance needs to address the four objectives simultaneously -while also seeking to better understand the relationships between and how to achieve balance across objectives. From a practical standpoint, the common lexicon that we offer will be helpful for those seeking to develop guidance on all dimensions of governance, and also assist in the design of indicators for evaluating that governance.

Application of the framework for design, evaluation, or analysis
In sum, the novelty of this framework is in the merging of the diversity of governance frameworks and recommended features into a more comprehensive offering to guide: (1) design, (2) evaluation, and (3) analysis of environmental governance.
First, many studies often treat governance as the context within which environmental management occurs or as something that emerges from sociopolitical contexts rather than as something that can be produced, shaped or designed. We propose that this framework can be a useful reference for the development of guiding principles or recommendations for different environmental issues (e.g., marine conservation, fisheries management, terrestrial protected areas, water governance, wildlife management, and forestry). For example, the lead author of this article used the general framework proposed here as the basis for a collaboration with several NGOs and government agencies to design governance objectives and principles for a system of marine reserves in the Gulf of California of Mexico (Bennett, Lasch-Thaler et al., 2017). While this process is still underway, one important lesson learned to date was that this is not meant to be a blueprint per se, but the framework can be usefully adapted and applied to the design of governance in different social and political contexts.
Second, since all policies should be seen as experiments that require continual monitoring and adaptation (Armitage et al., 2008), indicators have become an important part of learning and reflection. In this article, we stopped short of developing indicators for the different objectives and attributes. This is because the application of the framework for monitoring and evaluation of environmental governance will require adaptation to fit the objectives of different initiatives, calibration to the normative expectations of the setting, and the development of problem and scale-specific indicators. It is also important to ensure that the indicators developed address, as relevant, both: (1) the institutional, structural, and procedural elements of environmental governance and (2) the capacity (inputs), functioning (outputs), and performance (outcomes) associated with each governance attribute and objective (Hockings, Stolton, Leverington, Dudley, & Courrau, 2006;Lockwood, 2010). We recommend that indicators for evaluating environmental governance be developed in collaboration with stakeholders to ensure that they correspond with local norms and increase their legitimacy and salience (Hicks et al., 2016;Keeney & Gregory, 2005).
Third, there has been increasing attention to analyzing the impact of different attributes and elements of governance on social and ecological outcomes to develop generalizable lessons aimed at improving conservation in a variety of contexts (Ban et al., 2017;Cinner et al., 2016;Mascia et al., 2017). Additional efforts are needed to better understand these cause-effect relationships between governance and social and ecological performance (Biesbroek, Dupuis, & Wellstead, 2017;. To move this body of research forward, there is a need to engage: (1) clearer conceptualizations of the difference between governance and management and (2) more comprehensive sets of features and indicators than might be drawn from a single area of governance theory. We hope that the framework we present here provides one such comprehensive reference set of objectives and attributes from which to draw in future research.

CONCLUSION
To conclude, we recognize the importance of governance in environmental management and conservation and reiterate the need for greater attention to understanding the myriad systems of environmental governance. The framework that we provide here might be applied to better understand environmental governance in different social contexts, for diverse ecological issues and at a range of scales. Evaluations and deliberations guided by the framework might also support efforts to design and improve the capacity, functioning, and performance of environmental governance systems. However, we emphasize that there are no panaceas and there will inevitably be a continual process of learning and regeneration for any particular system of environmental governance. In presenting this framework, we hope to support such efforts -be that by governments, NGOs, private actors, local communities, researchers, or collaborative networks -to analyze, evaluate, and create more effective, equitable, responsive, and robust environmental governance.