Value chains of Cameroonian non-timber forest products move through harvesters, processors and traders, to consumers locally and worldwide. This paper characterises six governance arrangements governing eight such chains: statutory and customary regulations, voluntary market-based systems, international conventions, project-based systems and corruption. Governance is messy with overlapping, multiple layers of institutions and actors. There are voids where no institutions govern access to resources and markets; some actors fulfil roles normally the reserve of the state. In some chains the state performs its duties, in others not, and other institutions fill the gaps. To negotiate this complexity, many actors have become adept 'bricoleurs'. They make the best of the arrangements in which they find themselves, and creatively use capitals available, building on natural capital to construct new governance arrangements and/or remould existing ones to meet their current objectives, circumstances and livelihoods. This 'fine mess' makes examining the impacts on the livelihoods of participants and their sustainability challenging. A measure of governance intensity and extensive fieldwork was thus used. It indicates strong trade-offs between natural, social and economic capital, creating winners and losers. Trade-offs between livelihoods and sustainability are most acute either when there are no governance arrangements; when arrangements do not take account of the susceptibility of a species to harvesting; or when they do not balance supply and demand. Policy challenges and opportunities include recognising and dealing with pluralism; reconciling conflicting rules; hearing the voices of silent actors; learning from failures and raising chain visibility by recognising natural and socio-economic values.

As payment for environmental services (PES) initiatives spread to collectively managed natural resources, questions arise because the incentive structures that might be appropriate for individually managed resources will not necessarily promote the collective action required to manage the commons. Theory suggests challenges for cash payments to promote collective action, and for alternative payment types to facilitate conditionality. Possible ways to reconcile this disconnect involve conceiving of PES more broadly through the use of multiple forms of payment including non-cash incentives and placing greater focus on building institutions for collective action than on strict conditionality.

Given increased pressure on natural resources to deliver benefits, complex trade-offs and the regulation of behaviours in relation to benefits is of key concern. Behaviours that signify resistance to the rules according to which benefits are allocated prompt us to consider causal links and feedbacks between benefits, perceptions of benefits, meanings attached to the benefits, and the regulatory instruments that mediate the distribution of benefits. An understanding of how meanings influence the perception of benefits exposes the complexity inherent in how people perceive and allocate value to natural resource benefits. Meanings are personal, sometimes overlapping, context dependent and variable across space and time. A challenge in directing resource user behaviour in common pool resources is that the relationship between the resource and resource use is typically not interpreted to include the manner in which users associate resource benefits with meanings. We propose that collective ordering of meanings and associated rules help to direct behaviours and in doing so they contribute to the purposeful maintenance of desirable elements of a social-ecological system (i.e. robustness). Using an example, we illustrate how tensions around benefit sharing are rooted in the emergence and changing prioritisation of contexts and meanings over time. The importance of eliciting, ordering and sanctioning of meanings is emphasised. We conclude by discussing the implications for robustness and benefit sharing in social-ecological systems and we comment on the usefulness and limitations of the framework.

While Common Pool Resource (CPR) theory has been widely applied to forestry, there are few examples of using the theory to study large-scale governance. In this paper we test the applicability of CPR theory to understanding forest governance and outcomes in Indonesia between 1965 and 2012. Indonesia contains one of the world’s largest tropical forests, and experienced rapid deforestation during this time frame, with forest cover dropping from close to 85% to less than 50%. Using a mixture of within case comparison and process tracing methods, we identify key variables that influenced the levels of deforestation during two time periods: before 1998, when governance was dominated by the dictatorship of President Suharto, and after 1998, when democratic governance and political decentralization were initiated, and deforestation rates fell and then rose again. Our results point to the value of CPR theory in identifying important variables that influence sustainability at large scales, however they also illustrate important limitations of CPR theory for the study of forests with large spatial extent and large numbers of users. The presence and absence of key variables from CPR theory did emerge as important causes of deforestation. However, some variables, such as strong leadership and local rule-making, appeared to work in the opposite direction as predicted by CPR theory. In addition, key variables that may have influenced deforestation rates are not well captured in CPR theory. These include the intention of the governance system, the presence of clientelistic politics, the influences of international politics and markets, and the influence of top-down governance. Given that CPR theory does not fully explain the case at hand, its applicability, as is, to large-scale commons should be treated with some caution.

Land uses are what land users do. When spatial planners and other policymakers promote or preclude certain land uses, they interfere with the rights of the users of land, most notably with property. The technical term for what connects land uses, planning, and property is land policy. My paper has a simple message: Good land policy provides a diversity of land uses with plural property relations. No single kind of property rules fits the purposes of all types of land uses. A detached single family house is not like a community garden, nor a highway like a retail chain. Each land use needs its own property “fingerprint.” In everyday practice, private and common property relations often accommodate a wide variety of demands made by the owners and users of land. Many theories of property and land policy, however, fail to recognize plural property relations. The simple message of my paper seeks to reconcile practice and theory. A polyrational theory of planning and property identifies eight types of land uses, each type needing its own kind of property rules. The eight types of land uses are: insular, opportunistic, kinship, collaborative, corporate, structural, container, and environmental uses of land. Polyrational land policy makes sure that desirable land uses are enveloped by appropriate property relations.

Japanese<em> iriai</em> forests have been regarded as a model of institutions for collective action in the sustainable use of resources in studies on commons, as pointed out by Ostrom (1990) and McKean (1996). However, present-day<em> iriai</em> forests that have survived decades of legal and even greater economic and social challenges have undergone significant alteration. While we know that external conditions such as foreign competition from low-cost timber have depressed the Japanese forestry industry and thus reduced the health of Japanese forests as a whole, we do not know about the current state of the <em>iriai</em> forests in particular. Adaptation to external impacts is crucial for the survival of the commons in a modern industrialized society. This study examines external impacts on traditional commons and the resultant institutional changes in current Japan. We cannot easily track the changes in traditional commons without deep understanding of many cases, because the factors affecting their functioning are complex and diverse. Therefore, we opted to use the case study method to improve the empirical foundations for analyzing these complex phenomena. Our goal was to examine the institutional changes resulting from one source of pressure found in many commons near urbanizing areas in postwar Japan – an increase in newcomers – as well as from the pressure of foreign competition in forest products. We chose eleven villages in the Yamaguni district in Kyoto city that manage their own common forests and studied the documented rules in these communities. We used participant observation and also conducted interviews with villagers to obtain their sense of change over time, the impact of globalization, and the current status of the commons. This paper derived the following conclusions. First, the village community can adapt its institutions to external influences by supporting continuous institutional change. Second, although village communities can overcome most external impacts themselves, there is one impact, low-priced competition due to free trade in forest products which they cannot cope with independently. Third, regenerating local Japanese commons requires multi-level governance based on the principle of subsidiarity.

Punishments and rewards are effective means for establishing cooperation in social dilemmas. We compare a setting where actors <span class="italic">individually</span> decide whom to sanction with a setting where sanctions are only implemented when actors <span class="italic">collectively</span> agree that a certain actor should be sanctioned. Collective sanctioning decisions are problematic due to the difficulty of reaching consensus. However, when a decision is made collectively, perverse sanctioning (e.g. punishing high contributors) by individual actors is ruled out. Therefore, collective sanctioning decisions are likely to be in the interest of the whole group. We employ a laboratory experiment where subjects play Public Goods Games with opportunities for punishment or reward that is implemented either by an individual, a majority, or unanimously. For both punishment and reward, contribution levels are higher in the individual than the majority condition, and higher under majority than unanimity. Often, majority agreement or unanimity was not reached on punishments or rewards.