Polycentric governance of collective rangelands in southern Tunisia

Abstract

The governance system of collective rangelands in southern Tunisia (i.e., tribal grazing lands covering 1.5 million ha) entails several governmental and non-governmental actors. Thus, enabling collaboration between the different decision-making centers within this system becomes essential to guarantee its functioning. Following the implementation of the Program of Agro-pastoral Development and Promotion of Local Initiatives in South-eastern Tunisia (French acronym PRODESUD 2003-2020) by the Tunisian government and the International Fund for Agriculture Development, a pilot land-use scheme has been run to experiment with a set of new rangeland management rules alongside an alternative polycentric design. While the institutional change induced by such a policy experiment seems to be sufficiently debated by scholarship, little interest has been devoted to exploring the effectiveness of its simultaneous organizational prescriptions. Among these prescriptions are introducing new community-based organizations and promoting new rangeland management contracts to ensure a sustainable harvest of pastoral resources. The present communication aims to assess the effectiveness of this pilot organizational design around the concept of polycentric governance. To do so, we perform a two-step diagnostic research. We apply first to the analytic tool of Networks of Adjacent Action Situations (NAAS; McGinnis, 2011) to visualize the different subcomponents of the governance system and better understand the mandated patterns of interaction between them. Next, we refer to the output and process performance criteria suggested by Koontz et al (2019) to assess the performance of polycentric design embedded within the under-consideration pilot scheme. Overall, results highlight numerous intersections between the pilot organizational content and requirements of efficacy and coherence. However, besides pointing out several duplications of function between the new community-based organizations created by PRODESUD and the preexistent ones, our investigation stresses several concerns about the resilience of the suggested polycentric version, which seems to confirm the need for promoting an effective autonomy of local pastoral communities.

Keywords

• Collective rangelands, polycentric governance, networks of adjacent action situations, Tunisia.