Grassroots Global Governance ─ Local Watershed Management Experiments and the Evolution of Sustainable Development

The recent Paris climate change accord has set out an ambitious agenda for its 195 signatories. The question of how they will each meet their goals is daunting, but will be especially so for states with developing economies. Approaches to understanding the process through which global ideas are implemented at a local level often focus on national policymaking, but it has long been noted by institutionalists that efforts to apply global ideas through new national laws or state agencies frequently prove insufficient. This is particularly the case in less-developed states where such efforts are often left to hollow institutions that lack the capacity to produce change on the ground.

However, in Grassroots Global Governance, Craig Kauffman shows how grassroots actors normally left out of studies of global governance adapt international ideas to fit local realities and in turn reshape global environmental governance. The book presents a model to show how ideas move from the global to the local, are adapted at the local level, and are then scaled back to the global, and it explains why and how the process endures or breaks down at different points. For example, it shows that inter-governmental organizations, powerful states, and international NGOs often govern indirectly by activating networks of grassroots actors. They wield influence not by directly pressuring local actors to accept particular ideas, but by stimulating and supporting local experimentation. Grassroots actors ultimately guide these processes due to their unique ability to adapt global ideas to local contexts and provide the pressure needed to push the process forward. Kauffman also suggests that the impact of any particular policy has more to do with the framing strategy used than with power dynamics, as previous scholars have suggested. Kauffman illustrates his argument by looking at watershed management in Ecuador, where local governments have successfully experimented with ways to address global problems like climate change despite a lack of national institution building.

Craig M. Kauffman is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon.