Adekola, Olalekan ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9747-0583 and Grainger, Alan (2023) Bottom-Up and Bottom-Top Institutional Changes in Environmental Management in the Niger Delta. World Development Perspectives, 31 (100491).

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Abstract

Research into how changes occur in repeated human practices, or ‘institutions’, is expanding rapidly. Yet there is still only limited understanding of how institutional change involves social networks. To address this gap this paper proposes a new Network Communication Framework, which predicts how ‘bottom-up’ and ‘bottom-top’ institutional changes can arise through interplays between state and civil society networks. While ‘top-down’ institutional change requires perfect compliance with state policies by a civil society network in a ‘strong state’, bottom-up institutional change can occur in a ‘weak state’ when a civil society network has high autonomy and adapts to a vacuum in state institutions at local scale by devising new informal institutions itself. Bottom-top institutional change, proposed here for the first time, can occur when a state network has a moderate ability to enforce its formal institutions throughout a country and a civil society network has moderate autonomy, and members of the two networks jointly negotiate new hybrid informal institutions. This paper reports evidence from the Niger Delta region of Nigeria for: (a) a bottom-up change by a clan network in its traditional land rights institutions which enabled it to sell communal land to an oil company; and (b) a bottom-top change in timber harvesting institutions, negotiated between members of a logging network and an informal government network (comprising staff of the state forestry department), which allowed loggers to extract more timber than permitted under formal state institutions. The examples of bottom-up and bottom-top change reported here both lead to higher environmental impacts than under the original informal traditional and formal state institutions. They show that autonomous bottom-up institutional change is not always as environmentally benevolent as previously assumed, and that it is difficult to treat overlogging as ‘illegal logging’ if government personnel are complicit in its operation through bottom-top institutional change.

Item Type:	Article
Status:	Published
DOI:	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wdp.2023.100491
Subjects:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > G Geography (General) G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GE Environmental Sciences
School/Department:	School of Humanities
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/7684

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