Hoonchul Shin

Governing common pool resources (CPR) in the face of disturbances such as globalization and climate change is challenging. The outcome of any CPR governance regime is the influenced by local combinations of social, institutional, and biophysical factors, as well as cross-scale interdependencies. In this study, we take a step towards understanding multiple-causation of CPR outcomes by analyzing 1) the co-occurrence of Destign Principles (DP) by activity (irrigation, fishery and forestry), and 2)

Smallholder agricultural systems, strongly dependent on water resources and investments in shared infrastructure, make a significant contribution to food security in developing countries. These communities are being increasingly integrated into the global economy and are exposed to new global climate-related risks that may affect their willingness to cooperate in community-level collective action problems. We performed field experiments on public goods with private and collective risks in 118 sm

"On-going efforts to understand the dynamics of coupled social-ecological (or more broadly, coupled infrastructure) systems and common pool resources have led to the generation of numerous datasets based on a large number of case studies. This data has facilitated the identification of important factors and fundamental principles which increase our understanding of such complex systems. However, the data at our disposal are often not easily comparable, have limited scope and scale, and are based

Large-N comparative studies have helped common pool resource scholars gain general insights into the factors that influence collective action and governance outcomes. However, these studies are often limited by missing data, and suffer from the methodological limitation that important information is lost when we reduce textual information to quantitative data. This study was motivated by nine case studies that appeared to be inconsistent with the expectation that the presence of Ostrom’s Design

The U.S. highway system is an iconic example of civil infrastructure. Yet it also exemplifies the challenges of infrastructure sustainability. The American Society for Civil Engineers gave the American road infrastructure a grade of “D” since the roads “are often crowded, frequently in poor condition, chronically underfunded, and are becoming more dangerous.” In this paper, we seek to understand the intertwined social and technical processes that lead to this unsustainability by examining the U.

Vallury, S., H. C. Shin, M. A. Janssen, R. Meinzen-Dick, S. Kandikuppa, K. R. Rao, and R. Chaturvedi. 2022. Assessing the institutional foundations of adaptive water governance in South India. Ecology and Society 27(1):18. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-12957-270118

In the study of common-pool resource (CPR) governance, frame- works provide a metatheoretical language to describe system states, dynamics, elements, and relationships. The coding manuals which accompany CPR frame- works–in addition to providing guidelines for connecting empirical case work to conceptual variables–define a vocabulary of coding questions. For empirical work, connecting variables and coding questions with framework elements con- tributes to conceptual advance. In the process of an

A useful theoretical lens that has emerged for understanding urban resilience is the four basic types of interdependencies in critical infrastructures: the physical, geographic, cyber, and logical types. This paper is motivated by a conceptual and methodological limitation-although logical interdependencies (where two infrastructures affect the state of each other via human decisions) are regarded as one of the basic types of interdependencies, the question of how to apply the notion and how to

Abstract Unreliable public water supplies cause human hardships and are still common worldwide. Households often deal with the issue by adopting various coping strategies that are representative of economic decentralization (e.g., using private wells, sourcing from third‐party vendors) and political decentralization (e.g., making petitions to a public provider). There is growing interest in these user‐level decentralized coping strategies, but their relative effects on provider's behavior and th

In the management of reservoirs, different forms of infrastructure (such as dams, hydropower units, information) are functionally interdependent and often managed by different types of actors to form a social-ecological-technological system. Such interdependence also occurs because institutions (understood as rules that guide and constrain actor behavior) exist to indicate how infrastructures should be managed. We apply institutional analysis and social network analysis to identify how functiona