Sustainability issues cannot be separated from their social and biophysical context, and collaborative governance responses to interdependent sustainability issues are inherently complex. Previous empirical research has not adequately captured whether or not collaboration networks are matching the patterns among multiple sustainability issues that are interdependent and thus influencing each other, such as livelihoods, infrastructure, food security, biodiversity and land use. Failing to address this match or mismatch increases the risk that the policies and management responses will be inefficient or have unforeseen and even adverse consequences. In the Jimma zone, a rural area in southwest Ethiopia, I investigated if and how different types of collaborative institutions improved how interlinked sustainability issues are managed (objective B), with focused studies on biodiversity conservation and food security in poor farming households (objective A).
Objective A was to investigate if and how informal small-group traditional collaboration among smallholder farmers influenced their food sovereignty and crop choices. Collaboration is generally assumed to have many positive effects, but little research has actually measured the outcomes. I made 183 household interviews to investigate three types of traditional informal ways of collaboration,
in which farmers help with each other’s crops, and mitigate and share crop losses by joint planning, cultivating and by crop guarding against animal pest. In the local language Oromoo these institutions are called the didaro, the dado and daboo. Among my research questions were: To what extent and under which conditions is the dado, daboo and didaro improving household food security and diversity? Who gets to mobilize cooperative labor and what are the individual and structural barriers for participating? Among the preliminary conclusions are that traditional collaboration improved household food security, significantly reduced crop losses to wild animals, facilitated social learning and trust, but at the cost of a slightly limited individual freedom over crop choice.
Objective B included two main tasks:
• To design a conceptual and analytical model of how governance gaps arise when collaborative governance responses fail to recognize how sustainability issues and actors are interlinked. I did this by modelling the intersection of two networks: an actor-collaboration network, and a network of interlinked societal issues (Fig.1–2).
• To identify critical governance gaps in southwest Ethiopia consisting of 60 actors and 38 sustainability issues, by applying my network model (Fig.3–4).
I differentiated between integrative governance gaps that arise when interdependent issues are managed in separation without recognizing their interdependencies, versus collaborative gaps that arise when actors working on common issues do not collaborate (Fig.2). One of my conclusions is that it that actors and policymakers should, in order to be cost-effective, (re)allocate resources to the most pressing governance gaps, which I in southwest Ethiopia identified as: forest and wildlife issues (collaborative gaps), and the access provision of finance, transportation, schools, food and crop markets (integrative gaps, see Fig. 4–5).
