LAPPRI Research Seminar: Networks of Prescribed Interaction in Chilean Environmental Governance

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The Latin America Policy Process Research Initiative (LAPPRI) aims to advance established and emerging policy process theories in order to enhance scholarly understanding of policymaking in Latin America. The LAPPRI Research Seminar Series features scholars from around the world dedicated to researching policy process dynamics across the region.

Presenters:Karina Arias Yurisch (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile) and Karina Retamal Soto (Universidad de Chile)

Title:Networks of Prescribed Interaction in Chilean Environmental Governance

Abstract:Environmental policies increasingly depend on coordination among multiple public agencies, yet the coordination they prescribe is rarely examined at the moment of design. Decontamination plans are a clear case. A single plan addresses diverse problems, some with identifiable sources that authorities can target directly and others with diffuse sources whose resolution depends on many interdependent actors.

We ask whether this difference leaves an imprint on how policies prescribe coordination. We argue that the nature of the problem shapes policy design, because the instruments feasible for each problem carry rules that define who must interact with whom and therefore produce distinct architectures of prescribed coordination. We examine this argument in two Chilean decontamination plans that govern different environmental media, the Villarrica Lake Basin Water Pollution Control Plan and the Santiago Metropolitan Region Atmospheric Prevention and Decontamination Plan.

Using Institutional Grammar 2.0, we decompose each plan into institutional statements and reconstruct multilevel networks of prescribed interaction among public agencies, among tasks, and between agencies and the tasks the rules assign them. We then apply network motif analysis and multilevel Exponential Random Graph Models to compare the coordination prescribed for identifiable-source and diffuse problems.

In both plans, coordination is anchored in managing agencies, while shared responsibility, in which coordinated agencies converge on the same tasks, intensifies where sources are diffuse. Each plan thus rests on a common managerial backbone that adds distributed convergence in proportion to the interdependence of each problem. The comparison across water and air suggests that the nature of the problem, more than the policy domain, drives the coordination that formal rules create. It also offers a way to anticipate the coordination demands placed on subnational actors.