SDLC-STATION

Taking an institutional work perspective highlights precisely these often unremarked components of institutions, directing my attention to the rest of the iceberg. The primary theoretical contribution of the articles discussed here, then, is to demonstrate that institutional creation involves all four dimensions of power, while much of the literature on PES has focused only on coercion and, occasionally, manipulation, corresponding to thin, formal institutions. For clarity, I separately discuss coercion, manipulation, and subjectification, the three most important dimensions of power in my work on PES below.

5.1.1 Coercion in the PES Literature

Fleming and Spicer (2014, p. 242) define coercion as a means of directly “getting another person to do something that he or she would not otherwise have done.” This form of power, which Gebara and Agrawal (2017) gloss as the “carrot-and-stick” approach, has been the central focus of much of the PES literature and a core feature of its approach to institutional design (Article #3). This is consistent with a thin approach to institutions, where the formal rules need only be in place to change calculations of interests and resulting behavior. Articles #1 and #3

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illustrate the pitfalls of limiting policy discussion to formal design principles that reinforce transactional behavior that in many circumstances diminishes the efficacy of the overall environmental intervention. Historically, much effort has been placed on getting PES design right, in an almost Sisyphian challenge to work against the weight of the overall complexity of the end ambition. Given that failed outcomes have been common, it is reasonable to ask why PES design often continues to be implemented in an almost formulaic fashion.

Admittedly, as illustrated in Articles #1, #3, and #4, if the rest of the iceberg is so important to success, as Fleming and Spicer (2014, p. 31) point out, it seems puzzling “why organizations tend to cling to positions of formal authority – often with great fervor – given its secondary status in getting things done.” A possible answer is that it is simply cognitively less demanding to focus efforts on explicit and formal institutions that can be readily identified and broken into discrete rules. Of course, what is expedient for boundedly rational actors with limited resources may not be the most effective, nor is it always the best strategy for researchers.

That is not to say that coercion is not an important part of the story of PES. PES is explicitly designed to create a system in which actors are incentivized either by the government or one another to engage in more sustainable behaviors. The problem, however, is that coercion does not exist on its own. First, institutions are not neutral and cannot fulfill every stakeholder’s desires, so they are always open to filtering. Second, as Agrawal (2005) points out, formal institutions presuppose certain types of subjects who are to be governed by those institutions, so the process of subjectification is as much a part of institutional creation and maintenance as rule making. If the intended subjects of the institution are not pliable in the way envisioned, the institution will often be ineffective or even lead to perverse outcomes (Article #3). The power to affect what issues are and are not included in the ambit of an institution, as well as the power to shape subjects’ norms and perceptions of their own interests are also central to the future development of PES systems. These more subterranean forms of power, which, only visible under a thick institutional lens, are a primary focus of my work.

5.1.2 Manipulation in PES

Manipulation occurs when “actors seek to either limit the issues that are discussed or fit issues within (what are perceived to be) acceptable boundaries” (Fleming & Spicer, 2014, p. 242).

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Article #4 provides a concrete example. The RSPO, while certainly among the most successful of existing sustainability certification programs, is severely limited by an internal tension between its scope in terms of membership and its rigor in terms of results. Reliant on brand reputation concerns to drive participation, the RSPO’s membership has expended considerable effort strengthening the verifiability and traceability of certified supply chains. In the process, it has generated a set of more or less separated supply chains, whose costs are much more reflective of the transaction costs involved in monitoring the flow of oil than the costs of more sustainable and equitable production. This system results directly from the changing power relations between different groups in the initiative and particularly reflects the growing dominance of downstream economic actors, who have come to primarily set the agenda at RSPO, leading to increases in rigor that threaten to lock out small producers.

The case of RSPO is not unique. As Fleming and Spicer (2014) note, institutional entrepreneurs may often find themselves at odds with the very institutions they promote as these institutions become more formal and, as a result, begin excluding issues. On the one hand, such a filtering function may be necessary if emerging institutions are to avoid collapsing under their own weight (Gallemore, 2016). On the other, because formalization is also simultaneously a process of selection, only some interests will be served by the institutional agendas that are formed. In other words, all PES systems are not created equally but will reflect the constellation of interests that motivate actors to undertake the institutional work of creation and maintenance. Article #2, for example, demonstrates that inequalities in resource distribution and specialization in institutional work leads to inequalities in organizations’ positional ability to influence policy development on PES systems like REDD+. This type of power, however, does not result from formal institutional arrangements but is, rather, presupposed by them because it is power that precedes and helps to set the agenda that shapes institutional creation itself. Inasmuch as PES systems are produced by different constellations of interests that attempt to manipulate the agenda, researchers must never regard the resulting systems as neutral and should pay close attention to the social process of institutional creation as a possible source for the inequitable outcomes that often plague these schemes. Too often, institutions have been assumed to be isomorphic and to have similar effects in different social contexts, but this is often not the case (Gebara & Agrawal, 2017).

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5.1.3 Subjectification in PES

Fleming and Spicer (2014, p. 6) explain that subjectification “seeks to determine an actor’s very sense of self, including their emotions and identity.” As mentioned above, formal coercive institutions are generally counterproductive or ineffective if they are inconsistent with the identities and interests of the subjects they are intended to govern.

Subjectification is a subtle mode of power, and Fleming and Spicer (2014) helpfully characterize it as a power between actors who are continuously shaping one another’s behavior. This can be seen, for example, in Article #2’s study of the diverse types of institutional work involved in developing and disseminating PES systems. Article #2 demonstrates that if we think of the institutional work of building PES as always being undertaken collectively, we can see that what are often understood as individual acts of institutional work are also simultaneously acts of network construction and, effectively, construction of the self as a particular kind of actor with a particular kind of expertise. Or, as Wheatley (2011, p. 69) puts it, “Nothing exists independent of its relationships.” Subjectification takes place as a result of social interaction and while, on the one hand, it is the ultimate form of control, in which an actor’s very self is constructed by power, as Foucault (Foucault, 1982) argues, these power relations cannot fully determine behavior, and there is always an opportunity for resistance, in part because no one actor can totally control the forces giving shape to others identities. Gebara and Agrawal (2017), for example, note that in Brazil local land users in the Amazon have learned how to clear forestland without being detected by satellite monitoring, refusing to respond to a carrot-and- stick approach to anti-deforestation, their knowledge and subjectivities prompting resisting coercion.

As advocated throughout the presented articles, the theoretical merits of adopting a thicker notion of PES is that it offers a space for reflection vis-a-vis the power of subjectification that can constrain or enable institutions. As argued by Schön, “a reflective institution must make a place for attention to conflicting values and purposes” (Schön 1991, p. 338). Through this broader discourse a stakeholder must not only interpret their position within this complex network, but so too acknowledge the constellation of other actors within this network and the power they inversely exert upon the observer.

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