Placing environmental democracy at the heart of co-governance: rethinking the governance of complex waterways
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ways in which complex systems are governed often generate democratic malaise due to a gap between people’s expectations and the ability of authorities to meet these expectations. Additionally, misalignment between ecological and social systems makes it difficult for decision-makers to adapt to dynamic environments. Co-governance, which involves collaboration and engagement between governments and a range of stakeholders, is a common mechanism to address these challenges. However, co-governance has been criticized for being exclusionary, ad hoc, and counter to democratic principles. We argue that principles of environmental democracy offer a way to strengthen the effectiveness and legitimacy of co-governance. We base this argument on findings from research on the governance of national historic waterways in Ontario, Canada, specifically the Rideau Canal and Trent-Severn Waterway. These waterways reach across multiple watersheds, territories, and jurisdictions, involving a range of authorities and different stakeholder groups, many of whom have expressed dissatisfaction with current decision-making structures. By examining the difficulties involved in governing these waterways, we propose three reforms to co-governance that would enhance environmental democracy: (1) tiered-mechanisms that facilitate collaborative governance, (2) targeted collaborative exercises to create and strengthen within-ties across stakeholder groups, and (3) semi-regular forums to support communication among stakeholder groups.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it