Making institutions and governance spatially explicit

The governance of natural resources is rarely made spatially explicit. Although  maps are routinely used in spatial planning, they usually  do not explicitly state the formal and informal rules and forms of governance  that apply to different zones. Crucially, spatial planning maps do not provide information on land users’ and other stakeholders’ compliance with rules or enforcement effectiveness. Yet all of these elements have a direct and often significant impact on social-ecological indicators, such as biodiversity, above-ground biomass, and agricultural yield. In this contribution, we make the formal and informal rules that apply to land and water governance in the Kilimanjaro region spatially explicit, covering all main land-use types and major water bodies. We shed light on different types of rules (e.g., access, ownership, management, extraction), forms of governance (e.g., monitoring, sanctioning), and stakeholders (e.g., land users, state authorities, and extension services) and their spatial dimensions. These include i) administrative borders (e.g., inside/outside the National Park, ii) biophysical features (e.g., the 60-m-rule along open watercourses), iii) land-use types or practices (e.g., fertilizer and pesticide use for certain crops; water use regulations), and iv) socio-cultural borders (e.g., Kihamba - traditional customs governing the management and inheritance of land owned by Chagga people). We provide information on both  formal institutions (rules-in-form) and informal institutions (rules-in-use). Rules-in-form are mainly derived from analyzing relevant regulatory frameworks, ordinances, and other policy documents, but also from stakeholder interviews. The analysis of rules-in-use is based on stakeholder interviews and a village-level survey aimed specifically at eliciting local knowledge and ease of compliance with regulations, providing crucial insights on the – perceived – effectiveness of the formal institutions in place. Our spatially explicit representation of institutions and governance is a novel tool with practical use for policymaking. Such a map on institutions and governance provides spatially-explicit explanatory variables for the analysis of landscape-level social-ecological indicators and for the prediction/development of future (land use) scenarios. Such a map can shed light on local human-nature relationships and can inform participatory processes aimed at eliciting desired futures and transformation pathways.