Power and Participation: Assessing Collaborative Governance of Organic Standards in Canada

Politics and Power in the NGO Sector: Structural Shifts and Governance Challenges

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are broadly recognised as independent civil society actors that contest social injustice and advance community empowerment. Yet their autonomy and governance are increasingly compromised by political interference operating through regulatory mechanisms, funding structures, and informal patronage networks. This study adopts a qualitative research design, drawing on semi-structured interviews with key informants from 120 small and medium-sized Delhi-based NGOs, purposively selected based on organisational size, funding structure, and exposure to political and regulatory constraints. Data were analysed using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) reflexive thematic analysis. Primary findings were triangulated with secondary literature, government notifications, and publicly documented cases, including materials related to the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) and its 2020 amendment. Political interference operates not only through direct control but via indirect mechanisms that normalise compliance, produce self-censorship, and reconfigure accountability as a disciplinary instrument. Loss of community trust (80%) and loss of organisational autonomy (75%) were the most frequently reported consequences. Findings further reveal governance distortions, including the weakening of internal democratic practices and downward accountability, and the structural production of mission drift and advocacy depoliticisation. The study concludes that preserving NGO autonomy requires stronger internal governance, funding diversification, and transparent self-regulatory mechanisms. State regulatory frameworks should safeguard NGOs’ democratic and moral role rather than constrain their operational capacity. The paper contributes to the growing debate on civil society co-optation, the autonomy–accountability paradox, and the conditions required for NGOs to remain genuine democratic actors.

Digital Government and Green Development: Governance Mechanisms, Institutional Conditions, and Future Research

Despite widespread policy enthusiasm for digital government as a tool for environmental governance, research on digital government and green development has evolved as largely separate literatures, leaving the mechanisms and contingencies of their relationship poorly understood. This review combines descriptive CiteSpace mapping with an integrative qualitative synthesis to examine how digital government capacities may shape green development outcomes through information integration, cross-agency coordination, participation, regulatory implementation, and green-oriented resource allocation. The framework treats digital government as an enabling and contingent governance capacity rather than an autonomous driver of environmental transformation, and identifies institutional capacity, regulatory quality, data governance, and digital inclusion as boundary conditions. It also highlights tensions involving surveillance, exclusion, data bias, and the material footprint of digital infrastructure. The review contributes a mechanism-centered agenda for comparative and causal research linking public sector digital transformation to environmental and developmental objectives.

Contesting and Integrating Multiple Ways of Knowing in Collaborative Natural Resource Governance

Collaborative governance is increasingly used to address complex natural resource issues, yet integrating diverse ways of knowing remains a persistent challenge. This study investigates how stakeholders engage with scientific, experiential, and administrative ways of knowing (WoKs) in a collaborative effort to manage public rangelands in the Thunder Basin ecoregion of Wyoming, USA. Drawing on qualitative data from interviews, a focus group, and participant observation, we examine how participants articulate and engage with different WoKs to inform land management goals, shape perceptions of knowledge legitimacy, and influence attitudes toward collaboration. Findings suggest that knowledge is strategically interpreted and relationally constructed through participants’ institutional roles, values, and social positions. While collaboration created opportunities for mutual learning, it also surfaced tensions around credibility, authority, and representation. Participants who were open to epistemic humility and treated knowledge as a tool for governance were better positioned to foster integration. These findings contribute to our understanding of collaborative governance by illustrating how epistemic dynamics shape interaction, learning, and decision-making within a multi-stakeholder process. More broadly, this case contributes to a growing recognition that meaningful collaboration requires moving beyond stakeholder diversity to critical engagement with how knowledge is produced, negotiated, and used in decision-making.

Public Management and Policy

Regional Commissioners and the Governance of Sustainable Development in Tanzania

Regional Commissioners (RCs) occupy a strategically important position between Tanzania’s central government and the authorities responsible for district- and council-level implementation. Yet their contribution to sustainable development has received limited empirical attention. This qualitative case study examines how RCs understand and exercise their authority to coordinate development across sectors and administrative levels, and how leadership competence shapes that role. Data were generated through semi-structured interviews with ten serving and five former RCs, supplemented by documentary review and contextual observation, and analysed thematically. Sustainable development is treated not as a single outcome attributable to an individual office-holder, but as a governance process requiring policy integration, territorial equity, institutional continuity, public accountability and attention to long-term social, economic and environmental consequences. Participants portrayed RCs as brokers of national priorities, convenors of sectoral and security institutions, and influential actors in district-level implementation. They also emphasised that formal authority does not produce effective coordination automatically: its developmental value depends on competence, credibility, sectoral knowledge and the capacity to anticipate interactions among policy fields. Concentrated authority can accelerate implementation, but it may also weaken participation and accountability when directives are insufficiently questioned. The study therefore recommends a transparent competency framework, systematic induction, performance assessment and stronger accountability safeguards for RC appointments. It concludes that RCs can enable sustainable regional development, but their contribution remains institutionally mediated and should not be inferred from authority or short-term output gains alone.

Sustainable governance of forests: an integrated synergy model on the axes of policy, law, economics and society

Forest governance rests on a stubborn paradox. Conceptual understanding has matured over recent decades, moving from sustained-yield forestry toward a reading of forests as complex adaptive socio-ecological systems, yet governance practice has not followed and remains lodged in fragmented sectoral structures that keep reproducing incoherent policy, unenforced law, misaligned economic incentives and poor social outcomes. The Integrated Synergy Model is presented to address that gap, a diagnostic framework that couples three bodies of theory not previously brought together: Meadows’ leverage-points hierarchy in the nine-point condensation which Abson et al . (2017) proposed, Ostrom’s eight design principles for common-pool resources, and qualitative causal loop diagrams, run across four governance axes of policy, law, economics and society. The design is conceptual and theory-building, drawing on an integrative narrative synthesis of peer-reviewed literature published between 2000 and 2025, mapping that literature onto Ostrom’s principles, and screening candidate variables through three criteria of structural centrality, leverage depth and cross-axis reach. Three feedback structures carry the argument. A virtuous reinforcing loop (R1) links secure tenure, community stewardship, ecosystem-service provision and political legitimacy, while a vicious reinforcing loop (R2) entrenches degradation as weak enforcement, illegal extraction and eroded fiscal capacity feed. A balancing loop of payments for ecosystem services and market signals (B1) operates, but only where tenure security is already in place. Of the nine candidate variables screened, three stand out as priority leverage points; namely, tenure security, independent monitoring, and intersectoral coordination, each of which acts on system design rather than on parameters. A three-step diagnostic roadmap of mapping, diagnosis and monitoring is presented, which lets national and sub-national forest authorities audit the leverage depth of their own governance portfolios.