Amy R. Poteete

Concordia University Montreal · Department of Political Science

This is a summary of key findings from an online survey about impressions, experiences, hopes, and concerns about the Champ des Possibles in Montreal, Quebec. It is part of a SSHRC funded research project, "Supporting Urban Commoning in Montreal's Champ des Possibles."

Version française d'un rapport.

Tables of data from an online survey about experiences with and attitudes toward the Champ des Possibles in Montreal, including what people do there, what they like and dislike, their concerns, and how they would like the space to be cared for in the future. This is the technical annex to a separate progress report.

Annexe à un rapport technique sur un sondage en ligne.

Urban commoning—actions and processes to transform relations, producing shared access to and maintenance of resources and/or spaces as well as a sense of commonality (Blomley 2008, 2016; Linebaugh 2008, 79, 279; Velicu & García-López 2018)—is ubiquitous. It is also extremely challenging. Amorphous, dynamic sets of actors—strangers—often compete wit...

The multifaceted nature of decentralization, democracy, and development renders relationships among them ambivalent and conditional. It is certainly possible to decentralize in ways that foster local democracy and improvements in socio-economic well-being. The empirical record, however, is mixed, and not only because the phenomena of interest have...

Political clientelism is generally seen as an obstacle to democratic governance and inclusive development. The politics of access to Senegalese fisheries suggest a more nuanced relationship between elections, clientelism, responsiveness, and inclusion. Even where clientelism is pervasive, it takes different forms and interacts with electoral compet...

Presidential and legislative elections in 2012 produced Senegal’s second electoral turnover since independence in 1960, bringing to power Macky Sall and the Benno Bokk Yakaar coalition, led by Sall’s Alliance Pour la République (APR). In many respects, the elections of 2012 parallel the landmark elections of 2000, when the opposition united behind...

ØRNULF GULBRANDSEN, The State and the Social: state formation in Botswana and its precolonial and colonial genealogies. New York NY and Oxford: Berghahn (pb $34.95/£22 – 978 1 78238 325 3). 2012, 343 pp. - Volume 85 Issue 3 - AMY R. POTEETE

Elinor Ostrom’s article in this issue suggests that institutions for collective action evolve, highlights parallels between biological and institutional evolution, and describes an hypothetical example of institutional evolution related to an irrigation system. The article is provocative but not definitive in that it does not demonstrate that evolu...

Relative to other countries, Botswana is highly centralized fiscally and administratively (Schneider 2003). More decentralized political systems have two or more tiers of elected local government with considerable discretionary authority over decision-making and revenue generation (Marks et al. 2008; Schneider 2003). By contrast, Botswana’s single...

According to conventional wisdom, substantive policy does not feature in electoral politics in African countries. African elections often appear as ethnic censuses and involve competition over patronage. Several studies, however, find that electoral competition does influence policy in a variety of countries, including Botswana, Ghana, Ethiopia, an...

The strength of the legislature has been identified as one of the strongest predictors of democratic survival. Executive-legislative relations are defined by formal constitutional arrangements, but also by their interpretation in the practice of political power and in the courts. Renegotiation of executive-legislative relations thus occurs through...

NOTE: A longer pre-pubiication version of the chapter can be downloaded here: http://www.pbrc.soka.edu/current_research/the-absence-of-inter-group-violence-in-botswana.pdf#pdf ABSTRACT: Intergroup violence in Botswana has been limited and sporadic despite objectively significant ethnolinguistic heterogeneity, socioeconomic inequality, and uneven r...

Natural resources are affected by several types of “multiples.” Some analysts emphasize linkages across multiple scales while others focus on interactions across multi-level institutions or multiple fields of action. Different ways of framing the “multiples” associated with socio-ecological systems are important because they influence what analysts...

The Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) has maintained a super-majority in the National Assembly for over forty years despite increasingly competitive elections. Several factors contribute to the BDP's continued legislative dominance, including features of the electoral system, fragmentation of the party system, and obstacles to strategic voting behavi...

"Decentralization promises to empower local actors, but threatens others with a loss of power. We describe 'repertoires of domination' as the set of acts actors perform to defend--or entrench and expand--their positions. We illustrate how repertoires of domination prevent local-level democratization through the decentralization of natural resource...

This presentation discusses the influence of political organization and competition on natural resource management in Africa. Particular attention is give to how different types of interventions in natural resource management trigger the mobilization of different scales of political community, and of how interactions across political communities at...

Advances in the social sciences have emerged through a variety of research methods: field-based research, laboratory and field experiments, and agent-based models. However, which research method or approach is best suited to a particular inquiry is frequently debated and discussed. Working Together examines how different methods have promoted vario...

There are many frameworks for institutional and political analysis. This chapter focuses on property rights, institutions, and politics related to natural resources. From the mid-twentieth century until the 1980s, institutional analysis related to natural resources focused almost exclusively on property rights. With the emergence of new institution...

African Politics in Comparative Perspective, HydenGoran, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 314. - Volume 42 Issue 4 - Amy R. Poteete

Poor management of earnings from valuable natural resources results in a syndrome known as Dutch Disease, characterised by real exchange rate appreciation, high labour costs, and structural imbalances in economic development. Often a product of rentier politics, Dutch Disease undermines long-term economic performance in resource dependent economies...

Advances in the social sciences have emerged through a variety of research methods: field-based research, laboratory and field experiments, and agent-based models. However, which research method and approach is best suited to a particular inquiry is frequently debated and discussed. Working Together examines how different methods have promoted vari...

Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM), once presented as the best way to protect common pool natural resources, now attracts a growing chorus of critiques that either question its underlying assumptions or emphasize problems related to institutional design. These critiques overlook connections between the definition of rights to natur...

Many debates exist among social scientists that relate to the “best” way of collecting data about important theoretical questions. As scholars, who conduct individual case studies as well as participate in large-N studies combining qualitative and quantitative data, we recognize the value of each research strategy and trade-offs in choosing between...

"The trade-offs between qualitative and quantitative research methods are well known. Qualitative research promises high internal validity and the ability to disentangle causal processes. Given the costs of conducting in-depth research, however, it is difficult to obtain the large number of qualitative observations required to establish external va...

Collective action for sustainable management among resource-dependent populations has important policy implications. Despite considerable progress in identifying factors that affect the prospects for collective action, no consensus exists about the role played by heterogeneity and size of group. The debate continues in part because of a lack of uni...

Empirical research must overcome two major obstacles: conceptual inconsistency and the scarcity of comparable data. These problems are particularly severe for interdisciplinary research on topics such as the study of collective action. There is no agreement on the appropriate unit of analysis (who should act collectively), measures of successful co...

The ability to develop institutions is constrained by human capacity to cope with complexity. But complexity is multidimensional and it is not clear which forms of complexity present the greatest challenges for institutional development. In the context of natural resources, the predictability of resource availability affects expectations that an in...

Recent work in international studies and comparative politics scrutinizes the relative importance of ideas, interests, and institutions as sources of policy change. A growing body of scholarship identifies ideas as the main causal factors, influencing perceived interests as well as perceived policy options. Others contend that policies can best be...

The characterisation of a bureaucracy as Weberian does not capture the ambiguous developmental implications of relations among bureaucrats and other political entities. Nor do electoral politics guarantee broad representation of social interests in policy-making. Local conditions, informal patterns of social and political organisation at the local...

The characterisation of a bureaucracy as Weberian does not capture the ambiguous developmental implications of relations among bureaucrats and other political entities. Nor do electoral politics guarantee broad representation of social interests in policy-making. Local conditions, informal patterns of social and political organisation at the local...

Despite many approaches of neoclassical and endogenous growth theory, economists still face problems in explaining the reasons for income differences between countries. Institutional economics and the deep determinants of growth literature try to depart from pure economic facts to examine economic development. Therefore, this article analyzes the i...

Under what conditions do government agents utilize participatory techniques for policy choice and implementation? What factors influence the extent of participation sought by government agents? I first develop a game theoretic model focusing on a minimal condition for participatory policy-making: the solicitation of information from those who will...

Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) has been adopted throughout the developing world. Although Botswana's version is more decentralized than many and has been portrayed internationally as relatively successful, it is politically beleaguered. Suggestions that diamond revenues should be decentralized like wildlife revenues challenge t...

Three major issues concerning the relative importance of ideas, interests, and institutions for the choice of policies deserve closer examination: the influence of ideas in blocking rather than initiating policies; the influence of ideas in policy areas other than macroeconomic strategy; and differentiation in the receptivity of decision-makers to...

Most countries that rely heavily on a single valuable commodity have difficulty managing the fluctuations in income associated with these goods, typically treating booms as if they were permanent increases in income. The frequent result – known as Dutch Disease – is characterized by overvaluation of the exchange rate, relatively expensive labor cos...

Typescript. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Duke University, 1999. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 334-347).

"Decentralization policies ostensibly change the distribution of authority between center and locality by empowering a variety of local of actors and organizations, such as user groups, traditional authorities, or multipurpose local governments. While decentralization may empower some local actors, if implemented, it can threaten the authority of c...

"Decentralization is widely expected to empower local people. Empowerment implies increased equity, at least in terms of decision-making authority. Is it reasonable to expect increased equity from decentralization? The devolution of authority inherently involves a rebalancing of power relations between the center/national and the periphery/local, b...

"One of the themes for the 10th Biennial Conference of the IASCP calls for methodological innovation and introspection under the heading 'Contemporary Analytical Tools and Theoretical Questions.' The theme encourages the use of methods that are relatively new to the study of common property (e.g., game theory) or have been developed relatively rece...