Fostering collective action through participation in natural resource and environmental management: An integrative and interpretative narrative review using the IAD, NAS and SES frameworks.

Solving humanity's social-environmental challenges calls for collective action by relevant actors. Hence, involving these actors in the policy process has been deemed both necessary and promising. But how and to what extent can participatory policy interventions (PIs) foster collective action for sustainable environmental and natural resource management? Lab and lab-in-the-field experiments on co-operation in the context of collective action challenges (i.e. social dilemmas) and case study research on participatory processes both offer insights into this question but have hitherto mainly remained unconnected. This article reviews insights from these two streams of literature in tandem, synthesising and analysing them using the institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework in combination with the network of action situations (NAS) framework and the social-ecological systems (SES) framework. We thus perform an integrative and interpretative narrative review to draw a richer and more nuanced picture of PIs: their potential impacts, their (institutional and behavioural) mechanisms and challenges, and caveats and recommendations for their design and implementation. Our review shows that PIs can indeed foster collective action by (a) helping the relevant actors craft suitable and legitimate institutional arrangements and (b) addressing and/or influencing actors' attributes of relevance to collective action, namely their individual and shared understandings, beliefs and preferences. To fulfil this potential, the organisers and sponsors of PIs must address and link to the broader context through soundly designed and implemented processes. Complementary follow-up, enforcement and conflict resolution mechanisms are necessary to nurture, reassure and sustain understandings, beliefs and preferences that undergird trust-building and collective action. The conceptual framework developed for the review can help researchers and practitioners further assess these insights, disentangle PIs' mechanisms and impacts, and integrate the research and practice of participatory governance and collective action.

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Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests:The corresponding author himself has supported and sometimes led the organisation of participatory processes for sustainable watershed management. Notwithstanding, none of the involved organisations participated in the conception and development of the submitted paper. The conclusions of the paper, though relevant for the types of processes in which the corresponding author himself has been involved, are strictly based on the evidence gathered and analysed for this paper. For the sake of transparency, however, the corresponding author discloses the details of his involvement in participatory processes. (For details of these participatory processes, see Ortiz-Riomalo et al., 2022) Between 2014 and 2016, together with Juan Camilo Cardenas (Universidad de los Andes, Colombia), he co-organised several multi-actor workshops in the basins of the rivers rising from the Santurbán páramo (Santander and Norte de Santander departments, Colombia). The Colombian Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development called for and supported the first workshops and activities in 2014. Likewise, the Instituto de Investigación de Recursos Biológicos Alexander von Humboldt and the corresponding regional environmental authorities (i.e. CDMB and Corponor) supported the realisation of these activities. PROMAC (GIZ, Colombia) and USAID (through its ABC - LA program) funded some subsequent workshops between 2015 and 2016. Between October 2018 and March 2019, the corresponding author and the second author of the paper provided pro bono support and advice to the Peruvian Ministry of Environment and Pro Ambiente II (GIZ) for a participatory process for watershed management in the Cañete River Watershed (Lima, Peru). The corresponding author co-organised the workshops that this process comprised. The MERESE - FIDA project and Pro Ambiente II cover the logistics and other costs. However, none of the persons and organisations mentioned influenced (or bear any responsibilities for) the views and arguments expressed in the paper.