The current epoch, the Anthropocene, is characterized by unprecedented environmental change brought on by climate change, biodiversity loss, globalization, the digital revolution, development, and population growth. Interdependence between social, ecological, and technical systems operating at multiple scales presents challenges in adapting and transforming to fit the changing conditions. Governance systems that can adapt to this complexity and uncertainty are critical to dealing with these changes. Polycentric governance systems are one such type of governance and are theorized to enhance adaptive capacity, improve institutional fit, and mitigate risk. Empirical evidence demonstrates that effective polycentric governance supports learning and experimentation, key adaptation processes. Polycentric governance systems are susceptible to the exercise of power. Power dynamics are fundamental to the study of policymaking and governance. Actors with different positions, interests, and abilities to access and mobilize resources shape the goals, processes, and outcomes of the governance system. However, the popular conceptualizations of polycentric governance rarely account for how social, economic, and political power shapes the system's dynamics and adaptability. Learning is one of the crucial dynamics fostering adaptive institutions and governance. However, little attention has been paid to integrating power into policy learning frameworks. This dissertation uses the collective learning process framework to investigate learning and power. It employs diverse methodologies to investigate 1) the role of power in the structure of governance systems, 2) participation in the learning process, and 3) exercises of power in collective learning. In Chapter 2, I compare how local organizations perceive a governance system’s function and structure to help them learn and adapt to change. In Chapter 3, I analyze participation in collective learning using the case of housing supply legislation in Arizona. In Chapter 4, I aim to identify the impact of power at each stage in the collective learning process, creating scaffolding on which future studies may build. This dissertation contributes evidence to the ways in which power impacts learning in governance systems. It builds on evidence that power is a key dynamic in governance systems and provides examples of where it may be exercised to advance the common good.

Governance of complex social-ecological systems is partly characterized by processes of autonomous decision making and voluntary mutual adjustment by multiple authorities with overlapping jurisdictions. From a policy perspective, understanding these polycentric processes could provide valuable insight for solving environmental problems. Paradoxically, however, polycentric governance theory seems to proscribe conventional policy applications: the logic of polycentricity cautions against prescriptive, top-down interventions. Water resources governance, and large-scale water infrastructure systems in particular, offer a paradigm for interpretation of what Vincent Ostrom called the “counterintentional and counterintuitive patterns” of polycentricity. Nearly a century of philosophical inquiry and a generation of governance research into polycentricity, and the overarching institutional frameworks within which polycentric processes operate, provide context for this study. Based on a historically- and theoretically-grounded understanding of water systems as a polycentric paradigm, I argue for a realist approach to operationalizing principles of polycentricity for contribution to policy discourses. Specifically, this requires an actor-centered approach that mobilizes subjective experiences, knowledge, and narratives about contingent decision making.

I use the case of large-scale water infrastructure in Arizona to explore a novel approach to measurement of polycentric decision making contexts. Through semi-structured interviews with water operators in the Arizona water system, this research explores how qualitative and quantitative comparisons can be made between polycentric governance constructs as they are understood by institutional scholars, experienced by actors in polycentric systems, and represented in public policy discourses. I introduce several measures of conditions of polycentricity at a subjective level, including the extents to which actors: experience variety in the work assigned to them; define strong operational priorities; perceive their priorities to be shared by others; identify discrete, critical decisions in the course of their work responsibilities; recall information and action dependencies in their decision making processes; relate communicating their decisions to other dependent decision makers; describe constraints in their process; and evaluate their own independence to make decisions. I use configurational analysis and narrative analysis to show how decision making and governance are understood by operators within the Arizona water system. These results contribute to practical approaches for diagnosis of polycentric systems and theory-building in self governance.

Social-ecological systems (SES) are replete with hard and soft human-made components (or infrastructures) that are consciously-designed to perform specific functions valued by humans. How these infrastructures mediate human-environment interactions is thus a key determinant of many sustainability problems in present-day SES. This dissertation examines the question of how some of the designed aspects of physical and social infrastructures influence the robustness of SES under global change. Due to the fragility of rural livelihood systems, locally-managed common-pool resource systems that depend on infrastructure, such as irrigated agriculture and community forestry, are of particular importance to address this sustainability question. This dissertation presents three studies that explored the robustness of communal irrigation and forestry systems to economic or environmental shocks. The first study examined how the design of irrigation infrastructure affects the robustness of system performance to an economic shock. Using a stylized dynamic model of an irrigation system as a testing ground, this study shows that changes in infrastructure design can induce fundamental changes in qualitative system behavior (i.e., regime shifts) as well as altered robustness characteristics. The second study explored how connectedness among social units (a kind of social infrastructure) influenced the post-failure transformations of large-N forest commons under economic globalization. Using inferential statistics, the second study argues that some attributes of the social connectedness that helped system robustness in the past made the system more vulnerable to undesirable transformations in the current era. The third study explored the question of how to guide adaptive management of SES for more robustness under uncertainty. This study used an existing laboratory behavioral experiment in which human-subjects tackle a decision problem on collective management of an irrigation system under environmental uncertainty. The contents of group communication and the decisions of individuals were analyzed to understand how configurations of learning-by-doing and other adaptability-related conditions may be causally linked to robustness under environmental uncertainty. The results show that robust systems are characterized by two conditions: active learning-by-doing through outer-loop processes, i.e., frequent updating of shared assumptions or goals that underlie specific group strategies, and frequent monitoring and reflection of past outcomes.