Dealing with Conflicting Institutional Arrangements in Mongolia and South Africa: When International Blueprints Hit Local Realities

Throughout the history of political decision-making, policies and policy instruments have been exchanged between governance systems. To this day, it is common practice to use examples that have proven successful elsewhere to inform policy making processes. International organisations such as the United Nations foster policy transfer processes by setting international targets such as the Sustainable Development Goals or by promoting the adoption of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) principles. Such policies often contain holistic ideas that are considered to be universally accepted, but often portray norms that are coined in the Global North. When implemented in nation states, they may suit the political system in place or they may be in conflict with the existing institutional setting. The latter may lead to delayed implementation, as one can currently observe for IWRM in the countries in the Global South. Despite the obvious implementation gap regarding formal institutions on national levels, governance and management on the local levels are operational as local actors find ways how to deal with institutional insecurity. Applying bricolage theory, this paper investigates such procedures for Mongolia and South Africa, observing the coping strategies that actors at the local level employ when confronted with a new, dysfunctional institutional setting. In both cases, governments implemented IWRM as an institutional make-over without taking into account existing informal aspects of governance systems. We explore how these practical governance and management arrangements evolved in the two cases and which conclusions we can derive from them to design institutional arrangements that better suit local realities. The study focusses on horizontal and vertical integration as well as participation as important aspects of IWRM in the uMngeni river basin in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa and the Kharaa and Yeroo river basins in Mongolia. The analysis is based on semi-structured expert interviews and participant observation conducted over three months of field experience, respectively. Our study shows that informal aspects of governance systems are crucial for the success or failure of newly introduced policies on the ground. Adaptation and adoption processes on the local level need to be taken into account when implementing new policies, in particular when they were designed without observing the local institutional setting. Top-down steering from the international community that passes on through national governments to the local level must be met with meaningful and inclusive bottom-up decision-making in order to design locally suitable solutions to international blueprints.