Conservation governance

In this manuscript, we challenge the framing paper’s idea that goods and service provision (GSP) can be meaningfully disentangled from rule-making functions. We argue that GSP will be heavily influenced by the nature of goods–private goods, public goods, club goods, or common pooled resources (CPRs)–and also by the ideas about “goods” – whether they are resources or objects without considerations of use. Differences in these dimensions complicate the relationship between the governor and the governed, appropriate rules for specific governance situations, and the nature of audiences. We use three conservation cases–fisheries, whaling, and pangolin–to illustrate our point. We illuminate the difficulty of adopting the concept of GSP in the context of conservation and show how rules and the nature of audiences change depending on the object to be governed. We then evaluate effectiveness, accountability, and legitimacy of each conservation scenario.