Data from: Political dynamics and governance of World Heritage ecosystems

This repository contains the data to implement the analyses from Morrison et al. 2020  "Political dynamics and governance of World Heritage ecosystens", Nature Sustainability. If you use this data please cite the paper accordingly. 

Abstract [Related Publication]: Political dynamics across scales are often overlooked in the design, implementation and evaluation of environmental governance. We provide new evidence to explain how interactions between international organizations and national governments shape environmental governance and outcomes for 238 World Heritage ecosystems, on the basis of a new intervention–response– outcome typology. We analyse interactions between the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and 102 national governments responsible for implementing ecosystem protection under the World Heritage Convention between 1972 and 2019. We combine data on the reporting, deliberation and certification of individual ecosystem-level threats, with data on national governance quality, economic complexity and key stakeholder perspectives. We find that the extent of threatened ecosystems is seriously underestimated and that efforts to formally certify threatened ecosystems are often resisted by national governments. A range of responses to international intervention, including both productive and counterproductive responses, generates material impacts at the ecosystem level. Counterproductive responses occur in nations dependent on limited high-value natural resource industries, irrespective of overall level of economic development. We identify new political approaches to improve environmental governance, including how to overcome the problem of regulatory capture. Our findings inform how we can better anticipate and account for political dynamics in environmental governance.

The full methodology is available in the publication shown in the Related Publications link below.

    Data Record Details
    Data record related to this publication Data from: Political dynamics and governance of World Heritage ecosystems
    Data Publication title Data from: Political dynamics and governance of World Heritage ecosystems
  • Description

    This repository contains the data to implement the analyses from Morrison et al. 2020  "Political dynamics and governance of World Heritage ecosystens", Nature Sustainability. If you use this data please cite the paper accordingly. 

    Abstract [Related Publication]: Political dynamics across scales are often overlooked in the design, implementation and evaluation of environmental governance. We provide new evidence to explain how interactions between international organizations and national governments shape environmental governance and outcomes for 238 World Heritage ecosystems, on the basis of a new intervention–response– outcome typology. We analyse interactions between the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and 102 national governments responsible for implementing ecosystem protection under the World Heritage Convention between 1972 and 2019. We combine data on the reporting, deliberation and certification of individual ecosystem-level threats, with data on national governance quality, economic complexity and key stakeholder perspectives. We find that the extent of threatened ecosystems is seriously underestimated and that efforts to formally certify threatened ecosystems are often resisted by national governments. A range of responses to international intervention, including both productive and counterproductive responses, generates material impacts at the ecosystem level. Counterproductive responses occur in nations dependent on limited high-value natural resource industries, irrespective of overall level of economic development. We identify new political approaches to improve environmental governance, including how to overcome the problem of regulatory capture. Our findings inform how we can better anticipate and account for political dynamics in environmental governance.

    The full methodology is available in the publication shown in the Related Publications link below.

  • Other Descriptors
    • Descriptor

      This dataset is available as a spreadsheet saved in both MS Excel (.xlsx) and Open Document (.ods) formats.

    • Descriptor type Note
  • Data type dataset
  • Keywords
    • ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies
    • environmental governance
    • politics
    • heritage
    • scale
    • ecosystem
    • geography
    • intervention
    • conservation
  • Funding source
  • Research grant(s)/Scheme name(s)
  • Research themes
    Tropical Ecosystems, Conservation and Climate Change
    People and Societies in the Tropics
    FoR Codes (*)
    SEO Codes
    Specify spatial or temporal setting of the data
    Temporal (time) coverage
  • Start Date
  • End Date
  • Time Period
    Spatial (location) coverage
  • Locations
    Data Locations

    Type Location Notes
    Attachment DATA for JCU Tropical Data Hub.ods Open Document (.ods) format
    Attachment DATA for JCU Tropical Data Hub.xlsx MS Excel (.xlsx) format
    The Data Manager is: Tiffany Morrison
    College or Centre
    Access conditions Open: free access under license
  • Alternative access conditions
  • Data record size 2 files: 255 KB
  • Related publications
      Name Morrison, T. H., Adger, W. N., Brown, K., Hettiarachchi, M., Huchery, C., Lemos, M. C., and Hughes, T. P. (2020) Political dynamics and governance of World Heritage ecosystems.
    • URL https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0568-8
    • Notes Online early
  • Related websites
      Name
    • URL
    • Notes
  • Related metadata (including standards, codebooks, vocabularies, thesauri, ontologies)
  • Related data
      Name
    • URL
    • Notes
  • Related services
      Name
    • URL
    • Notes
    Citation Morrison, Tiffany (2020): Data from: Political dynamics and governance of World Heritage ecosystems. James Cook University. https://doi.org/10.25903/5f519dc27a7f7