In Grassroots Global Governance, Craig Kauffman addresses two main puzzles. One, when states fail to address a global problem, either through multilateral agreements or national laws, why and how do things get done on the ground? Two, how do ideas regarding the best way to tackle global problems evolve? What drives the evolution of global ideas like sustainable development and the emergence of new global ideas like buen vivir and rights of nature (p. 3)?

To answer these important questions, Kauffman conducts a comparative case analysis using the following methods (p. 28): (1) frame analysis to compare the effects of different framing strategies on motivating action; (2) social network analysis to compare networks’ expansion and resource mobilization; and (3) process tracing to analyze the evolution of strategies over time. The extensive time that the author spent in field settings during nearly three years of fieldwork in Ecuador shines through in his meticulously compiled evidence concerning the policy process and program implementation of Integrated Watershed Management (IWM).

According to Kauffman, the answer to my posed questions lies in the ability of transnational governance networks to expand by constructing and mobilizing groups of grassroots actors influential in local policy arenas. The ability of transnational actors to do this depends on the success of network activation strategies, which are likely to include two critical components: (1) motivating influential local organizations to join the governance network and contribute their resources, time, and energy to the cause; and (2) enhancing the network’s capacity to combine the resources accessible to each network member and convert these into action.

The book’s second purpose is to trace the processes by which local experiments with watershed management influenced the global discourse regarding sustainable development. The author devotes Chapters 7 and 8 to show how grassroots farmers and indigenous activists experimented with an innovative IWM governance arrangement that combined global IWM principles with local norms and practices associated with buen vivir. Organizations involved in this local experiment used network activation strategies to scale up the model nationally, resulting in Ecuador’s National Plan for buen vivir. Ecuadorian government representatives then used another set of network activation strategies to promote buen vivir and the rights of nature globally (p. 5). This shows how, under certain political and economic conditions, local experimentation with global ideas can alter global discourse and the policies and practices promoted by international actors.

Kauffman argues that the grassroots level should not be viewed merely as the object of global governance, but rather as a terrain where global governance is constructed. As such, he analyzes the intersection of top-down and bottom-up processes to show how global and local governance arrangements are co-constituted at the grassroots level. Such a multiscale analysis of global governance reveals the importance of various grassroots actors—municipal bureaucrats, smallholder farmers, indigenous activists, and rural community organizers among others—who are normally left out of global governance analysis. These grassroots global governors contest, translate, and adapt global ideas to fit local realities; they mobilize pressure to overcome local apathy and opposition; they experiment with new local governance arrangements; and they engage international actors in negotiation and learning processes (p. 6). By guiding the way global ideas are applied at the local level and consequently evolve, and by reshaping the thinking and strategies of international actors, these grassroots actors participate in the global governance process. These are original insights that enrich our understanding of transnational governance. A process-oriented and thick view of the origins, evolution, and reconstruction of global governance at various scales takes the reader beyond the often debated questions of privatization versus nationalization while offering a ringside view of governance in action.

Grassroots global governance theory, which is embedded within an overarching framework of a process model, explains how global ideas, i.e., policies and best practices for solving global problems negotiated at the global level, get implemented at the local level. It also demonstrates how the implementation of global ideas locally contributes to the evolution of these same global ideas. The theory argues that variation in outcomes (that is, whether the process endures or breaks down and the point where failed cases break down) depends on the ability of transnational governance networks to expand to include actors who are influential in the policy arenas relevant to each phase of the process (pp. 25–26).

Kauffman also argues that grassroots global governance involves the shifting of contestation over policy both within and across levels of analysis, first from global arenas to national and local arenas, and then from local arenas back to national and global arenas. These shifts in arenas contribute to variation in rules, resources, and power relationships across them, which means that transnational governance networks must incorporate a diverse array of actors able to exercise multiple forms of power in multiple arenas. He argues that the shifting of arenas leads to privileging of different actors, which brings different organizations to the center of a transnational governance network. This leads to an organic distribution of power, which relocates to whichever arena happens to control the territory for the contestation of global ideas at any point in time (p. 25).

The evidence-based tracing of the policy processes that he executed ably provides sufficient evidence that the “success” of global grassroots governance in Ecuador would be difficult, if not impossible, without appropriate engagement with the state at various levels. These include the role that the Ecuadorian political leaders played in pushing and promoting the concept of buen vivir in the United Nations forums. Kauffman also generalizes this point to argue that “as the campaign moves to the international realm, the state becomes the primary coalition representative due to its unique power to influence international policy” (p. 50). It would have been quite productive for him to have shone a light on the fact that despite failures to arrive at or implement international agreements, an engagement with state actors and agencies at various points remains pivotal to the success of grassroots global governance. These would be sufficient grounds to revisit the notion that grassroots global governance is a substitute for state failures, which is one of the points of departure for the analysis in the book under review.

On a related note, the book focuses quite significantly on the role of political mobilization and politicians at national and sub-national level. For instance, politicians were included among the key stakeholders that IWM proponents mobilized in each of the six cases studied. More important, political mobilization by movements of indigenous people was utilized cleverly by the promoters of IWM. One can think of few other countries in which indigenous people’s movements forced national governments “to renegotiate laws … and … contributed to the rewriting of … [the] Constitution” (p. 88). Ecuador’s political context played an extremely important role in shaping the ability of national policy experts to resist the World Bank and the technocratic methods and means promoted by Global Water Partnership.

One of Kauffman’s main findings is that “institutionalization of global ideas [is] primarily a social, rather than technical, exercise” (p. 222). That also suggests, as Bill Blomquist and Edella Schlager argue, based on decades of research on IWM, that competing political-economic interests are intrinsic to the implementation of IWM anywhere (see “Political Pitfalls of Integrated Watershed Management,” Society & Natural Resources 101–17 [2005]). For Kauffman, contestation is invariably resolved through clever framing and organizational strategies of network activation. Moreover, because grassroots global governance entails the shifting of arenas at various stages of the governance process, it is accompanied by redistribution of power which, it would appear, makes grassroots global governance essentially a progressive project. But does construction of such spaces, with “pressure from beside,” entail distributional consequences? For instance, what are the implications of Kauffman’s argument concerning municipal government representatives who pressure “landowners to lower their expectations and negotiate agreements by threatening to expropriate the land” (p. 155)? As it stands, the reader is left wondering if such competing interests are resolved in the process, or get disguised within the processes through which specific ideas take shape and get transported to a global fame. It would have been useful for Kauffman to have developed this argument more explicitly.

The book will also be of great interest to political scientists and other social scientists of environmental and natural resource policies and programs, who will find in grassroots global governance a provocative thesis, several new insights, and important methodological contributions. The book’s novel framework and analysis opens numerous opportunities for the students of comparative and international environmental politics interested in theorizing how elements of national and subnational politics influence the ways in which specific actors engage with global ideas, policies, and programs.