ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a case study from Tanzania to explore institutional plurality and the ways bricoleurs navigate such arrangements. It shows how plurality manifests through the diverse interests of multiple stakeholders, overlapping regimes of governance (traditional and modern) and varying values and uses of the resource. Plurality is also evident in the ways in which people improvise and borrow through different channels to form resource management institutions. The chapter suggests that institutional plurality is more socially dispersed than suggested in much literature on polycentric environmental governance, which focuses on decentralized but largely formalized units of decision-making and management. To illustrate that there is no normative superiority of institutions formed through 'bricolage' or through 'design', the deployment of authority, rules and norms to reinforce and reproduce social inequalities and resource exclusion is explored. Understanding the interaction between agency and norms is critical.
