How spatial feedbacks between institutional and ecological patterns drive landscape dynamics in peri-urban commons

Rapid urbanization is a critical landscape transition that impacts biodiversity, ecosystem goods and services, and social sustainability. Urbanizing locations may follow different ecological trajectories, with very different consequences for future inhabitants. Ostrom’s design principles assert that effective land governance (that maintains biodiversity and ecosystem services) requires congruence between rules and local social-ecological conditions. However, little is known about how to achieve such congruence in peri-urban systems, partly because local landscape conditions are constantly changing. We used dynamic simulation models to address this gap, testing how spatially explicit feedbacks between ecological patterns and land governance might influence landscape dynamics. We captured the feedbacks by testing the outcomes of decisions made at two different spatial extents, regional (100 km²) and local (4 km²), for two different levels of landscape heterogeneity. Our approach extends and operationalizes Ostrom’s design principle by explicitly defining the term “local” as relative rather than fixed; that is, as a spatial extent of decision-making based on an administrative hierarchy. We found that the rate of urbanization was higher for high heterogeneity landscapes than low heterogeneity landscapes. Further, the urbanization trend differed significantly between the regional and local scales for both high and low heterogeneity landscapes. The analysis shows how spatial mismatches between land governance and spatial processes can arise and explores their consequences for ecosystems in landscapes that are in transition from rural to urban.