“Fighting for crumbs under the table”: How The Nature Conservancy attains agency and relevance within the disorder of earth systems governance

This research asks how The Nature Conservancy reconciles the coherence of its ecoregional perspective with the incoherence of the world political system. To answer this question, I argue in favor of an analytical strategy that grounds determinations of agency and relevance upon a systematic evaluation of the axiological, ontological, and political characteristics of the entity under consideration. This approach promises to yield a thorough, sound, and parsimonious assessment of agency and relevance in earth systems governance. I conclude by drawing links between the specific concern for the issues of agency and relevance in environmental governance and broader considerations of the role of global civil society in world politics. I wish to thank the Environmental Governance Working Group, the Political Science Department, and the Graduate School at Colorado State University for their support. I also wish to thank the members of the panel on Agency In Water Governance for their time and consideration. 2 In 1998, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) reluctantly initiated a global effort to conserve freshwater resources. According to one observer, The Conservancy had previously avoided water issues because they were " too broad, too complex, too many other parties involved " (Horton 1999, 16). Nevertheless, TNC set out to reconfigure the scope of water resources management by expanding the time and space dimensions of decision-making responsibilities. Whereas traditional approaches prioritized proximate and short-term interests, alarm at the decline in aquatic ecosystems fueled Conservancy demands for an integrated approach designed to satisfy the long-term interests of an entire river basin or watershed. In this paper, I ask how The Nature Conservancy has reconciled the coherence of this integrated approach with the incoherence of the world political system. This analysis exposes a rift within the literature on global civil society relating to the topics of agency and relevance. After briefly outlining the dominant theoretical positions on these issues, I offer an alternative theoretical account of agency and relevance that retains the strengths of these competing theoretical perspectives and discards their weaknesses. I then test this model by returning to The Nature Conservancy's global water conservation efforts in order to assess more accurately its agency and relevance in earth system governance. The paper concludes with reflections on the lessons learned and offers suggestions for theoretical improvement. Why The Nature Conservancy? In many ways, The Nature Conservancy is the very model of the modern non-governmental organization (NGO). Having started life as a …