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Understanding how stakeholders choose to participate in different policy forums is central to research on complex, polycentric governance systems. In this article, we draw upon the Ecology of Games Theory (EGT) to develop theoretical expectations about how four incentive structures may guide how actors navigate the world of policy forums. We test these expectations using unique data on a three-mode network of actors, forums, and issues related to climate change adaption in the state of Ohio, in the US Midwest. Results of an exponential random graph model suggest that multilevel closure structures, which are a function of transaction costs and direct benefits, guide actors’ forum participation in ways that can either reinforce sub-optimal, ineffective governance arrangements, or conversely, encourage opportunities for innovation, increase diversity in representation, and facilitate policy learning. From a methodological standpoint, our research highlights the benefits of examining complex governance systems through the more precise approach allowed by three-mode network analysis, which has not been frequently used in research on polycentric governance systems up to this point.

We review the literature examining collaborative governance processes from a network perspective and evaluate the extent to which it tackles important conceptual and methodological challenges. In particular, we assess whether scholars clearly identify the boundaries of the network, define nodes and the nature of ties, and examine how they deal with missing data, account for tie strength, take tie multiplexity into account, and study networks over time. We discuss the implications of our findings for the collaborative governance literature and ways to address the shortcomings in existing research.

The urgent environmental challenges we now face, from climate change to biodiversity loss, involve people and the planet, the social, and the environmental. Teaching students to become effective socio-environmental problem-solvers requires clarity about concepts and competencies needed to understand and tackle these challenges. Here, we propose an educational framework that describes what students should learn and how they should apply this knowledge to address socio-environmental problems. This framework emphasizes the process of problem-solving and is based on socio-environmental (S-E) synthesis, an integrative, transdisciplinary approach to understanding and tackling complex socio-environmental problems. In addition to identifying the knowledge, skills, dispositions, and practices necessary for S-E problem-solving at the undergraduate and graduate levels, we clarify how one draws on such competencies to inquire about problems and generate solutions for them. Our primary goal is to provide a useful tool to help guide development of curricula, teaching materials, and pedagogies for S-E synthesis and interdisciplinary environmental education more broadly.

Achieving effective, sustainable environmental governance requires a better understanding of the causes and consequences of the complex patterns of interdependencies connecting people and ecosystems within and across scales. Network approaches for conceptualizing and analyzing these interdependencies offer one promising solution. Here, we present two advances we argue are needed to further this area of research: (i) a typology of causal assumptions explicating the causal aims of any given network-centric study of social-ecological interdependencies; (ii) unifying research design considerations that facilitate conceptualizing exactly what is interdependent, through what types of relationships, and in relation to what kinds of environmental problems. The latter builds on the appreciation that many environmental problems draw from a set of core challenges that re-occur across contexts. We demonstrate how these advances combine into a comparative heuristic that facilitates leveraging case-specific findings of social-ecological interdependencies to generalizable, yet context-sensitive, theories based on explicit assumptions of causal relationships.

This paper portrays a polycentric governance system by exploring the evolution of its structure and the interdependencies of its policymaking venues. It utilizes a semi-automated approach developed from the institutional grammar to analyze four policymaking venues by their 55 public policies adopted from 2007 through 2019 in the context of oil and gas development in Colorado, USA. The results show that this governance system continuously evolves through the adoption of public policies, which modifies its constellation of actors, issues, rules, and deontics (i.e., imperatives). In analyzing the content of these policies, we show how the four policymaking venues display interdependencies as well as distinct emphases. The conclusion summarizes the contributions and raises challenges for advancing knowledge about polycentricity.

Examining the early stages of coalition formation and how they may react to rapid institutional changes provides insight into how like-minded policy actors pursue their goals and coordinate their behavior in relatively unstable institutional systems. This study observes activity in the policy subsystem of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in the southern Argentinian province of Neuquen. Using media sources, we identify policy actors, their support or opposition to the expansion of unconventional oil and gas production through fracking and their agreement or disagreement on the topic of fracking, both before and after Chevron and YPF (the large publicly-owned Argentinian energy company) signed a controversial accord to develop parts of the Vaca Muerta formation, one of the largest in the world. Using Social Network Analysis, we show that two coalitions (pro and anti fracking) exist, and that they exhibit a high potential for intra-coalitional coordination and inter-coalitional conflict. Following the signing of the accord, which we see as an example of an “institutional shock”, significant increases in activity and the potential for intra-coordination within the anti-fracking coalition were observed, along with an increase in the potential for conflict between the coalitions. Our results illuminate shed new light on how coalitions may form and evolve in unstable institutional systems where political power is unevenly distributed.

We examine the participation of stakeholders in the rule-making process leading to the design of the US Clean Power Plan (CPP), which was the cornerstone regulation developed during the Obama admin...

Political mobilization of policy actors into advocacy coalitions is a defining feature of policy subsystems. Nonetheless, knowledge about the particularities of advocacy coalitions across different...

Public policy generally emerges from interactions among actors embedded within complex governance systems, composed of multiple actors and forums (issue-based arenas where stakeholders repeatedly interact to resolve collective action problems). Such systems allow actors multiple forums wherein they can influence policy decisions. But actors do not value the decisions made in each forum equally, and it remains unclear how actors allocate resources across forums. This article links actor strategy to their influence within the forums the actors identify as most important (their primary forum). There is theoretical ambiguity about how actors invest their limited resources across the forums that affect their interests to maximize primary forum influence. Do they concentrate all their effort within the primary forum or participate more broadly? To answer this question, we offer two competing theories. First, broad participation may allow actors to develop political capital necessary to influence other actors and thus influence primary forum policies. The second approach notes the opportunity costs of broad participation—actors have fewer resources to invest in their primary forum. An analysis of stakeholder participation in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta and Tampa Bay Watershed governance systems demonstrates that broader participation is associated with greater primary forum influence.

One of the focal events motivating the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972 was the decline of water quality in Lake Erie, which was originally linked to insufficient treatment of wastewater in some of the biggest adjacent urban centers. The passing of the CWA and the adoption of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement in the early 1970s contributed to the quick improvement of water quality in the two ensuing decades, but the 1990s saw the return of water quality problems, indicated by the return of algal blooms to Western Lake Erie. Algal blooms typically occur when excess nutrients are produced by mixture of agricultural and urban practices, and they may threaten ecological stability and public health for millions dependent on the lake for drinking water, tourism, and fisheries. In this case study, we explore the relationship between human behavior and water quality impairments that lead to harmful algal blooms (HABs) in the Western Lake Erie Basin (WLEB), and in particular, the Maumee River Watershed. The case is designed to be taught in eight class meetings to an audience of upper-level undergraduate students, and has been tested in the classroom in consecutive semesters starting in the fall of 2015.

The management of natural resources may potentially be improved when governance structures in social-ecological systems enable coordination among multiple actors who may operate on the same or different geographic and/or governmental scales. In this article, we analyze the network of formal coordination ties that link governmental and nongovernmental actors in the Maumee River watershed, which is the largest source of phosphorus loading into Lake Erie, one of the five Laurentian Great Lakes of North America. Since the 1990s, Lake Erie has seen a return of the seasonal harmful algal blooms (HAB) that were common in the 1960s and 1970s, and considerable research suggests that they might be triggered by excessive amounts of phosphorus produced by agriculture. Analyzing an assortment of documents that collectively detail how stakeholders relate to each other on the topic of nutrient management in the watershed, we examine who are the actors that are more likely to fulfill coordination roles, and the scales at which coordination takes place (vertically vs horizontally). Results suggest that coordination has been formalized vertically, with actors who operate at higher governmental levels being more likely to coordinate the activities of actors at lower levels. In addition, we see evidence of horizontal coordination but only in the confines of the individual state jurisdictions that share the watershed. We see this as a potentially important obstacle to solving the HABs problem in Lake Erie, given that the management of interjurisdictional watersheds is likely to be ineffective in the absence of proper coordination across the different jurisdictions that share the watershed.

This article studies factors affecting how policy actors perceive the effectiveness of political institutions involved in complex water governance systems. The ecology of games framework argues that participants are more likely to perceive institutions as effective when the benefits of solving collective action problems outweigh the transaction costs of developing political contracts within these institutions. The authors hypothesize that transaction costs are a function of conflict, type of participation, political knowledge, scientific knowledge, and actor resources. Survey results suggest that the importance of these different sources of transaction costs varies across study sites in the Tampa Bay watershed in Florida, the Sacramento–San Joaquin River delta in California, and the Parana River delta in Argentina. Based on the observed differences, some initial ideas are sketched about the evolution of complex governance systems from fairly simple and informal rules and networks to well-established tapestries of many formal institutions.

When do countries cooperate in transboundary waters? One of the largest in the world, the La Plata Basin covers part of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. These five countries co-manage the basin through a network of legal agreements, domestic and international organizations, and cooperative projects. In this paper, we examine the network structure of cross-national water projects within this intergovernmental framework. We use exponential random graph models to analyze the processes that lead to the formation of particular network structures when organizations participate in projects designed to improve the management of natural resources in the basin. Empirical results provide evidence that: (1) the network is characterized by a considerable level of bridging capital, rather than bonding capital, with a small group of organizations capturing most of the present links in the network; and (2) organizations that are active in two or more countries – especially basin governmental organizations – are the main collaborators in projects. These findings point to the extent to which coordinated state actors dominate the La Plata Basin. Study results carry significant implications for how networks facilitate the resolution of coordination problems and the administration of common resources in transboundary waters.

Recent research has shown that communication networks involving governmental and nongovernmental actors self-organize based on how risk is perceived. According to the “risk hypothesis,” actors embedded in governance systems in which there is widespread risk of defection tend to form bonding structures, whereas those in low-risk systems form bridging structures. A parallel strand of research proposes to study complex governance systems composed of multiple actors and the decision-making forums in which they interact. In this article, the authors couple these research threads and show how bonding and bridging structures form when stakeholders participate in three complex governance systems of varying institutional strength. Findings suggest that the prevalence of one type of structure over the other depends on contextual variables such as the stability of the institutions and the occurrence of environmental focusing events that demand quick policy responses.

This article compares the topics that underlie public debate around hydraulic fracturing covered in newspapers across nine U.S. states over an eleven-year period. In analyzing more than 7000 newspaper articles using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) modeling, thirteen main topics emerge. While these topics fluctuate over time, their relative frequency and, hence, importance in the discourse remains largely constant. The environmental risks associated with the practice is the topic that receives more attention when all data are aggregated. We find that the frequency of the topics varies by state, and the nature of this variation is associated with the political leanings of the state, with media sources in Republican governed states more likely to report on the economic benefits associated with hydraulic fracturing. Finally, we show how all topics are associated with words that indicate the presence of conflict among stakeholders involved in discussions about the costs and benefits of hydraulic fracturing. In doing so, we describe how the association between topics and conflict varies according to which party governs the state, which provides evidence about the fundamental differences on how parties consider the practice of hydraulic fracturing in the states we study. We conclude the article by discussing the advantages and disadvantages of our methodological approach, which can be leveraged to discern trends in discussions about environmental and energy-related problems that exceed the specific case of hydraulic fracturing.

The article A framework for teaching socio-environmental problem-solving, written by Cynthia A. Wei, Michael L. Deaton, Teresa J. Shume, Ramiro Berardo and William R. Burnside was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal on 11 April 2020 without open access.

Solving environmental problems on a regional scale demands joint efforts by multiple stakeholders, but coordinating such efforts can be difficult in complex governance systems. In this article, we combine the literature in Adaptive Governance with the Ecology of Policy Games (EPGs) framework to enhance our understanding of how complex governance systems react to environmental focusing events. We study the EPGs in the Parana River delta in Argentina following widespread fires caused by slash-and-burn practices in 2008, and analyze how new forums created to address the consequences of this event differ from the forums created prior to the event in terms of their capacity to attract stakeholders and to provide higher interconnectivity to the whole governance system. Furthermore, we offer an initial evaluation of the Comprehensive Strategic Plan for the Conservation and Sustainability of the Parana River delta, the main forum in the EPGs created to address the negative consequences of the focusing event. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for the study of complex governance systems where stakeholders are able to address the management of natural resources at a regional scale.

Public management and policy scholars have empirically demonstrated that in complex policy arenas, governments depend on the collaboration of policy actors outside their direct control to produce needed goods and services. Government-sponsored shared-cost programs are one of the premier mechanisms to foster such cooperation, yet little is known about the inner patterns of participation in such programs and whether they are conditional on specific resource needs that partners may have. In this article, I study the participation of organizations in projects seeking funds from the Cooperative Funding Initiative, a program sponsored by the Southwest Florida Water Management District that finances projects dealing with the management of water resources. Through the estimation of a series of Exponential Random Graph Models in the networks that form when organizations participate in projects (two-mode networks), I show that centralization around popular organizations results in greater bridging network capital, which facilitates the flow of nonoverlapping information from project to project. I analyze the implications of these findings and discuss how the formation of these bridging structures may enhance the capacity of the program to find innovative solutions to the problems the projects are designed to deal with.

Collaboration is commonly used to deliver public services that reach beyond the individual capacities of independent organizations. Although much of the literature in the fields of collaborative governance has offered theoretical insights to explain how stakeholders might initially enter into collaborative processes or how the design of collaborative processes can support continued stakeholder participation over time, the literature has not effectively studied what factors might drive actors to engage one another in a particular conversation or discussion during a collaborative process, nor what factors affect whether engagement is cooperative or conflictual. We fill this gap through a more “micro-level” view of collaborative engagement in a study of the South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Task Force, a collaborative arrangement involving representatives from 14 federal, tribal, state, and local agencies, charged with advising and coordinating the efforts in South Florida to restore and recover the Florida Everglades. We use data from coded meeting minutes of discussions among the participants in the South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Program Task Force over a 5-year time frame and demonstrate that the types of issues under discussion and the actors involved in discussion can either foster or inhibit engagement and conflict during dialogue. Our results have important implications for the development of a stronger theory of collaborative engagement in interorganizational partnerships.

A key variable to foster cooperation in groups is the perception among members that the process of making decisions is fair to everyone involved, yet little is known about how these perceptions coevolve with the interactions that take place within the groups. In this article, I use a stochastic actor-oriented model to examine the coevolution of perceptions of procedural fairness and the establishment of relationships among organizations in self-organizing policy networks in five U.S. estuaries. These networks form and evolve as their members seek to address important environmental problems that affect multiple jurisdictions. Findings show that participation in networks does not affect perceptions of procedural fairness; instead, the latter affect the former, i.e., stakeholders create ties with other actors with similar perceptions of how fair decision-making processes are. These results have important implications for our understanding of how governance institutions should be designed to find collaborativ...

This chapter surveys recent research that utilizes the measures and techniques of social network analysis (SNA) to explain socioecological outcomes. The chapter focuses on the role of key characteristics of networks—including density and fragmentation, bonding and bridging social capital, brokerage and leadership—in promoting adaptive governance and co-management, and in turn, successful environmental management outcomes. It argues that network structures affect the ability of actors to coordinate their behavior, cooperate with one another, share information, and adapt their behavior to new circumstances. The chapter concludes by discussing limitations and future directions for research, drawing attention to the need for more work integrating ecological and social networks, comparative SNA, and analyses of network formation and evolution.

This paper presents a conceptual framework for clarifying the network hypotheses embedded in policy theories and how they relate to macro-level political outcomes and micro-level political behavior. We then describe the role of statistical models of networks for testing these hypotheses, including the problem of operationalizing theoretical concepts with the parameters of statistical models. Examples from existing policy research are provided and potential extensions are discussed. This paper is forthcoming as the introduction to a special issue of the Policy Studies Journal on statistical models of policy networks. Paper Prepared for Political Networks Conference, 2011. Ann Arbor Note to PolNet 2011 Readers: Believe with Caution! This paper is in midstream so there are many missing references and sections that need additional work. We would welcome any comments that would help clarify the ideas in the paper, and especially persuade readers about the value of applying statistical models of networks to policy theory. Also, the references to the PSJ special issue might be confusing so feel free to ignore.

The management of international rivers is increasingly marked by a heightened attention to and growth in institutions at the river-basin level to promote cooperation and resolve conflicts between states in a basin. Yet, little theoretical and empirical research exists to understand when these institutions are most effective. Here we draw from diverse literatures, including work on social and ecological systems, international institutions, common-pool resources, and international waters, to capture and integrate the design elements associated with effective collaborative management along an international river. We apply and test the validity of our model in a plausibility probe through the analysis of the conflict between Argentina and Uruguay over the construction of pulp mills along the Uruguay River, and the role of the established and functioning river basin organization—the Administrative Commission of the Uruguay River (CARU)—in this conflict. We re-examine our model based on our case findings to highlight the challenge and role of public input and representation in institutional effectiveness along international rivers.

number of indicators signal a growing interest in the study of political phenomena from a network perspective in the United States, such as the growing number of published articles with a network focus in the discipline's top-tier journals and the creation of a new Political Networks section of the APSA in 2008. Yet another notable indicator is the organization of a new annual conference financially supported by the National Science Foundationthe Political Networks conference. The meeting not only brings together scholars who study networks in political science, but also fosters collaboration across disciplines by encouraging participation of non-political scientists with the goal of achieving more comprehensive answers to questions that cannot be properly answered within the confines of individual disciplines. So far, the Political Networks conference has taken place three times: in June 2008 and June 2009 at Harvard University, and in May 2010 at Duke University.1 These annual meetings give scholars the opportunity to present research and gain methodological training through workshops geared toward graduate students and faculty. But perhaps more importantly, they provide a setting in which professional collaboration may unfold among the members of this new scholarly community. In this article, I examine how the conference is helping shape this new community by showing: (1) who attended the first two conferences, (2) how these individuals engaged in collaboration with other attendees, and (3) whether new collaborative links bridge the limits of particular disciplines and subfields in political science. This last issue is particularly important to explore, because political science has been characterized repeatedly as a discipline in which scholars tend to work in compartmentalized ways (Almond 1988) and frequently ignore the professional benefits that can be derived from collaborative exchanges across subfields (see, e.g., Garand and Giles 2003) or disciplines. The emergence at the networks conferences of collaborative links connecting subfields of political science or bridging the void between our discipline and others suggests the development of a rich scholarly network that should facilitate a more comprehensive study of politics; the end result should be an enhanced ability to understand how political processes work.2 The following section provides a short description of the process of data collection. A later section presents results in a twofold manner: first, I address the patterns of collaboration and their changes, and second, I use a homophily analysis to show the tendency of attending scholars to diversify their contacts in ways that allow for professional collaboration across disciplines and subfields in political science.

Policy actors seek network contacts to improve individual payoffs in the institutional collective action dilemmas endemic to fragmented policy arenas. The risk hypothesis argues that actors seek bridging relationships (well-connected, popular partners that maximize their access to information) when cooperation involves low risks, but seek bonding relationships (transitive, reciprocal relationships that maximize credibility) when risks of defection increase. We test this hypothesis in newly developing policy arenas expected to favor relationships that resolve low-risk dilemmas. A stochastic actor-based model for network evolution estimated with survey data from 1999 and 2001 in 10 U.S. estuaries finds that actors do tend to select popular actors as partners, which presumably creates a centralized bridging structure capable of efficient information transmission for coordinating policies even without any government mandate. Actors also seek reciprocal bonding relationships supportive of small joint projects and quickly learn whether or not to trust their partners.

Do organizations with more collaborative partners perform better than organizations with fewer partners? And is this relationship conditional on the ability of those partners to provide nonredundant resources from their network of contact with other actors? This article answers these questions with data describing the participation of governmental and nongovernmental organizations in the Cooperative Funding Initiative (CFI), a program sponsored by the one of the five water management districts in Florida. Results show a positive relationship between the inclusion of more partners in a project and the chances of getting funded, but also that once the project becomes too inclusive; those chances decrease if the partners fill more structural holes (e.g., provide more nonredundant resources). In other words, organizations perform better by adding more partners as long as this addition does not result in excessive complexity. These results are valuable for the growing community of policy scholars seeking to understand the specific conditions under which collaborative behavior positively affects organizational performance.

This study tests hypotheses linking the structural characteristics of policy networks to the feelings of trust of their members. A social capital perspective suggests that actors in denser networks should trust others more, while an alternative “centrality” approach suggests that trust may be a byproduct of the occupation of key positions in the group. The author tests these expectations with data mapping policy networks in twenty-two estuaries in the United States and finds that centrality is a better predictor of trust. This opens room for questioning the real value of trust as a necessary ingredient in the solution of collective action dilemmas.

Two competing theories suggest different ways in which networks resolve collective action problems: small, dense networks enhance credible commitments supportive of cooperative solutions, while large boundary-spanning networks enhance search and information exchange supportive of coordinated solutions. Our empirical study develops and tests the competing credibility and search hypotheses in 22 estuary policy arenas, where fragmentation of authority creates collective problems and opportunities for joint gains through collaboration. The results indicate that search rather than credibility appears to pose the greater obstacle to collaboration; well-connected centrally located organizations engage in more collaborative activities than those embedded in small, dense networks.

There is widespread consensus among environmental scientists that a holistic understanding of how natural resources are managed effectively at different scales requires a solid grasp on the functioning of governance institutions that link human users to the biophysical world in which they are embedded. Societies exist within complex social-ecological systems, in which the social and ecological components are tightly connected in systematic, but often hard to understand, ways. Institutions are, in essence, the lubricant that mediates the relationship between the two components; without the right institutions in place, no human society can tackle environmental problems successfully. Needless to say, the variation of societies and ecological systems around the world is vast and rich, which makes the study of institutional diversity and its effect on the management of natural resources both fascinating and daunting. From the rules to manage small-scale indigenous fisheries to the treaties to tackle global climate change, humans craft and enforce institutions to avoid “tragedies of the commons” that result when the prevalence of individual interests leads to the mismanagement (and sometimes sheer complete destruction) of resources that are open to multiple users. This article serves as an introductory guide for scholars and students with an interest in understanding how social scientists have researched institutions and their role in constraining human behavior in search of sustainable uses of natural resources. Sections cover research focusing on the definition, creation, development, evolution, and performance of institutions, as well as the operation of institutions at different scales and in different topic areas.

The majority of Ph.D. programs in political science in the United States provide some kind of teaching training for graduate students, which ranges from assisting other instructors to designing and teaching new courses. In most cases, departments make an effort to guide these students in their new role as instructors; however, first-time teachers whose first language is not English do not usually receive any special guidance on how to successfully address the challenge of communicating effectively with their students—an all-too-real problem for many foreign instructors. This article provides some basic tips for improving the communication process that develops in the classroom, and is particularly tailored for individuals whose first language is not English and who are about to take the first steps of their teaching careers.

This essay extends theoretical arguments pertaining to single (uniplex) networks on how to solve coordination and cooperation problems associated with institutional collective action to multiplex networks constituting both formal and informal relationships formed by policy actors. While coordination problems reflect difficulties for actors in arriving at jointly desired policy outcomes, cooperation problems mean that actors have conflicting interests and, thus, face incentives to defect on each other. We propose multiplex versions of bridging and bonding networks, which have been found suitable for solving coordination and cooperation problems in single networks. Although our approach is limited to the simultaneous analysis of formal and informal relationships in policy networks, the arguments we present should aid researchers interested in analyzing policy networks beyond these manifestations of inherently complex relationships., Complexity, Governance & Networks, Vol 1, No 1 (2014)

La literatura politologica destaca la importancia de la confianza en la emergencia de procesos sociopoliticos cooperativos, pero en la politologia latinoamericana no existen aun exploraciones empiricas de la relacion entre confianza y otras variables que tambien afectan la cooperacion en arenas decisorias regionales. Este articulo contribuye a solucionar esta limitacion examinando la relacion entre confianza, intercambio de recursos y reconocimiento de influencia politica, entre actores de tres regiones subnacionales de la Argentina. Los resultados sugieren que tanto el reconocimiento de influencia como el intercambio de recursos se correlacionan de manera muy significativa con las relaciones de confianza que existe entre los actores. Esta relacion tiene implicancias sobre procesos de gobernanza a nivel regional, que discutimos en detalle.