Through this paper we explore how knowledge for watershed management is created and shared in one urbanizing watershed in NE Ohio, the Chagrin River. Governance there has emerged and self-organized into a network of public, private and NGO organizations in a unique model. We sought to characterize the overall structure of the network and the inter-organizational interactions as these might influence the flow of knowledge (instrumental and tacit) used for policy, planning and implementation. We use a combination of institutional and network frameworks to understand both the structure of inter-organizational interactions and the flow of knowledge as these shape overall effectiveness and adaptive capacity.

 Our data comes from 20 semi-structured interviews with watershed actors, and document and web page review of more than 200 organizations somehow connected to watershed and land conservation activities.  We generate the network analysis using UCINET software.

Our research questions asked whether we could discern a pattern in these interactions through a network analysis, that combined with responses from the interviews with stakeholders, would identify a “core” group of organizations—thereby likely to exert the most influence on policy and implementation in general and the flow of knowledge generation, sharing and use—as well as the organizations that performed a bridging function to activate “structural holes” of knowledge in the network (Frank et al 2012).  Would the presence of an organization engaged in more than one type of activity—constitutional, collective policy making and operational—(Hardy and Koontz, 2009; Ostrom, 1990; Imperial, 2005)—and interacting with organizations in different sectors (public, private, NGO) and in different geographies across the watershed, indicate an important role in generation and diffusion of knowledge as documented in a set of interviews? Which organizations are the sources of different types of knowledge for governance and how do interactions in different settings (plan making, projects, etc.) allow the individuals to learn through social learning and build capacity to adapt to future conditions in the social-ecological system of the watershed?