Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: How Network Arrangements and Policy Processes Shape the Adaptive Capacity of Land and Water Resource Systems

(Natural Resource Security, Energy and Environmental Policy)

Networks and collaborative processes are recognized as central to governance arrangements in the natural resource arena. Competing resource uses and environmental change present complex policy and management problems that are arguably best addressed by networked systems of governance and collaboration across scales, jurisdictional boundaries, levels of government, and sectors. The burgeoning literature on collaborative environmental governance over the past decades has identified important antecedents, key features, and outputs of collaborative decision-making arrangements. While these studies have proven foundational to our understanding of environmental collaboration, there remains considerable need to understand how policies and programs can be made more efficient, equitable, and effective in a network context. Each of the four papers in this panel draws on novel datasets and rigorous qualitative and quantitative methodologies to examine how network governance arrangements can foster more efficient and equitable decision-making, and produce effective, sustainable policies that enhance the adaptive capacity of resource-dependent communities. The first paper addresses how network decision-making forums evolve over time, specifically in terms of whether forums are able to remain inclusive and draw upon diverse perspectives, and how these changes relate to the quality of forum outputs (plans and policies) and ultimately to policy outcomes. The paper uses temporal exponential random graph models to measure participation in river basin planning groups in the state of Georgia from 1997 to 2015 to assess whether certain patterns of collaboration produce more comprehensive and integrated plans and policies. Using a Bayesian hierarchical spatio-temporal model, the paper then relates evolving network structures and policy outputs to subsequent changes in land use and water quality outcomes. The second paper explores inter-municipal fracking policy advocacy across a contiguous 10-county region in New York, and how patterns of advocacy activities facilitate diffusion of fracking policies among New York municipalities. Empirically, the paper leverages two original datasets of fracking policies passed by New York municipalities, 2008-2012, and local newspaper articles on topics related to oil and gas production. The third paper focuses on patterns of organizational collaborations across the nonprofit, government, and for-profit sectors focused on the conservation of ecologically-valuable private lands across 85 counties in North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee. This analysis draws on a two-mode network dataset derived from 24 land trusts and their conservation and financial achievements. The final paper analyzes the environmental permitting processes at local, state, and federal agency levels for water projects in California. It uses fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to identify how applicant-agency coordination interacts with project, organizational, and regulatory characteristics to lead to more or less efficient permitting processes. Together, the four papers engage with different patterns of network arrangements and processes across time, jurisdictions, sectors, and levels of government and, so doing, begin to make meaningful contributions to policy-relevant knowledge about the adaptive capacity of land and water resource systems in communities across the United States.