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In order to meet the challenges of an increasingly fragmented public sector and severe wicked problems, network structures have become an important part of contemporary public administration. Thus, managing networks is a central concern for public managers. The article focuses on networks being established in Norway in accordance with the EU Water Framework Directive. The mandatory networks consist of actors representing different levels of government and several policy sectors, having highly asymmetric interests, interdependencies, and power relations. Based on comprehensive survey material, the article illuminates how the important role of network management on multi-level coordination is conditioned by complexity. Rather surprisingly, the more complex networks score better on coordination, and the most promising management strategy seems to depend upon institutional complexity. Direct and connecting strategies seem to be required in the most complex settings, while in less complex settings, indirect facilitative strategies are more effective to achieve coordination.

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This paper is an examination of Norway's national strategy for developing local environmental policies and institutions from the late 1980s to the present, and how this strategy has been influenced by changes in the dynamic between central government and local political institutions. It is argued that the strategy has changed during the period of study, shifting from a strong emphasis on the development of local institutions to an emphasis on the delegation of responsibilities from central government to local governing bodies. This new policy of delegation has been advanced at a time when municipalities are suffering from a weakened institutional capacity for environmental policymaking because of changes in the country's overall regulatory approach. The authors argue that this approach, which first and foremost has been motivated by national, macroeconomic objectives and the role of local government in service production, is inconsistent with the government's ambitions of a more important role for local government in environmental policy. The nature of environmental challenges, which often cut across political and administrative borders and often involve conflicts between different levels of government, suggests that local institutions are crucially important within the environmental policy domain.

International policy trends are always transformed and translated to fit the political and administrative systems in which they are introduced. An international trend of decentralization has resulted in conservation management systems in Sweden and Norway that differ, both in the choice of institutional solution and in the scope of change. This is surprising, as conservation management in the two countries was originally very similar. Nature conservation was managed through hierarchical systems dominated by bureaucratic experts. While Sweden has introduced co-management in a few protected areas only, Norway has devolved powers in all large conservation areas to inter-municipal management boards. Through document studies, we investigate how decentralization interacts with the broader systems of political actors and institutions pf which nature conservation is a part.