Connecting Social Networks with Ecosystem Services for Watershed Governance: a Social-Ecological Network Perspective Highlights the Critical Role of Bridging Organizations

Abstract

In many densely settled agricultural watersheds, water quality is a point of conflict between amenity and agricultural activities because of the varied demands and impacts on shared water resources. Successful governance of these watersheds requires coordination among different activities. Recent research has highlighted the role that social networks between management entities can play to facilitate cross-scale interaction in watershed governance. For example, bridging organizations can be positioned in social networks to bridge local initiatives done by single municipalities across whole watersheds. To better understand the role of social networks in social-ecological system dynamics, we combine a social network analysis of the water quality management networks held by local governments with a social-ecological analysis of variation in water management and ecosystem services across the Montérégie, an agricultural landscape near Montréal, Québec, Canada. We analyze municipal water management networks by using one-mode networks to represent direct collaboration between municipalities, and two-mode networks to capture how bridging organizations indirectly connect municipalities. We find that municipalities do not collaborate directly with one another but instead are connected via bridging organizations that span the water quality management network. We also discovered that more connected municipalities engaged in more water management activities. However, bridging organizations preferentially connected with municipalities that used more tourism related ecosystem services rather than those that used more agricultural ecosystem services. Many agricultural municipalities were relatively isolated, despite being the main producers of water quality problems. In combination, these findings suggest that further strengthening the water management network in the Montérégie will contribute to improving water quality in the region. However, such strengthening requires developing a network that better connects both agricultural and tourism oriented municipalities. Furthermore, these findings show that consideration of the social-ecological context of social networks, can help explain the structure of networks and reveal social-ecological clusters and disconnects in a network

Social–ecological network analysis of scale mismatches in estuary watershed restoration

“…Analyzing scale mismatch with SENA is relatively new, and previous research largely focuses on single-governance levels (e.g., local municipalities) (10,12,28,30,31). Although a necessary first step to understand social-ecological systems as networks, single-level approaches fail to represent the reality of most natural resource governance, which unfolds at local, regional, and larger levels (32,33).…”

“…Density has direct impli- ¶ This paper uses the term "regional node" to avoid confusion with other work that has focused on "scale-crossing broker nodes" (10) and "bridging organization nodes" (31). The regional node is defined by spatial expanse because it spatially overlaps two ecological nodes.…”

Resilience (Republished)

“…In these situations actors start interacting and connecting with each other, often in unpredictable and unplanned ways, and from such interactions broader scale patterns with new properties emerge, which than feed back on the social-ecological system and influence the actors and their interactions . Such a dynamic interplay of actors, social networks, bridging organizations, and diverse and multilevel institutions, continuously learning with change, are found to be significant features of social-ecological system dynamics, often emerging in relation to crisis (perceived or real) as well as the opening of windows-of-opportunity for change toward stewardship of ecosystem services (e.g., Olsson et al 2004, Hahn et al 2006, Bodin and Crona 2009, Crona and Parker 2012, Rathwell and Peterson 2012, Österblom and Folke 2013. Such "adaptive waves" of moving up scales of social-ecological systems occur both inadvertently and deliberately in response to both rapid and gradual changes and may lead to increased resilience on a higher governance scale (e.g., Olsson et al 2007, Luthe andWyss 2015).…”

Network approaches for understanding rainwater management from a social-ecological systems perspective

“…In agroecosystems, water is not simply a resource supporting food production, it also serves a fundamental role in connecting both places and people (Ripl 2003). Water management must thus be examined from solely a physical perspective (Nyssen et al 2004), but also from a combined social and ecological perspective (Rathwell and Peterson 2012). We are accustomed to this perspective in surface water management, for example in considering irrigation, but it is equally true in rain-fed agroecosystems where multiple actors manage rainwater for different purposes over different scales in space and time.…”

“…In an assessment of several case studies involving participatory processes and stakeholder interactions, Reed et al (2009) showed that different objectives necessarily require different types of engagement and data. More specifically in relation to SENs, typical examples tend to be based on relatively large scale ecosystems and institutional interactions (Janssen et al 2006, Rathwell and Peterson 2012, Beilin et al 2013). Understanding small-scale variation is also important, for although small-scale systems may be able to suppress some consequences of local variation by integrating over space and time, the necessary social and ecological infrastructure to accomplish this integration may actually increase vulnerabilities to processes operating at other scales (Levin and Clark 2010).…”