Homophily and Agency: Creating Effective Sustainable Development Networks

Abstract

Community networks are self-organized groupings that form for many different reasons. Some networks, connected mainly through bonding ties, are based on personal interests and relationships; others, based mainly on bridging ties, centre around broader interests. These networks form to create collective agency for engaging with social, environmental, and other issues through the concentration of social capital. The multi-scaled and evolutionary nature of sustainable development issues requires that community groups dedicated to engaging with such issues be particularly diverse, resilient, and flexible. As such, they must build a large number of bridging ties leading to external resources and limit the potential for bonding ties to impose constraining norms upon the group.Over time, however, volunteer groups tend towards a state of homophily, the tendency of groups to form from similar actors and then become more similar with time. This tendency leads to a decrease in the number of the bridging ties that help to provide group agency. Homophily must be actively recognized within community sustainable development groups if they are to remain effective over the long term. This paper suggests methods to prevent and control group homophily drawn from experience in forming small, time-limited sustainable development networks.

Competition and the Dynamics of Group Affiliation

“…In turn, group success is likely to be a more complex function of membership and context than currently considered. Real groups must balance the cohesion provided by intra-group ties with the access to resources and information provided by inter-group ties [30]. Furthermore, the implications of groups with a finite, or timelimited, goal remain to be explored.…”

“…Not only may this homogeneity have a negative impact on societal integration, it may also be harmful to the interests of the groups: research on social movements indicate that a movement's efficacy (it's ability to achieve its aims) is dependent on the diverse skills and resources that its members can call upon. Such skills and resources are likely to be maximised among heterogeneous groups [30].…”

An experiment in strengthening the networks of remote communities in the face of environmental change: leveraging spatially distributed environmental memory

“…On the other hand, external bridging links are useful for accessing locally unavailable information about sustainable natural resource management (Bodin and Crona 2009;Demiryurek 2010;Isaac et al 2007;Isaac and Matous 2017;Newig et al 2010;Newman and Dale 2007). BBoundary-spanning individuals^(i.e., individuals who connect different networks) and external links to outreach professionals are known to contribute to the innovativeness of agricultural systems (Klerkx et al 2010;Lubell et al 2011).…”

“…However, without new external inputs, much of this knowledge might have been already known and shared within the community. Linking only to similar actors through internal bonding ties leads to a reliance on redundant information and can hinder sustainable environmental management (Newman and Dale 2007;Prell et al 2009). People tend to lock into the same behavior as peers in their group, which may lead to the rigid continuation of maladaptive practices and avoidance of innovative change (Scheffer and Westley 2007).…”

Exploring dynamic mechanisms of learning networks for resource conservation

“…It has been recognized that "not all social networks are created equal" (Sampson 2004, Newman and Dale 2007, Bodin and Crona 2009). Different social networks have different structures with different implications for the governance of socialecological systems.…”