Polycentricity and the Hollow State: Exploring Shared Personnel as a Source of Connectivity in Fragmented Urban Systems

Abstract

The Ecology of Games (EoG) theory couples institutional rational choice with social network theory, articulating how transaction costs, social capital, and collective action dilemmas shape networks and network outcomes in polycentric governance systems. EoG literature has often focused on social–relational ties across organizational boundaries. However, jurisdictional fragmentation and increased reliance on private contractors in local public service delivery foster another source of network connectivity—shared personnel who work for multiple service providers. Drawing upon novel data of organizational personnel from more than 500 special purpose entities responsible for delivering drinking water to local neighborhoods in the Houston metro area in the state of Texas (United States), we examine how managerial, technical, and financial service delivery personnel connect otherwise independent organizations. We find that districts regulated by a common groundwater management agency and districts which contract with one another are both more likely to share technical and managerial personnel. By studying special districts that have overlapping personnel, we broaden the scope of the EoG framework to include additional layers of governance network complexity. As individual bureaucrats and service professionals play a key role in information transfer and innovation diffusion across organizations, shared personnel networks merit consideration as a mechanism for coordination and collective problem solving in fragmented urban systems.

Exploring Coordinative Mechanisms for Environmental Governance in Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area: An Ecology of Games Framework

“…From this perspective, policy institutions can serve as boundary organizations, and facilitate, enable and regulate relations between internal actors. This finding is in accordance with many empirical studies using the EGF [10][11][12][13][14][15], which recognizes that policy institutions actually perform as coordinators in decision-making among multiple actors. Apart from internal actors' coordination, our empirical evidence shows positive externalities between policy institutions.…”

“…The extant studies on policy institution largely focus on the coordinative mechanisms of multiple actors within one single institution or the pattern of actor interactions within a specific regional project [5][6][7][8][9]. Only a few studies have tried to understand how different policy institutions are interlinked and mutually affected to influence policy outcomes [10][11][12]. In this article, we follow in the opinion that the policy institutions that exist at a particular time and place may generate interdependent effects and combine to define the complex institutional system of environmental governance.…”

The Ecology of Games as a Theory of Polycentricity: Recent Advances and Future Challenges

“…It is important to note that while most of the work on structure of ecologies of games has focused on how the shape of the governance system is affected when actors meet in forums, new research is expanding the EGT by accounting for different types of networking structures that form among actors beyond their participation in forums. For instance, Scott and Greer (2018) analyze how personnel in more than 500 special purpose entities responsible for delivering drinking water to local neighborhoods in Texas connect those otherwise independent organizations, and find that districts are more likely to share technical and managerial personnel when they contract with each other or are regulated by a common groundwater management agency. This work contributes to broadening our understanding of how institutional variables can have an exogenous effect (as opposed to the more endogenous effects described by Lubell in his 2013 foundational paper) on the structural characteristics of complex governance systems.…”

The polycentricity of climate policy blockage

“…It is clear from this exposition that polycentric arrangements can be analyzed using tools from network science, which focus explicitly on the connections between different centers of a system, as well as their internal organization. The literature on polycentric governance from an Ecology of Games perspective has contributed to this line of research by focusing on the connections of localized actors through shared policy forums as an emergent complex social system (Berardo and Lubell 2019;García and Bodin 2019;Scott and Greer 2019;see also Lubell et al 2010;Hamilton and Lubell 2018). A policy forum is an organization that connects a range of stakeholders and facilitates a multipartite exchange between the participating parties in order to produce decentralized policy solutions (Fischer and Leifeld 2015).…”