Why Are Cross‐Sectoral Forums Important to Actors? Forum Contributions to Cooperation, Learning, and Resource Distribution

Abstract

Actors within an ecology of games in a polycentric governance system have to choose from a large number of forums they could participate in. This article analyzes why given types of forums are important to actors, as compared to other forums. It shows that functions of an ecology of games, such as cooperation, learning, and resource distribution, influence the importance that actors attribute to forums. The empirical analysis focuses on cross‐sectoral forums, a particular type of forum that is specialized in coordination among actors from different societal sectors, such as government, private interest, or science. Analysis of survey data from eight cross‐sectoral forums in Swiss habitat and land use governance and their 159 members shows that cross‐sectoral forums are comparatively important to actors that perceive their forum to contribute to learning and resource distribution.

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 Dynamic Change of Bosten Lake Area in Response to Climate in the Past 30 Years

“…Considering the accuracy of water information extraction due to the characteristics of large injection and outflow of the Bosten Lake, we chose an image segmentation algorithm based on the threshold values derived from NDWI and MNDWI [15] to extract water information of 14 images and evaluated the accuracy through water area obtained by manual visual interpretation [26]. The water index can effectively reduce the influence of other features and its format can be changed according to the difference between images in various time with the help of the threshold algorithm to ensure the accuracy of basic data.…”

“…The statistical algorithms are utilized to explore and analyze the correlation between lake area change and the kinds of its driving factors like climate dynamics and human behaviors and so on. Some suggestions have been provided for the management of lakes and ecology [23][24][25][26][27][28]. Recent studies about the monitoring of lake area dynamic changes of Chinese researchers has been summarized in Table 1.…”

Editorial Team Introduction

“…This issue of the PSJ presents five articles that can be generally characterized as focusing on decision‐making schemes and policy influence, spanning from specific factors affecting political leaders’ policy decisions to citizen participation in the policy process. Though the analysis of polycentric systems of governance is not new to policy research (e.g., Fischer & Maag, ; Hamilton & Lubell, ; Hileman & Bodin, ), Carlisle and Gruby () attempt to provide clarity to the concept by proposing a theoretical model that focuses on institutional features that positively impact functionality. Their model includes two attributes, each with a set of enabling conditions that are likely to lead to the proposed advantages of polycentric governance systems (i.e., enhanced adaptive capacity as compared to more centralized governance systems, the production of institutions that match the problem to be addressed, and the reduced risk of resource losses and institutional failure via redundancy).…”