Collaborative Research: Governing the Commons in Complex Settings: Policy Networks in an Ecology of Games

该小组正在探索政策制定参与者如何决定要解决哪些问题、参与哪些政策制定场所以及与谁合作解决问题等问题。他们假设合作模式或政策网络强烈影响治理机构解决复杂问题的效率和效果。该研究涉及位于加利福尼亚、佛罗里达和阿根廷的三个河口，在这些河口，水质下降、供水减少、洪水和生物多样性威胁等问题需要多方利益相关者的协调行动。这三个站点提供了管理这些问题的监管、协作和自愿机构的不同组合，从而提供了研究这些问题的充足条件。数据将从新闻媒体和互联网分析中收集，并对每个河口的所有主要政策参与者进行调查。分析技术将包括对当地生态的定性描述以及基于社会网络分析（SNA）技术的定量分析。这项研究试图将非正式网络和体制结构纳入一种与复杂政策问题更为相关的治理理论。特别是，该小组力求更好地了解当行为者嵌入复杂的决策系统中时，如何通过合作活动管理自然资源。许多政策分析都关注于单一的政策项目，而这些研究的建议可能会导致意想不到的后果，因为它们未能认识到参与者、制度和整个游戏生态中问题之间复杂的相互作用。本研究旨在了解河口和类似生态系统中经济、环境和社会利益之间的相互关系。此外，通过对美国和阿根廷的比较，可以分析不同的政治文化和国家制度如何影响政策制定者解决这些关键环境问题的能力。

This team is exploring questions about how policy making actors decide which problems to tackle, what policymaking venues to participate in, and who to collaborate with in solving the problems. They hypothesize that the patterns of collaboration, or policy networks, strongly affect the efficiency and effectiveness of governing institutions in resolving complex problems. The study involves three estuaries located in California, Florida and Argentina, where problems such as declining water quality, dwindling water supply, flooding, and threats to biodiversity require coordinated action from multiple stakeholders. The three sites provide different mixtures of regulatory, collaborative, and voluntary institutions governing these issues, and thus provide an ample range of conditions in which to study the questions. Data will be collected from news media and internet analysis as well as surveys of all major policy actors in each estuary. Analytic techniques will include qualitative descriptions of the local ecologies as well as quantitative analyses based on Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques. The study seeks to integrate informal networks and institutional structure into a theory of governance more relevant to complex policy problems. In particular, the team seeks a better understanding of how natural resources are managed through cooperative activities when actors are embedded in complex policy-making systems. Many policy analyses focus on single policy programs, and advice from these studies can to lead to unintended consequences when they fail to recognize the complex interaction of actors, institutions, and problems within the full ecology of games. This study seeks to understand the interrelatedness of economic, environmental, and social benefits at stake in estuaries and similar ecological systems. In addition, the comparisons between the U.S. and Argentina enable analysis of how different political cultures and national institutions affect the ability of policy actors to solve these key environmental problems.