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

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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.