Networks across Venues: Strategies to Navigate Complex Institutional Systems

Abstract

Ongoing research continues to reaffirm institutional fragmentation as a defining trait of most real-world environmental governance systems. Furthermore, the emergence of participatory institutions has expanded access to decision-making venues to actors previously excluded from public policy and management forums. This session focuses on the structures of governance networks that emerge as a result of actors engaging with multiple, and often overlapping, policy issues and management tasks. The presence of a multitude of venues provides actors with a set of parallel opportunities to intervene in governance and build upon their networks. In this session, we explore how actors make decisions and use their networks to engage in governance processes across venues, which compete for funding, relevance, and actors’ time. Understanding strategies for working within fragmented policy systems is necessary if participatory natural resource governance is to be inclusive and effective, as the benefits of policy and management actions across fragmented institutions often fail to accumulate. We draw inspiration from the works on polycentricity and from the recently revived Ecology of Games framework, which explicitly accounts for multiple and interconnected institutions in a policy arena. Network analysis provides a straightforward means of implementing the Ecology of Games framework, enabling us to assess actors’ venue selection strategies and understand the structure of these complex institutional webs as the aggregate of localized decision-making. We encourage the submissions of abstracts that deal with these issues from different points of view. The papers in this session may be methodological or conceptual, but at their heart explore various aspects of fragmented institutional landscapes.