The Effects of Time on the Structure of Environmental Governance Networks

Empirical research provides strong evidence that the growth of collaborative institutions in environmental governance has resulted in increasingly complex and interconnected policy systems, characterized by an array of participatory decision-making venues and involving many diverse public and private actors. While collaborative institutions provide actors with more opportunities to engage in governance processes, determining who to collaborate with in order to create social ties and form working partnerships is challenging both in terms of time and effort. Similarly, the increase in boundary-spanning issues and expansion of venues means the process of venue shopping and determining how to allocate participation is also costly. This suggests two parallel strategies, or network activities, that actors may employ to pursue their interests in governance arrangements – partner selection and venue participation – both of which draw from the same pool of resources and present similar constraints. In this paper, we focus on the structures of networks that emerge as a result of actors’ aggregated choices regarding how to engage with multiple, and often overlapping, policy issues and management tasks. We specifically highlight a general trend in the popularity of actors and venues that suggests governance networks self-organize according to tradeoffs in time and complexity. Drawing on the Ecology of Games framework, we analyze four empirical governance networks from Argentina, Sweden (two networks), and the United States and illustrate how actors and venues that engage with more, and more complex, policy issues and management tasks are not necessarily the most popular (i.e., not the most socially well-connected actors nor the most well-attended venues). We further find that the saturation of actor and venue popularity occurs at higher levels in networks that form over longer periods of time.