A Multilevel Network Perspective on Organizational Activity and Regulatory Structure in Swiss Flood Control Governance

Research in environmental governance emphasizes the importance of coordinating policies across sectors when addressing complex and interdependent policy issues. Existing research has separately analyzed the coordination between organizations, on the one hand, and the institutional integration of policies across sectors, on the other hand. We connect these separate streams of research by jointly analyzing the interdependencies between organizational activity and the regulatory framework regarding a set of issues in Swiss flood control governance as a multilevel network. We hypothesize a link between the compartmentalization of policies into isolated sectors and lacking coordination of organizational activity across policy sectors. In order to assess the validity of this hypothesis, we first assess the degree to which flood protection is institutionally integrated across policy sectors. To this end, we analyzed 35 legislative texts (laws and regulations) in sectors related to flood management, such as spatial planning, hydraulic engineering, or insurance policies. We applied a systematic coding scheme to identify which flood-related policy issues were addressed in which parts of the texts. Second, we assess the extent to which policy organizations integrate different issues with respect to their activity in flood control governance. To do so, we rely on data gathered in a nation-wide survey of 168 organizations involved in flood control governance. These two data sets allow us to create a multilevel network, which simultaneously contains the regulatory framework and organizational activity surrounding issues in Swiss flood control governance. The regulatory framework is captured in the co-occurrence of issues in legislative texts, while links between organizations and issues indicate inasmuch organizations are active on multiple flood governance issues. The multilevel network structure allows us to gauge the extent to which the presence of absence of regulatory links between issues are reflected in organizational activity. In doing so, the study makes several crucial contributions to the study of environmental governance, and, more specifically, to the analysis of cross-sectoral policy integration. First, against the background of most existing studies focusing on the integration of formal policies or government organizations, we add a new and important dimension of cross-sectoral policy integration by studying the actual activity of organizations across a range of policy issues in a governance system. We thus deliver a more holistic perspective on cross-sectoral policy integration. Second, against the background of mostly qualitative studies of policy integration, we provide a quantitative assessment based on a network approach as a methodological contribution, which can be applied to many other cases and foster systematic comparative work. Third, our approach identifies processes of policy integration based either on institutions or on organizational activity. Uncovering these processes and understanding their interdependencies pushes the study of policy integration further, and has important implications for policy recommendations aiming to foster cross-sectoral policy integration.