Polycentricity and Non-Point Source Pollution: an Examination of the Complex Governance of Water Quality Problems.

Effective governance of natural resources is critical to addressing pressing environmental challenges, and it demands that actors with dissimilar goals and interests learn to coordinate their behavior in complex and constantly-changing social-ecological systems. In complex water governance systems, top-down approaches have resulted in cumbersome and ineffective policies, and decentralized, collaborative arrangements have been studied as a way of promoting a more contextualized and adaptive governance structure to fragmented social-ecological systems. In this paper, we explore the polycentric governance system that forms when water quality stakeholders jointly participate in the development of non-point source pollution management plans in the state of Ohio, United States. We match watershed Total Maximum Daily Loading (TMDL) analyses to the content of management plans to develop an ‘effectiveness index’ for each plan -taking into account strategies and actions proposed to address sources of impairment, and use social network analysis (SNA) techniques to examine whether higher levels of effectiveness relate to the topology of the network of stakeholders participating in the plan, and the degree to which the governance system adapts to the characteristics of the ecosystem under consideration. Our results shed light on the relationship between stakeholder coordination and effectiveness of policy responses and the implications of polycentric systems in the challenge of accommodating the complexity of spatial patterns, collective action and policy formation.