Why Do Actors Choose to Participate in Forums, and in Which Ones?

In polycentric governance systems, decisions that impact a given issue (e.g., water, healthcare, transportation) can be made across a series of interdependent forums: formal venues where actors work together to resolve collective action problems. Actors potentially participating in forums can be interest groups, public administrations, political parties, scientific actors, or other experts. Forums exist on many different topics, with many different tasks, competencies, and ways of internal organization. Forum participation is generally voluntary. Some actors select into a multitude of forums that impact their interests, others decline to participate entirely. Furthermore, those who participate select the forums they are active in based on the forum topic, their expertise, their goals, or other factors. In this paper, we examine who does and doesn’t participate in collaborative forums, and analyze the factors that drive participation patterns. This is an important question that has thus far not been examined, given that most research designs rely on information about forum participants only, but not on the potential set of actors that could – or not – participate in forums. We thus examine the forum participation patterns of 350 actors involved in Swiss water management, who could, but often don’t, participate in water governance forums. Using generalized linear regression models in a Bayesian framework, we examine how a series of actor-specific variables—organizational-type, network size, resources, the issues that affect their interests—impact whether actors participate in forums at all, and after taking this into account, the breadth of their participation.