1 / 1 A Multimode Network Analysis Reveals Power in the Indonesian Palm Oil Value Chain

Power has increasingly been integrated into institutional analysis to explain behavior, interactions, and outcomes in environmental governance. Yet, actor-focused theories of power do not fully capture the influences, hierarchies, and power relations that span multiple decision-making situations, and the power that actors exert via powerful linked situations. Social Network Analysis (SNA) offers graph theoretic measures to quantify and examine power relations among nodes based on their structural connections. This paper leverages a multimode network approach and a nascent power typology from institutional analysis to theorize and assess interdependences between situations and actors as two forms of power: ‘power-over’ and ‘power-to’. We describe ´power over’ as situation-centered pragmatic, framing, and design power, manifested via AS linkages of biophysical transactions, information, and institutions, respectively. ‘Power-to’ is theorized as capacity of actors to exert influences, determined by their involvement in situations (membership). We operationalize these NAS concepts via multimode motifs that assess the extent of ‘power-over’ situations and ‘power-to’ actors. The framework is applied to examine deforestation outcomes of the Indonesian palm oil value chain. Data sources include semi-structured interviews with 16 policy actors, supplemented by secondary datasets from peer-reviewed and media articles. Among 11 delineated situations, policy making and certification situations exert substantial design power, whereas global market, discourse, and monitoring situations manifest significant framing power. We note the reciprocal relations between the design power by Indonesian policymaking and the framing power by global market. Among 22 actor typologies, producing companies, NGOs, and the Indonesian government demonstrate high ‘power-to’, stemming from their participation not only in the greatest number of decision-making situations, but also the ones exerting substantial ‘power-over’.