Containing containment: rethinking Italy's experience during the Cold War

This article examines the impact of the Cold War on the Italian political system. It compares the relations of the two main Italian parties - the DC and the PCI - with their external interlocutors and allies - the USA and the USSR - during the first decade of the Cold War. By doing so, the article rejects traditional interpretations of how post-Second World War international constraints limited Italy's sovereignty. It argues instead that the main Italian pro-western party, the Christian Democrats, deliberately opted for a policy of containment of American pressures. Such a policy was functional to the twin objectives of consolidating DC hegemony, and safeguarding Italy's new republican constitution.     

Bottom-Up Identification of Subsystems in Complex Governance Systems

Theories of policymaking often focus on subsystems within a larger, overarching governance system. However, subsystem identification is complicated by the complexity of governance systems, characterized by multiple, interrelated issues, multi-level interactions, and a diverse set of organizations. This study suggests an empirical, bottom-up methodology to identify subsystems. Subsystems are identified based on bundles of similar observed organizational activity. The study further suggests a set of three elementary criteria to classify individual subsystems. In order to prove the value of the methodology, subsystems are identified through cluster analysis, and subsequently classified in a study of Swiss water governance. Results suggest that Swiss water governance can be understood as a network of overlapping subsystems connected by boundary penetrating organizations, with high-conflict and quiet politics subgroups. The study shows that a principled analysis of subsystems as the interconnected, constituent parts of complex governance systems offers insights into important contextual factors shaping outcomes. Such insights are prerequisite knowledge in order to understand and navigate complex systems for researchers and practitioners alike.     

Network Dynamics in Natural Resource Governance: A Case Study of Swiss Landscape Management

Structural characteristics of social networks have been recognized as important factors of effective natural resource governance. However, network analyses of natural resource governance most often remain static, even though governance is an inherently dynamic process. In this article, we investigate the evolution of a social network of organizational actors involved in the governance of natural resources in a regional nature park project in Switzerland. We ask how the maturation of a governance network affects bonding social capital and centralization in the network. Applying separable temporal exponential random graph modeling (STERGM), we test two hypotheses based on the risk hypothesis by Berardo and Scholz (2010) in a longitudinal setting. Results show that network dynamics clearly follow the expected trend toward generating bonding social capital but do not imply a shift toward less hierarchical and more decentralized structures over time. We investigate how these structural processes may contribute to network effectiveness over time.