Collaborative Networks for Effective Ecosystem‐Based Management: A Set of Working Hypotheses

Ecosystem‐based management (EBM) represents a comprehensive approach to better govern the environment that also illustrates the collaborative trend in policy and public administration. The need for stakeholder involvement and collaboration is strongly articulated, yet how and for what purposes collaboration would be effective remains largely untested. We address this gap by developing and evaluating a set of hypotheses specifying how certain patterns of collaborations among actors affect their joint ability to accomplish EBM. Content analyses of management plans drawn from five EBM planning processes in Sweden are combined with analyses of the collaborative networks through which these plans have been developed. Our results indicate that system thinking and the ability to integrate across different management phases are favored by collaborations between different kinds of actors, and by project leaders being centrally located in the networks. We also find that dense substructures of collaboration increase the level of specificity in the plans in regards to explicating constraints on human activities. Having many collaborative ties does however not enhance the overall level of specificity. Our results also show that different network characteristics can give rise to similar EBM outcomes. This observed equifinality suggests there is no single blueprint for well‐performing collaborative networks.     

Soviet housing: who built what and when? The case of Daugavpils,Latvia

Throughout much of the Soviet period, access to housing was a major consideration, both for individual citizens and employers intent on increasing their number of employees. Because of the heavy emphasis on industry, and despite the progress made within the area since the late 1950s, Soviet urban residential provision never managed to fully recover from the acute housing shortage that characterized the Stalin years. In this paper, we address the quantitative side of housing construction during the socialist era. Using the mid-sized diversified industrial town of Daugavpils (Latvia) as a case study, we set out to investigate the extent to which employers were involved in decisions concerning housing provision. To do this, we consult a large volume of archival records, our focus being on documents tracing entries indicating that new living quarters were ready and could be allocated to employees of sponsoring organizations and enterprises.     

Collective Action Problem Characteristics and Partner Uncertainty as Drivers of Social Tie Formation in Collaborative Networks

The effectiveness of collaboration is often explained by the alignment of social networks with collective-action problem characteristics, yet previous research on social tie formation has focused almost exclusively on actor and relational attributes. We theorize that collective-action problem characteristics together with actor and relational attributes explain social tie formation and that the relative effect of these factors varies with uncertainty about collaboration partners. The study tests seven hypotheses associated with these factors by estimating multilevel network models of collaboration and task engagement among managers responding to a major wildfire in Sweden. The combination of actors and tasks in a single model captured key characteristics of the collective action problem (task engagements and task interdependencies), and disentangled the relative effects of these factors from actor and relational attributes. Results suggest that social tie formation can be explained both by actors’ task engagements, and actor attributes associated with leadership, professionalization, and experience. Further, the effect of task engagements decreases in organizational relationships where collaborative uncertainty is high. Since the alignment of social ties with problem characteristics is supposedly positively associated with collaborative effectiveness, this finding suggests that risk-aversion is a more deep-rooted driver of tie formation than the pursuit of collective performance.     

Balancing Costs and Benefits of Collaboration in an Ecology of Games

The growth of collaborative approaches to governance has resulted in increasingly complex policy and management landscapes, where actors are presented with ever‐increasing numbers of decision‐making venues they can participate in and actors they can collaborate with. Given that actors face constraints on their capacity to manage actor and venue relationships in such polycentric governance systems, we assume the marginal benefit of yet another relationship should begin to diminish at some level of engagement. Furthermore, we hypothesize that such capacity limitations are not static, but decrease as actors learn, develop skills, and formulate strategies for how to navigate complex polycentric systems more effectively. Drawing on the Ecology of Games framework, this article investigates two Swedish collaborative governance initiatives where a multitude of actors came together to address a range of different, but interrelated, policy issues and management tasks. The empirical findings suggest that actors’ capacities to successfully navigate polycentric governance arrangements increase as they gain experience and develop their networking skills. Our findings imply there is a need to balance increased complexity in polycentric systems with increased capacity, otherwise the overall effect of an ever‐increasing number of venues and actors could be collaborative fatigue and decreased abilities to address diverse governance challenges.     

石器研究的新视角:技术-功能分析法——以观音洞遗址为例

技术-功能分析法通过综合考察支配石制工具生产的技术机制、分析工具刃口上所整合的技术特征,理解工具预设性的功能和使用方式,并复原打制者的意图。对观音洞遗址石器材料的分析表明,此方法在揭示打制者意图及工具预设性的功能和使用方式的多样性方面具有重要作用。     

Participation in Multiple Decision Making Water Governance Forums in Brazil Enhances Actors’ Perceived Level of Influence

The Ecology of Games Framework (EGF) draws attention to the intertwined nature of different forums in a given policy setting and how this affects governance outcomes. In this article, we associate the EGF with the literature on power asymmetries, in order to investigate hypotheses of actors’ perceived level of influence in a forum. Focusing on the Paraíba do Sul river basin committee in Brazil, we specifically explore actors’ participation in multiple forums, time spent participating in the basin committee, and actors’ degree of involvement in the committee as factors that might explain actors’ level of perceived influence in the forum. The findings suggest participation in multiple forums is a key driver of perceived influence and thus highlight a way to challenge traditional power asymmetries. More research, however, is needed to determine to what extent perceived influence is affecting decision‐making processes and governance outcomes in the Paraíba do Sul river basin committee.     

Transient and Long-Term Changes in Seismic Response of the Natural Resources Building,Olympia, Washington,due to Earthquake Shaking

The Natural Resources Building (NRB) in Olympia, Washington, was shaken by three earthquakes (Mw = 5.8, 6.8, and 5.0) between 1999 and 2001. Building motions were recorded on digital accelerographs, providing important digital recordings of repeated strong shaking in a building. The NRB has 5-stories above grade with 3 sub-grade levels and a ductile steel-frame elongated in the E-W direction. The upper two floors extend significantly beyond the lower 3 on the southern and eastern sides. N-S motions dominate the fundamental modal vibrations of the building system. In the 1999 Satsop M5.8 earthquake, the frequency of this fundamental system mode was 1.3 Hz during motions of 10% g. The frequency dropped to 0.7 Hz during the 2001 M6.8 Nisqually strong motions. Moreover, the Nisqually recordings reveal both numerous high-frequency transients of up to 0.18 g, several of which are visible on widely spaced sensors, and long-term tilts of some of the sensors. The weaker 2001 M5.0 Satsop earthquake motions showed the frequency remained depressed at less than 1 Hz for the eastern side of the structure, although the western side had recovered to 1.3 Hz. An ambient noise survey in 2008 showed the fundamental frequency of N/S vibrations remains about 1.0 Hz for the eastern side of the building and 1.3 Hz for the western side. These results suggest that in the Nisqually earthquake, the east side of the NRB suffered a permanent reduction in fundamental mode frequency of 37% due to loss of system stiffness by undetermined mechanism.