Achieving effective, sustainable environmental governance requires a better understanding of the causes and consequences of the complex patterns of interdependencies connecting people and ecosystems within and across scales. Network approaches for conceptualizing and analyzing these interdependencies offer one promising solution. Here, we present two advances we argue are needed to further this area of research: (i) a typology of causal assumptions explicating the causal aims of any given network-centric study of social-ecological interdependencies; (ii) unifying research design considerations that facilitate conceptualizing exactly what is interdependent, through what types of relationships, and in relation to what kinds of environmental problems. The latter builds on the appreciation that many environmental problems draw from a set of core challenges that re-occur across contexts. We demonstrate how these advances combine into a comparative heuristic that facilitates leveraging case-specific findings of social-ecological

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.

Local governments, or municipalities, play a key role in water governance around the world owing to the many administrative competencies they hold, ranging from water service delivery to urban planning. However, the ability of municipalities to carry out their competencies effectively depends in large part on the characteristics of the institutional arrangements in which they are embedded. In particular, the relationship between municipalities and watershed governance institutions has received little attention in the literature on polycentric and multilevel governance. Drawing on insights from diverse cases around the world, we argue that empirical research must pay closer attention to the links, or lack thereof, between municipalities and watershed governance institutions to improve the sustainability of water governance outcomes in practice. We identify a set of critical issues affecting municipalities' engagement in governance at the watershed scale that broadly apply across different contexts, and which we argue deserve more attention in future research: (1) disconnect and ambiguities of authority across hierarchical levels; (2) internal and external challenges to municipalities engaging in effective collaborations; (3) barriers to expanding the scope of traditional municipal affairs; and (4) misalignment of biophysical, institutional, and political timescales.

The acceleration of changes in global water resource systems is exacerbating the ability of governance institutions to adapt, particularly in developing world regions. We highlight one of the key challenges to resilience in environmental governancecoordinating governance processes within and across multiple interacting geographic levels-and investigate structures of local, regional, and multilevel water governance networks using empirical data from Central America. We examined hypotheses of multilevel governance network structure and function using descriptive statistics and exponential random graph models, and found that closed and open network structures are more prevalent at the local and regional levels, respectively, and that cross-level ties impart smallworld structures upon the multilevel network. Small-world networks are theorized to provide joint benefits on cooperation, policy learning, and resource distribution, all of which are necessary for effective water resources governance.