From local to central: a network analysis of who manages plant pest and disease outbreaks across scales

Abstract

ABSTRACT. One of the key determinants of success in managing natural resources is "institutional fit," i.e., how well the suite of required actions collectively match the scale of the environmental problem. The effective management of pest and pathogen threats to plants is a natural resource problem of particular economic, social, and environmental importance. Responses to incursions are managed by a network of decision makers and managers acting at different spatial and temporal scales. We applied novel network theoretical methods to assess the propensity of growers, local industry, local state government, and state and national government head offices to foster either within-or across-scale coordination during the successful 2001 Australian response to the outbreak of the fungal pathogen black sigatoka (Mycosphaerella fijiensis). We also reconstructed the response network to proxy what that network would look like today under the Australian government's revised response system. We illustrate a structural move in the plant biosecurity response system from one that was locally driven to the current top-down system, in which the national government leads coordination of a highly partitioned engagement process. For biological incursions that spread widely across regions, nationally rather than locally managed responses may improve coordination of diverse tasks. However, in dealing with such challenges of institutional fit, local engagement will always be critical in deploying flexible and adaptive local responses based on a national system. The methods we propose detect where and how network structures foster cross-scale interactions, which will contribute to stronger empirical studies of cross-scale environmental governance.

The social structural foundations of adaptation and transformation in social–ecological systems

“…This typically calls for effective coordination, where a few centralized actors organize the flow of information and delegate tasks in an efficient manner (Provan and Kenis 2008, McAllister et al 2015, Bodin et al 2016b, McAllister et al 2017). This type of coordination is emphasized by configuration D in Fig.…”

Social–ecological network analysis of scale mismatches in estuary watershed restoration

“…The SENA is also integrated with an ecological habitat assessment done by Washington State to provide a social-ecological approach to natural resource management planning. The framework and its application significantly advance a young literature that uses SENA (34,35) and other network approaches (36)(37)(38)(39) to study multilevel natural resource governance.…”

Balancing collaboration with coordination: Contesting eradication in the Australian plant pest and disease biosecurity system

“…In summary, even though each response has a generic organisational structure under the Deed, each response will have unique structural patterns of stakeholder participation (e.g. McAllister et al 2015a). …”