Organizational Capacity for Collaborative Adaptive Governance: An Empirical Assessment of a Large Landscape Network

Abstract

Collaborative adaptive governance has become a prominent, if not dominant, framework for thinking about multi-scalar and cross-jurisdictional environmental management. The literature broadly and consistently suggests that learning and collaboration are two key dimensions for adaptive governance and that inter-organizational networks provide the institutional framework for addressing social-ecological system challenges. Surprisingly little scholarship addresses the influence of network structure on an organization’s capacity to engage in adaptive governance. In the following, we establish a quantifiable, statistical relationship between network structure (i.e., organizations and their arrangement among a network) and organizational capacity for collaborative adaptive governance. We use a linear network autocorrelation model (lnam) to test the relationship between organizational capacity for adaptive governance (operationalized as capacity for learning and collaboration) and how that relates to network structure across the three hypothesis: (1) that social position – operationalized as network centrality – is related to organizational capacity, (2) that subgroup or community structure – operationalized as modularity – is related to organizational capacity, and (3) that there is a social contagion effect of organizational capacity for adaptive governance. Our results identify an empirical relationship between organizational-level collaborative and learning capacity and those organizations in positions of brokerage. This work contributes to our understanding of the role of bridging organizations and networks for large-scale environmental management.