Policy issue interdependency and the formation of collaborative networks

Abstract

Environmental problems often span a set of challenges that each may engage different policy actors across different policy domains. These challenges, or policy issues, nonetheless exhibit interdependencies that may constrain the ability of actors to work together towards joint solutions. Still, we have limited knowledge about whether and how policy issue interdependencies actually shape how actors collaborate. Using data derived from two venues for collaborative water governance in the Norrström basin, Sweden, we investigate whether and how policy issues and policy issue interdependencies influence actors' selection of collaborative partners. We test two alternative sets of propositions; one set assumes that partner selection is driven by actors' engagement in policy issues and their interdependencies, while the other set emphasises social positions and actor attributes. Our results show that in one venue, actors' choices of collaborative partner were associated with factors from both sets, but not with policy issue interdependencies specifically. In the other venue, only actor and relational attributes shaped social tie formation. These results suggest that how actors interact does not necessarily align with the policy issues and the policy issue interdependencies defined by the environmental problem they are to address. Our results provide an important step towards arriving at evidence‐based recommendations for more effective collaborative efforts in addressing complex environmental problems that no actor can address alone. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

Assessing Policy Issue Interdependencies in Environmental Governance

“…Yet, the respondents agreed on the intervening factors between the issues as a common denominator. The existence of Table 1 Policy issues in the Norrström basin (reproduced from Hedlund et al, 2021). Names in bold correspond to shortened names of policy issues in Figure 6.…”

“…Policy actors with responsibility for and/or stakes in environmental problems engage in policy issues to address the problems collectively or individually. They do so by addressing problems through different environmental targets defined by the policy issues at focus (Hedlund et al, 2021). In the process of developing new or implementing existing policies to reach such targets, actors must concentrate on certain step-wise actions to reach targets, and the possible biophysical-and/or societal consequences these actions can have.…”

“…Figure3The Norrström basin, located in Mideast Sweden (Vattenmyndigheterna, Länsstyrelsen, SMHI, Lantmäteriet, 2020, reproduced fromHedlund et al, 2021). Names in bold refer to major cities, and names in regular font refer to catchment areas for the collaborative venues included in data collection.…”

Closing integrative gaps in complex environmental governance systems

“…Individual environmental problems rarely exist in isolation. Ecological dynamics and feedbacks cause individual issues to become interwoven with other issues in complex ways (Lubell 2013, Hedlund et al 2021. For instance, the spread of an invasive plant across a landscape can be accelerated by warming microclimate temperatures (Willis et al 2010).…”

“…Despite the many interdependencies between environmental issues (i.e., the change in one issue affects the outcome in another, or two issues have overlapping management activities; Pham-Truffert et al 2020, Hedlund et al 2021, stakeholders do not always address these interdependencies in a holistic manner (Le Blanc 2015, Munsch et al 2020. In complex governance systems, actors may operate more efficiently when they focus their limited capacity on a subset of interrelated issues because this, for example, can lower the environmental externalities that result from managing problems in a fragmented way.…”