Connecting social networks with ecosystem services for watershed governance: a social-ecological network perspective highlights the critical role of bridging organizations.

By K. Rathwell, Garry D. Peterson. 2012

175 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In many densely settled agricultural watersheds, water quality is a point of conflict between amenity and agricultural activities because of the varied demands and impacts on shared water resources. Successful governance of these watersheds requires coordination among different activities. Recent research has highlighted the role that social networks between management entities can play to facilitate cross-scale interaction in watershed governance. For example, bridging organizations can be positioned in social networks to bridge local initiatives done by single municipalities across whole watersheds. To better understand the role of social networks in social-ecological system dynamics, we combine a social network analysis of the water quality management networks held by local governments with a social-ecological analysis of variation in water management and ecosystem services across the Monteregie, an agricultural landscape near Montreal, Quebec, Canada. We analyze municipal water management networks by using one-mode networks to represent direct collaboration between municipalities, and two- mode networks to capture how bridging organizations indirectly connect municipalities. We find that municipalities do not collaborate directly with one another but instead are connected via bridging organizations that span the water quality management network. We also discovered that more connected municipalities engaged in more water management activities. However, bridging organizations preferentially connected with municipalities that used more tourism related ecosystem services rather than those that used more agricultural ecosystem services. Many agricultural municipalities were relatively isolated, despite being the main producers of water quality problems. In combination, these findings suggest that further strengthening the water management network in the Monteregie will contribute to improving water quality in the region. However, such strengthening requires developing a network that better connects both agricultural and tourism oriented municipalities. Furthermore, these findings show that consideration of the social-ecological context of social networks, can help explain the structure of networks and reveal social-ecological clusters and disconnects in a network.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/025268d3c46392abd4dbcb8e9501e6cca5f67504

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In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

Interactions Among Ecosystem Services Across Land Uses in a Floodplain (2014, background): “…2008. ecosystem services (ES; Costanza et al. 1997, de Groot et al. 2002), i.e., the benefits humans obtain from ecosystems, such as clean air, water, food, raw materials, and recreation (Rose and Chapman 2003, Bennett and Balvanera 2007, Barral and Maceira 2012, Rathwell and Peterson 2012).”
The Emergent Network Structure of the Multilateral Environmental Agreement System (2013, background): “Future research could also link the institutional network to a network map of global social-ecological systems (e.g., Janssen et al., 2006; Ekstrom and Young, 2009; Ernstson et al., 2010; Stein et al., 2011; Rathwell and Peterson, 2012).”
When, Where, and How Nature Matters for Ecosystem Services: Challenges for the Next Generation of Ecosystem Service Models (2017, background): “However, little quantitative work has been done to understand the complex interplay between biophysical and social systems in ES provision (but see Rathwell and Peterson 2012, Mogollón et al. 2016).”