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Recent research has shown that communication networks involving governmental and nongovernmental actors self-organize based on how risk is perceived. According to the \"risk hypothesis,\" actors embedded in governance systems in which there is widespread risk of defection tend to form bonding structures, whereas those in low-risk systems form bridging structures. A parallel strand of research proposes to study complex governance systems composed of multiple actors and the decision-making forums in which they interact. In this article, the authors couple these research threads and show how bonding and bridging structures form when stakeholders participate in three complex governance systems of varying institutional strength. Findings suggest that the prevalence of one type of structure over the other depends on contextual variables such as the stability of the institutions and the occurrence of environmental focusing events that demand quick policy responses.

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 governance- coordinating 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.

Social-ecological systems are governed by a complex of ecology of games featuring multiple actors, policy institutions, and issues, and not just single institutions operating in isolation. We update Long's (1958) ecology of games to analyze the coordinating roles of actors and institutions in the context of the ecology of water management games in San Francisco Bay, California. The ecology of games is operationalized as a bipartite network with actors participating in institutions, and exponential random graph models are used to test hypotheses about the structural features of the network. We found that policy coordination is facilitated mostly by federal and state agencies and collaborative institutions that span geographic boundaries. Network configurations associated with closure show the most significant departures from the predicted model values, consistent with the Berardo and Scholz (2010) “risk hypothesis” that closure is important for solving cooperation problems.

Regional agroecological systems are examples of complex adaptive systems, where sustainability is promoted by social networks that facilitate information sharing, cooperation, and connectivity among specialized components of the system. Much of the existing literature on social capital fails to recognize how networks support multiple social processes. Our paper overcomes this problem by analyzing how the social networks of wine grape growers exhibit structural features related to multiple social processes: ties to central actors that build bridging social capital and facilitate the diffusion of innovations, ties that close triangles and build bonding social capital to solve cooperation dilemmas, and ties to individuals that span community boundaries to connect specialized components of the system. We use survey data to measure the communication networks of growers in three viticulture regions in California. A combination of descriptive statistics, conditional uniform random graph tests, and exponential random graph models provides empirical support for our hypotheses. The findings reflect regional differences in geography and institutional histories, which may influence the capacity to respond to regional environmental change.

Sustainable agricultural knowledge networks consist of heterogeneous actors who collaborate and share knowledge to advance the goals of sustainable agriculture. We analyze how the structure of sustainable agriculture knowledge networks is related to the social-ecological context across 57 counties in California. We apply a population ecology approach that identifies variables related to the space, energy, and stability of the social-ecological context in which networks evolve. Using data from a 2016 survey of agricultural outreach and extension professionals, we find four different types of networks at different stages of development, which vary in the centrality of key actors associated with the University of California. The most highly developed networks exist in agriculturally productive counties with diverse crops. The population ecology variables relate differently to the size versus structure of knowledge networks, which implies a need for ambidextrous extension strategies customized to different types of network processes.

Significance Sustainability is notoriously difficult to define and put into practice in the context of agricultural and other social-ecological systems. A crucial task within this debate is to analyze how practitioners understand the idea of sustainability. Using California winegrape growers as an example, this paper uses network science to describe the structure of farmer mental models of sustainable agriculture and link those models to behavioral aspects of sustainable agriculture. California growers have hierarchically organized mental models with more abstract goals in the center and more concrete strategies in the periphery. The concept of sustainability is a viable approach for linking knowledge to action; there are strong positive correlations between the sophistication of an individual’s beliefs about sustainability, participation in local outreach programs, and adoption of sustainable practices.

Social and ecological outcomes of environmental governance systems are shaped by interplay across the spatial levels at which policy actors and decision-making forums operate. We focus on the conditions under which actors participate in policy forums operating at higher or lower levels than the actors’ own level. We draw upon theories of network science and transaction costs to formulate and test predictions about the overall prevalence of such cross-level linkages as well as the conditions under which policy actors engage in these linkages. We estimate an exponential random graph model using data collected from a survey of climate change adaptation policy actors participating in decision-making forums operating at different spatial levels within the Lake Victoria region in East Africa. Within this governance system, efforts to improve adaptive capacity across national boundaries and diverse vulnerable populations hinge on how well policy forums operating at regional and higher levels attract the participation of actors with access to information about local conditions, the efficiency with which actors can disseminate funding and technical resources through more local policy forums, as well as other processes that occur via cross-level linkages. We find that actors are less likely to engage in cross-level linkages compared to within-level linkages. Conditioning on this general tendency, actors are even less likely to participate in forums operating at lower levels in which their collaborators also participate. By contrast, actors are more likely to participate in forums operating at lower levels when influential actors jointly participate. These findings, which highlight distinct roles of social and political capital in cross-level forum participation, have implications for efforts to improve climate change adaptation governance in the Lake Victoria region, as well as other multilevel governance systems.

Area-wide management (AWM) is a strategy for invasive plant pests and diseases in which management actions are coordinated across property boundaries to target the entire pest or pathogen population in an area. Because some people may benefit from the actions of others without bearing the costs, but group-level contributions are required to achieve effective control, AWM suffers from free-riding, yet it has rarely been studied as a collective action problem. To foster collective action for the management of huanglongbing (HLB), California citrus stakeholders have adopted two distinct institutional approaches: Psyllid Management Areas (PMAs), in which coordinated treatments are voluntary, and Pest Control Districts (PCDs), in which coordinated treatments are mandatory. Through a survey distributed to citrus stakeholders in Southern California and a regression analysis of participation levels in AWM over nine seasons, we assess the impact that individual perceptions, institutional approaches, and group-level determinants have had on collective action. Our results show that although citrus stakeholders are confident about the benefits of AWM, they are aware of collective action problems and identified the lack of participation as the main barrier to AWM. Group size, grove size, and heterogeneity in grove size were found to significantly impact collective action. In addition, our analysis shows that the two institutional approaches that were developed for AWM have followed a different trajectory over time, leading to a discussion of the determinants that may enable and sustain collective action for invasive species management.

The study investigates residents’ behavior towards reducing the use of single-use plastic (SUP), specifically in the context of food packaging. The widespread view holds that pro-environmental behavior (PB) results from a person’s moral and rational deliberations. In reducing single-use plastic (SUP) consumption and waste, the relative roles of rationality and morality models in validating PB among rural and urban residents are not yet clear. In this empirical study, we compared the relative efficacy of two models for explaining people’s SUP reduction behavior: the theory of planned behavior (TPB; rationality) and the value belief norm (VBN; morality). We investigated Thailand’s rural (Sichang Island) and metropolitan (Nonthaburi city) areas. As a result, we surveyed people living on Sichang Island (n = 255) and in Nonthaburi city (n = 310). We employed structural equation modeling (SEM) for data analysis in this study. Findings showed that while morality better justified all the study participants’ SUP reduction behavior, rationality underpinned behaviors of rural residents, while morality better explained the actions of city residents. We discussed future theoretical development and a policy roadmap based on these findings.

In response to agriculture's vulnerability and contribution to climate change, many governments are developing initiatives that promote the adoption of mitigation and adaptation practices among farmers. Since most climate policies affecting agriculture rely on voluntary efforts by individual farmers, success requires a sound understanding of the factors that motivate farmers to change practices. Recent evidence suggests that past experience with the effects of climate change and the psychological distance associated with people's concern for global and local impacts can influence environmental behavior. Here we surveyed farmers in a representative rural county in California's Central Valley to examine how their intention to adopt mitigation and adaptation practices is influenced by previous climate experiences and their global and local concerns about climate change. Perceived changes in water availability had significant effects on farmers' intention to adopt mitigation and adaptation strategies, which were mediated through global and local concerns respectively. This suggests that mitigation is largely motivated by psychologically distant concerns and beliefs about climate change, while adaptation is driven by psychologically proximate concerns for local impacts. This match between attitudes and behaviors according to the psychological distance at which they are cognitively construed indicates that policy and outreach initiatives may benefit by framing climate impacts and behavioral goals concordantly; either in a global context for mitigation or a local context for adaptation.