Resources

Sep 26, 2019

‘Includ­ing qual­i­ty in Social net­work analy­sis to fos­ter dia­logue in urban resilience and adap­ta­tion poli­cies ’ in Envi­ron­men­tal Sci­ence & Policy

The capac­i­ties of orga­ni­za­tion­al actors increase when they are linked in net­work rela­tion­ships, espe­cial­ly when con­fronting com­plex prob­lems such as cli­mate change adap­ta­tion and the devel­op­ment of resilience. This Social Net­work Analy­sis (SNA) of orga­ni­za­tions work­ing on adap­ta­tion to cli­mate change and resilience on the ter­ri­to­ry of Mon­tréal was con­duct­ed to pro­vide insights into the imple­men­ta­tion of poli­cies in these areas. The analy­sis reveals a fair­ly uni­form net­work with orga­ni­za­tion­al links grav­i­tat­ing around two poles: one focused on local action and the oth­er on pol­i­cy design. The den­si­ty of rela­tion­ships is weak over­all, and there is medi­um cen­tral­iza­tion around the City of Mon­tréal. While cen­tral­iza­tion is ben­e­fi­cial for coor­di­na­tion, a struc­ture involv­ing more dis­tinct sub-net­works linked to cen­tral actors by bound­ary (bro­ker) orga­ni­za­tions would improve prospects for inno­va­tion and effi­cien­cy. Analy­sis of the qual­i­ty of rela­tion­ships high­lights impor­tant dif­fer­ences between what fos­ters good rela­tions in each of the poles, reduc­ing the chances that poli­cies devel­oped in the pol­i­cy-ori­ent­ed pole will be imple­ment­ed in the action-ori­ent­ed pole. Over­all, this study empha­sizes the rel­e­vance of net­work analy­sis in under­stand­ing prospects for pol­i­cy imple­men­ta­tion in com­plex areas such as resilience and cli­mate change adaptation.

Subject: Adaptation policies, Common operative picture, Network Analysis
Target audience: Practitioners, Researchers
Type of document: Article