Governance networks describe the complex relations among different types of actors involved in the governance of a policy issue. Here, we ask how different institutional and socioeconomic contextual conditions influence the structure of these networks and result in more horizontal or hierarchical types of governance networks. To answer this question, we study Vietnam’s sanitation sector and compare two different provinces, Hanoi and Ben Tre. More specifically, we analyze networks of information exchange among key actors based on face-to-face interviews and prestructured questionnaires. We find that in the highly urbanized capital city of Hanoi, which serves as a national leader of innovation, where national and international actors are present, and where local actors have high capacities, information exchange tends to follow horizontal network structures. In the more rural, typical province of Ben Tre, hierarchical structures dominate.

In many resource governance systems, representatives of resource-related organizations gather in forums to discuss and develop solutions to policy problems. Forums often deal with interdependent policy problems, giving rise to institutional externalities: instances where decisions made in one forum either decrease (negative institutional externality) or increase (positive institutional externality) the rate by which current policy outputs in other forums resolve their prescribed policy problems. In this article we argue that forum-specific factors can impact the direction of such externalities. We theorize that forums with more diverse memberships in terms of both the issues that participants care about and types of organizations represented are better equipped to incorporate more holistic, ecosystem-based perspectives, which promote the generation of positive institutional externalities. Our study utilizes survey data collected from forum participants in the California Delta. Results from a series of cross-nested regressions demonstrate a positive association between forum diversity and positive externalities.

Achieving effective, sustainable environmental governance requires a better understanding of the causes and consequences of the complex patterns of interdependencies connecting people and ecosystems within and across scales. Network approaches for conceptualizing and analysing these interdependencies offer one promising solution. Here, we present two advances we argue are needed to further this area of research: (i) a typology of causal assumptions explicating the causal aims of any given network-centric study of social–ecological interdependencies; (ii) unifying research design considerations that facilitate conceptualizing exactly what is interdependent, through what types of relationships and in relation to what kinds of environmental problems. The latter builds on the appreciation that many environmental problems draw from a set of core challenges that re-occur across contexts. We demonstrate how these advances combine into a comparative heuristic that facilitates leveraging case-specific findings of social–ecological interdependencies to generalizable, yet context-sensitive, theories based on explicit assumptions of causal relationships.

In north-eastern Madagascar, maintenance of biodiversity competes with expansion of land for agriculture and mining. The concept of "telecoupling" provides a framework for analysis of distant actors and institutions that influence local land use decisions. However, there is a lack of knowledge regarding the extent of telecoupling of land governance in north-eastern Madagascar and a lack of evidence regarding its role in driving land use change and land competition. Using a descriptive Social Network Analysis, we disentangled distant interactions between actors in terms of flows and institutions. Our findings show that the domains of economic and environmental interactions are dominated by actors from different sectors that have claims on the same land but generally do not interact. Distant influences occurring via remote flows of goods, money, and institutions serve to reinforce local land competition. Balancing economic and environmental land claims for more sustainable regional development in north-eastern Madagascar requires collaboration between actors across sectors, scales, and domains.

Actors within an ecology of games in a polycentric governance system have to choose from a large number of forums they could participate in. This article analyzes why given types of forums are important to actors, as compared to other forums. It shows that functions of an ecology of games, such as cooperation, learning, and resource distribution, influence the importance that actors attribute to forums. The empirical analysis focuses on cross‐sectoral forums, a particular type of forum that is specialized in coordination among actors from different societal sectors, such as government, private interest, or science. Analysis of survey data from eight cross‐sectoral forums in Swiss habitat and land use governance and their 159 members shows that cross‐sectoral forums are comparatively important to actors that perceive their forum to contribute to learning and resource distribution.

This article investigates whether linkages between members of parliament (MPs) and interest groups influence MPs' activities of co-sponsoring legislative proposals. Based on statistical models for network data, the study builds on classical explanations of co-sponsorships highlighting the role of similar ties between MPs, such as party membership, legislative committee assignments, electoral district or gender. It shows that, on top of these traditional forms of homophily, MPs' ties to interest groups matter as well. MPs with ties to a similar type of interest groups are more likely to co-sponsor their respective proposals. The same holds for MPs with ties to groups active in the same policy domain. These findings have implications for the study of groups' lobbying, legislative behaviour and representative democracy.

In polycentric governance systems, actors interact in different venues, such as forums which foster cross-sectoral interaction. This analysis centres on water forums in Switzerland and on actors with multiple forum memberships, creating interactions throughout the entire forum network. Findings show that the central actors in the entire water forum network are predominantly from the public administration sector, even though members from the private sector are most numerous. Despite an emphasis on the bottom-up and self-organizing character of polycentric governance systems in the literature, this analysis shows that public administration actors still play a crucial role as network managers and brokers.