Examining social networks alongside cultural frameworks and their effectiveness in creating and implementing policy change
By Ari Sanjar
Social networks are the foundation of society, basically consisting of entities, their relationships with each other, and their interactions with each other. A cultural framework on the other hand explains the traditions, symbols, and value systems within a particular society. Our guest lecturer this week was Madeline Brown, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Maryland and a researcher with one of her current projects being about community-based forest management within the cultural framework of the Yunnan Province of China. She detailed what social networks are, how we research them, and why they are studied. When graphed, entities can show various types of ties, some more weighted than others that represent the magnitude of their relationship to one another. This is used when studying the flow of information or materials between actors.
The easiest way to describe the importance of social networks and cultural frameworks would be utilizing Crona and Bodin’s research1 on the social networks of the coastal seascape of Kenya. In their work, they discuss community-based management of resources based on the flow of information between subgroups. These researchers looked at the social networks in relation to natural resource extraction and coastal ecosystem management. They mapped the communication of knowledge and information spread, highlighted the subgroups within the community structure, and compared the local ecological data known by villagers of various occupations. It is theorized that this particular community has not been successful in regulating resource extraction off of the coast due to limited communication between the necessary subgroups, the ones with knowledge about ecosystem management, and the ones without. Increased and widespread communication would help to gain collective action with other community members and spread more knowledge about the coastal resources, leading to various policy changes that would better conserve the region. Knowledge is only power if everyone has access to it and can make informed decisions to push for change. If there was a way to get representatives of the various levels within the overarching group to communicate with each other while also directing more funding and resources toward them, then that would be much more conducive to deciding where to focus the political efforts and decide what specific policies must be implemented.
As an environmental science and policy major, my immediate reaction is to see how this applies to government structure. How can we alter the current political systems to account for social networks within their given cultural frameworks? Each nation operates differently, has distinct resources, and has various economic structures that play a part in their decision making, so how do we analyze each culture to decide what systematic changes must be made in order to implement better policymaking strategies?
This brings us to networked governance. It is exactly what I just described, where there is an increased reliance on these social networks to create, implement, and enforce the policy. This places more responsibility in the hands of the individuals and the stakeholders rather than policymakers, making it a bottom-up approach to government. This approach responds to the needs and interests of the public, rather than presenting them with a cookie-cutter plan. Providing a top-down, one-size-fits-all policy can lead to internal conflict between stakeholders because the reliance is on people within the government, not the experts in the field, to fix any issues2. A bottom-up approach allows for a greater range of innovative solutions at the hands of the stakeholders themselves. Utilizing network governance may require more time and effort to create an all-inclusive policy, but there is better identification of risks and loopholes, it provides a more extensive knowledge base, and it increases collaboration among all stakeholders involved3.
So, what now? Looking forward, we should work towards a more integrated form of government, one that blends bottom-up and top-down governance styles. A top-down approach does have its benefits: it leads to a faster implementation of policy, and it can step in to decide a middle ground amidst a controversy. The networked governance system built off of communication within various levels of a network is overall more effective in the long run, appeals to more facets of an issue, and offers a wider variety of solutions than traditional methods, but used in conjunction with the top-down approach, it could be exponentially more beneficial. In a scenario where policymakers and communities create an agenda together, the government could create space and provide funding to allow individual involvement within the decision-making process4. In order to make this plan successful, we would also have to better understand the sociology of a given group within its cultural framework, increase communication, increase education, reinforce the local economies, and create innovative political change that supports all components of a community and its subgroups.
I want to end with a real-world example of this combined governance approach using Carlos F. Gaymer’s research5 where he compared the two systems concerning the waters of Fiji. The nation’s government made a plan to protect 30% of its waters within marine protected areas (MPAs) by 2020.
When the research was being conducted, most of the progress had been made through community-based, locally managed marine areas (LMMAs). This was motivated by the increasing awareness and widespread understanding of marine resource decline, so gear restrictions, taboo areas, and no-take areas were implemented. Using a setlist of objectives to compare the effectiveness of both a top-down (systematic) and bottom-up approach in a modeled simulation, it was found that while the network approach completed the conservation objectives for half of the ecosystems, nearly all of the objectives were achieved with the top-down approach.
At first glance, it would make the most logical sense to use this systematic approach then, right? However, we must take into consideration that a systematic approach is specifically designed to achieve all of these objectives outright with the quickest turnaround time, and network governance puts a great amount of responsibility within the community who may not have the proper resources and allocations to achieve them immediately. Realistically speaking, a systematic approach may not be able to cover all the areas selected to be conserved due to outside factors like various claims made by stakeholders, and it has a much higher cost than the button-up approach. This means that a better policy-making strategy would combine both top-down and bottom-up governance in order to maintain effectiveness, have low-costs, and provide communities with the power to create long-term change that they want to see. Future research would need to be completed in order to develop this compromise most constructively in a way that works within the specific area’s cultural framework.
Works Cited
[1] Crona, B., & Bodin, Ö. (2006). What You Know Is Who You Know? Communication
Patterns among Resource Users as a Prerequisite for Co-Management. Retrieved October 05, 2020, from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/42763377_What_You_Know_Is_Who_You_Know_Communication_Patterns_among_Resource_Users_as_a_Prerequisite_for_Co-Management
[2] Rowlands, J. (n.d.). Bottom-up View of Government. Retrieved October 05, 2020, from http://rebirthofreason.com/Articles/Rowlands/Bottom-up_View_of_Government.shtml
[3] Monday, T., & Clarizen, T. (2019, September 09). What Are the Benefits of the Bottom Up Approach? Retrieved October 05, 2020, from https://www.clarizen.com/what-are-the-benefits-of-the-bottom-up-approach/
[4] Quick, A. (2018, May 17). Power struggles: Why we need top-down and bottom-up.
Retrieved October 05, 2020, from https://www.involve.org.uk/resources/blog/opinion/power-struggles-why-we-need-top-down-and-bottom
[5] Gaymer, C. F., Stadel, A. V., Ban, N. C., Cárcamo, P. F., Ierna, J., & Lieberknecht, L. M.
(2014). Merging top-down and bottom-up approaches in marine protected areas planning: Experiences from around the globe. Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems, 24(S2), 128-144. doi:10.1002/aqc.2508. Retrieved from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/aqc.2508
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Comments
Ari, This is a great blog
Ari, This is a great blog about social networks and networked governance. Your quote "Knowledge is only power if everyone has access to it and can make informed decisions to push for change." is a fantastic take-off of the "Knowledge is power" quote attributed to Francis Bacon and Thomas Jefferson. Someday, we will be referring to the Ari Sanjar quote instead of the Bacon/Jefferson quote.
I like the way you made the connection to marine protected areas (MPAs) in your blog. Ten years ago, our Integration and Application Network team worked with Conservation International's Science to Action team to co-produce a series of booklets on marine managed areas (MMAs) (Conservation International preferred the term MMA instead of MPA). The importance of 'bottom-up' governance was made clear in our analyses of what made for successful MMAs. I will never forget hosting resource managers from Fiji, Brazil, Panama, and the Galapagos Islands in winter at Boston University. The Fijians ran outside when it began to snow to catch snowflakes on their tongues--it was the first snow they had ever experienced. In our workshops, we learned about the ecological reasons for MMAs, but also learned about the societal and cultural reasons for MMAs. The crucial importance of the social networks was paramount in the Fijian society, and it was clear that informal social networks were powerful, perhaps even more powerful, than the formal governmental hierarchy.
You make the point that there are global goals for marine protected areas, and this was a motivation for the Conservation International initiative. They point out that somewhere around 14% of the world's terrestrial area is under some sort of protection, but only a few percent of the world's marine area is protected. The effort is ramp up marine protection to approach the terrestrial percentages.
Thanks for capturing Maddie Brown's excellent discussion and the readings, and then bringing in additional concepts. Bill