Abstract
Resilience as a concept and resilience assessment as a practice are being explored across a range of social, ecological and technical systems. In this paper, we propose a new method and visualisation approach for interrogating the communication of resilience within organisational networks, using participatory social network analysis and message passing. Through an examination of the UK water sector organisational network, represented by multiple co-produced network graphs, we identify organisations having a key role in the communication of resilience regulatory and evidence messages, as well as highlighting the potential role of complexity tools in strategy formulation. Animations are presented showing the dynamics of resilience communication, which is discussed. Reflections on the use of participatory social network analysis are explored, as the method opens new doors to potentially examine how network changes could alter communication. Key insights highlight that perceived responsibilities for resilience in the UK water sector rest with a small core of organisations; water customers play a limited role in the two-way communication of resilience and water sector organisations do not communicate widely on resilience with other sectors (such as energy). Additionally, who an organisations’ neighbours are and what catalyses a message to be passed are important in determining how quickly messages spread. Results lead to a recommendation that high level governmental and policy organisations should engage to a greater extent with new resilience knowledge and consider the use of complexity tools in policy making. Policy in relation to resilience is not keeping pace with such knowledge, limiting the communication and learning of organisations who ardently follow policy and regulation. For inter-organisational cooperation to make a difference to water governance, such organisations need to be encouraged to communicate and embed the latest approaches in relation to resilience and complexity thinking and practice.
Highlights
In social-ecological systems (SES), resilience is a long-standing, welldefined concept that has been explored and assessed using numerous methods and across a range of disciplinary cases (Carpenter et al, 2001; Folke et al, 2010, 2016)
Social Network Analysis (SNA) has focused on water governance across a range of contexts, including actors influencing water flows in Tanzania (Stein et al, 2011); access to water-related education in Arizona, USA (Cutts and Munoz-Erickson, 2015); governance transitions in the Klamath river basin, USA (Chaffin et al, 2016); water-sanitation (WatSan) non-governmental organisation exit strategies in Nicaragua (Walters, 2016); stakeholder interactions in Malta (Gatt, 2016); floodplain management in the Dutch Rhine delta (Fliervoet et al, 2016) and water management in a mining company (Kunz et al, 2017)
The developing field of resilience engineering and assessment of social-ecological-technical systems (SETS) is beginning to follow that of SES, where a range of quantitative resilience measures for water infrastructure systems have been forthcoming from a range of international disciplinary perspectives
Summary
In social-ecological systems (SES), resilience is a long-standing, welldefined concept that has been explored and assessed using numerous methods and across a range of disciplinary cases (Carpenter et al, 2001; Folke et al, 2010, 2016). As SNA has led to a focus on resilience in SES, resilience itself has been criticised as functionalist, presenting the assumption that there is already or could be agreement on a desired end state of an unchanging social system (Brown, 2014) Taking these issues into consideration it is important to recognise that the water sector in the UK represents a policy context where the institutional enmeshing of commodity-like entities such as water are often removed from being entirely managed or governed at the local scale due to marketization, making the operationalisation of resilience thinking a complex one. There is no consensus building aim in the method presented; multiple PSNAs were derived and analysed and use is made of the ‘clumsy’ arrangements that are usually removed as uncomfortable knowledge in SNA studies (Rayner, 2012)
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