Assessing social-ecological fit of flood planning governance

Abstract

Social-ecological fit demands that governance systems align with and function at the appropriate scales of social and ecological processes being governed. While multilevel social-ecological network analysis has been applied to assess fit in various contexts, it has not yet been applied to understand transboundary flood planning. We investigate the social-ecological fit of collaborative flood planning efforts in the St. John River Basin, located in New Brunswick and Quebec in Canada and Maine in the United States, focusing on two social-ecological fit challenges: shared management of ecological resources and management of interconnected resources. Our results displayed organizations have a tendency to collaborate with others located in the same sub-sub-basin and not with those working in different sub-sub-basins, indicating limited social-ecological fit of the collaboration network to flooding at the basin scale. Qualitative analysis identified collaboration provided increased knowledge and technical resources to engage in flood planning, but it was hindered by a lack of financial resources, time constraints, and a lack of shared commitment. Collaborative relationships among organizations working in different sub-sub-basins are essential for cohesive flood planning at the basin level, and in this case, there is potential for an increase in collaboration among ecological neighbors to govern for ecological connectivity.