Abstract
In many densely settled agricultural watersheds, water quality is a point of conflict between amenity and agricultural activities because of the varied demands and impacts on shared water resources. Successful governance of these watersheds requires coordination among different activities. Recent research has highlighted the role that social networks between management entities can play to facilitate cross-scale interaction in watershed governance. For example, bridging organizations can be positioned in social networks to bridge local initiatives done by single municipalities across whole watersheds. To better understand the role of social networks in social-ecological system dynamics, we combine a social network analysis of the water quality management networks held by local governments with a social-ecological analysis of variation in water management and ecosystem services across the Monteregie, an agricultural landscape near Montreal, Quebec, Canada. We analyze municipal water management networks by using one-mode networks to represent direct collaboration between municipalities, and two- mode networks to capture how bridging organizations indirectly connect municipalities. We find that municipalities do not collaborate directly with one another but instead are connected via bridging organizations that span the water quality management network. We also discovered that more connected municipalities engaged in more water management activities. However, bridging organizations preferentially connected with municipalities that used more tourism related ecosystem services rather than those that used more agricultural ecosystem services. Many agricultural municipalities were relatively isolated, despite being the main producers of water quality problems. In combination, these findings suggest that further strengthening the water management network in the Monteregie will contribute to improving water quality in the region. However, such strengthening requires developing a network that better connects both agricultural and tourism oriented municipalities. Furthermore, these findings show that consideration of the social-ecological context of social networks, can help explain the structure of networks and reveal social-ecological clusters and disconnects in a network.
Highlights
Water has been called the bloodstream of the biosphere because of the way it connects distant places (Ripl 2003)
The range included municipalities that were not connected to others, through to municipalities that were connected to several bridging organizations in addition to other municipalities (Fig. 4)
Most municipalities maintained no collaboration with other municipalities but were connected to the larger water quality management network via bridging organizations
Summary
Water has been called the bloodstream of the biosphere because of the way it connects distant places (Ripl 2003). In our human dominated world, water connects people who live in different places, and these connections bring opportunities and conflicts. In many densely settled agricultural watersheds, water quality is a point of conflict between amenity, e.g., tourism related, and agricultural activities. This is because excess fertilizer from agriculture pollutes water, in turn reducing water quality and impairing the production of drinking water, swimming, and fishing (Carpenter et al 1998). Lowered water quality can cause substantial economic losses if it reduces tourism or triggers declines in the value of waterfront property (Leggett and Bockstael 2000). Successful governance of agricultural watersheds requires coordination of activities between agricultural and amenity-based water user groups to produce mutually desired outcomes. Coordination is difficult because of differences in practices, interests, values, and management structures among these groups (Lubell et al 2002, Ison et al 2007, Lubell and Fulton 2008)
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