Abstract
One of the key determinants of success in managing natural resources is “institutional fit,” i.e., how well the suite of required actions collectively match the scale of the environmental problem. The effective management of pest and pathogen threats to plants is a natural resource problem of particular economic, social, and environmental importance. Responses to incursions are managed by a network of decision makers and managers acting at different spatial and temporal scales. We applied novel network theoretical methods to assess the propensity of growers, local industry, local state government, and state and national government head offices to foster either within- or across-scale coordination during the successful 2001 Australian response to the outbreak of the fungal pathogen black sigatoka (Mycosphaerella fijiensis). We also reconstructed the response network to proxy what that network would look like today under the Australian government’s revised response system. We illustrate a structural move in the plant biosecurity response system from one that was locally driven to the current top-down system, in which the national government leads coordination of a highly partitioned engagement process. For biological incursions that spread widely across regions, nationally rather than locally managed responses may improve coordination of diverse tasks. However, in dealing with such challenges of institutional fit, local engagement will always be critical in deploying flexible and adaptive local responses based on a national system. The methods we propose detect where and how network structures foster cross-scale interactions, which will contribute to stronger empirical studies of cross-scale environmental governance.
Highlights
The coordination of actions across natural resource problems requires management structures that collectively fit the spatial and temporal scales of the challenge at hand (Young 2002, Brondizio et al 2009)
We applied novel network theoretical methods to assess the propensity of growers, local industry, local state government, and state and national government head offices to foster either within- or across-scale coordination during the successful 2001 Australian response to the outbreak of the fungal pathogen black sigatoka (Mycosphaerella fijiensis)
Building on recent studies that use statistical network modeling (Gallemore et al 2014, Guerrero et al 2015, Lubell 2015), we explored whether the interactions observed in the institutional response for black sigatoka predisposed across-scale governance
Summary
The coordination of actions across natural resource problems requires management structures that collectively fit the spatial and temporal scales of the challenge at hand (Young 2002, Brondizio et al 2009). Assessing “institutional fit,” i.e., how well environmental management matches the underpinning scale(s) of problems, is an emerging scholarly ambition that stands to identify institutional gaps and practical alternatives (see Robinson et al 2011, Lebel et al 2013). One approach to assessing institutional fit is through carefully designed questionnaires to measure the capacities of various stakeholders (Lebel et al 2013). A complementary approach to analyzing capacities is to analyze scale matching by measuring the across-scale relationships between stakeholders operating at different scales. We built on this work, treating governance as an interlinked network of decision makers and managers (Lubell 2013) and identifying not just if across-scale coordination happens, but where it does so
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