Perceptions of Social Network Influence: Key Players' Insights Into Power, Conflict, and Collaboration at the Bonneville Salt Flats.

Abstract

Conflict among stakeholders is a familiar challenge to natural resource managers and researchers. Fostering trust and collaboration among diverse stakeholder groups is, therefore, a primary goal for natural resource conservation. One tool often used to understand stakeholder relationships and to foster collaborative conservation is social network analysis (SNA), a method that identifies patterns in social relationships among members of a population using networks and graph theory (Scott 2017). Through an explanatory sequential mixed-methods approach, this study applied SNA to better understand social dynamics among six stakeholder groups associated with Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats (Bonneville; USA). We sought to (1) build social network models (i.e., sociograms) depicting Bonneville-related social interactions among stakeholders, (2) identify potentially influential individuals (i.e., key players) in Bonneville's stakeholder network; and engage these key players in (3) 'member-checking' social interaction trends gathered during the data collection year, and (4) discussing perceptions of their network's influential social dynamics. Sharing SNA data and sociograms through semi-structured qualitative interviews with key players verified four seasons' worth of social interaction trends within and among Bonneville stakeholder groups. These conversations also evoked key players' reflection on social power dynamics, social network evolution, the influence of research into the Bonneville social network, and introspection about social connections therein. These emergent themes support applying SNA and qualitative interviews with key players in natural resource social networks to yield valuable information for managers who seek to foster collaboration while avoiding or abating resource-related conflict among stakeholder groups.