Browsing by Author "Henry, Adam Douglas"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4

Information, Networks, and the Complexity of Trust in Commons Governance
(2011) Henry, Adam Douglas; Dietz, Thomas
"The publication of Elinor Ostroms (1990) Governing the Commons fueled significant theoretical and empirical progress in the field of commons governance and collective action, most notably in the form of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. A central question within this literature is how trust is created, maintained, and potentially destroyed in the context of sustainability issues. While the commons literature has provided a deeper understanding of trust, most empirical work has been done in relatively simple settings that do not capture the complexity of many global, institutionally-complex dilemmas that we face today. This paper discusses how our understanding of trust in these more complex settings may be improved by considering how two broad categories of variables belief systems and networks influence trust."
Risk, Networks, and Ecological Explanations for the Emergence of Cooperation in Commons Governance
(2012) Henry, Adam Douglas; Vollan, Björn
"The commons literature increasingly recognizes the importance of contextual factors in driving collaboration in governance systems. Of particular interest are the ways in which the attributes of a resource system influence the dynamics of cooperation. While this may occur through many pathways, we investigate the mechanisms by which ecological factors influence both the risk of cooperation as well as the density of networks in which strategic interactions take place. Both of these factors influence the co-evolutionary dynamics of network structure and cooperative behavior. These dynamics are investigated through agent-based simulations, which provide preliminary evidence that: 1) low-density networks support higher levels of cooperation, even in high-risk Prisoners Dilemma scenarios; and 2) in high-risk scenarios, networks that develop higher levels of clustering generally enjoy higher societal gains."
Social Networks and the Challenge of Learning for Sustainability: The Case of Regional Planning
(2008) Henry, Adam Douglas
"Environmental problems usually involve emerging and uncertain information that must be successfully assimilated ('learned') by decision-making communities to have a consequent impact on policy. Despite the importance of successful learning, it tends to be very difficult to alter the beliefs of stakeholders involved in technically complex and ideologically divisive policy arenas. One theory of the policy process, called the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), offers a potential explanation that focuses on the interactions between beliefs, bias, and the emergence of social networks. In particular, the ACF hypothesizes that cognitive biases tend to polarize policy-relevant belief systems. The result is that policy network structures tend to coalesce and self-reinforce around shared ideologies, exacerbating political conflict and making the efficient use of scientific information difficult. Collaborative institutions are hypothesized to attenuate this effect, by providing a forum for meaningful deliberation across competing ideologies and interests. Empirical data used in testing these hypotheses are collected, via online survey, from policy elites in five regional land use and transportation planning processes in California (N = 752). Hypotheses are tested using a variety of network analytic techniques to identify signatures of network growth processes as a result of biased learning. The results lend some support for the ACF view of policy learning, but also suggest that the role of bias is highly context dependent. Future work in the area should pay close attention to the differential role that various types of beliefs play in learning and the formation of policy networks."
Social Networks, Collaborative Institutions, and Learning for Sustainable Regional Planning
(2012) Henry, Adam Douglas
"Decision-making for sustainability in regional transportation and land use planning is often confounded by the complex and ideologically divisive nature of planning issues. Some agents, however, tend to be much more successful than others in learning to deal with these challenges. This study draws on network-theoretic perspectives to explain learning as a function of information-exchange relationships amongst multiple policy actors. Data on learning and networks are collected from policy elites involved in three regional planning processes in California. This study underscores the importance of non-hierarchical information exchange relationships in promoting learning within complex issue domains, although the results also suggest that persistent ideological conflict is an important barrier to learning."