Learning to Collaborate: Lessons Learned from Governance Processes Addressing the Impacts of Sea Level Rise on Transportation Corridors Across California

This study was designed to identify lessons learned from experiences of multi-stakeholder collaboration in governance processes focused on adaptation to sea level rise for specific transportation corridors/assets across different areas of California. Four transportation assets in California were selected as case studies: State Route 37 in the Bay Area; the Cardiff Beach Living Shorelines Project and the LOSSAN railroad at Del Mar in San Diego County; and the Port of Long Beach in Los Angeles County. The study methods included attendance of policy meetings; document analysis; and interviews of staff at (local, regional, and state) government bodies, transportation agencies, climate collaboratives, etc. The study identified three major governance challenges shared among these cases: (1) stakeholder involvement or collaboration with ‘unusual’ partners; (2) jurisdictional fragmentation; and (3) lack of funding. The lessons learned to address these challenges were: (a) include a wide range of stakeholders early on in the project; (b) identify an intermediary or facilitator with relevant knowledge and social capital with the stakeholders; (c) establish a forum for negotiations and information exchange; (d) draft a memorandum of understanding with the rules of collaboration; (e) appoint a project manager to tie all the project parts and stakeholders together and sustain engagement; (f) structure the collaboration in tiers from technical/operational to executive/political; (g) explore options to make any given project a multi-benefit project; (h) advocate for a multi-year stream of funding rather than a lump sum; (i) leverage collaboration for funding and highlight, to potential funders, the collaborative element as a means to increase the efficiency of their investment. Issues to consider when deriving lessons from other jurisdictions were: differences in capacity, or available resources and staff; the numbers of actors involved; pre-existing positive collaborative relationships between the actors; exposure of transportation assets to sea-level rise; existing vulnerabilities of the corridor/asset; and the economic relevance of the corridor/asset

Integrative frontiers in environmental policy theory and research

Environmental policy research continues to advance toward a more Kuhnian “normal” science where theory and empirical tools are brought to bear on real-world policy systems to better understand social processes and determine the context in which policies work best. Traditional environmental policy tools now involve more flexible market-based instruments, voluntary agreements, and information provision tools like ecolabels and sustainability indicators. Policy process theories continue to be refined through hypothesis testing and are evolving into more integrative and multidisciplinary frameworks. Interdisciplinary methods are also being employed to better measure and analyze environmental outcomes, which has always been a major challenge in environmental policy research. These research tools are being explored in emerging policy approaches like collaborative partnerships and with novel environmental issues like climate change adaptation, pharmaceuticals and personal care products, and nanotechnology

Sustainability Partnerships and Viticulture Management in California

Agricultural regions in the United States are experimenting with sustainability partnerships that, among other goals, seek to improve growers\u27 ability to manage their vineyards sustainably. In this paper, we analyze the association between winegrape grower participation in sustainability partnership activities and practice adoption in three winegrowing regions of California. Using data gathered from a survey of 822 winegrape growers, we find a positive association between participation and adoption of sustainable practices, which holds most strongly for practices in which the perceived private benefits outweigh the costs, and for growers with relatively dense social networks. We highlight the mechanisms by which partnerships may catalyze sustainable farm management, and discuss the implications of these findings for improving sustainability partnerships. Taken together, we provide one of the most comprehensive quantitative analyses to date regarding the effectiveness of agricultural sustainability partnerships for improving farm management

How limiting factors drive agricultural adaptation to climate change.

Consensus is growing that agriculture is vulnerable to climate change and adaptation responses are necessary to minimize impacts. Nonetheless, the diversity of potential impacts, agro-ecological contexts and regional capacity for change make understanding adaptation behaviors challenging and ensure that climate change adaptation will not be the same across all contexts. Considering this heterogeneity, this paper aims to develop a theoretical approach to connect agro-ecosystem diversity with farmer decision-making in the context of agricultural adaptation to climate change. We combine the ecological principle of Liebig’s Law of the Minimum with the Psychological Distance Theory to suggest how adaptation behaviors vary across regional contexts. We argue with our limiting factors hypothesis that limiting factors within a farm system (water or temperature impacts) influence the adoption of adaptation practices differently across regions and farm systems. Limiting factors varied across farm systems and regions, based on historical climate changes, agro-ecological contexts, infrastructure and adaptation capacity. Using farmer survey data from New Zealand we show that limiting factors mediate the effect of past climate experiences on the adoption of adaptation strategies differently in two regions with water acting as a limiting factor in Hawke’s Bay and water and temperature as a limiting factor in Marlborough. This suggests that farmers perceive and respond to climate change in part due to their personal experiences with climate change and the limiting factors within their system. Such results are relevant for the development of regional adaptation strategies, effective policies and targeted climate change communication

Extension 3.0: Managing Agricultural Knowledge Systems in the Network Age

This paper develops the idea of “Extension 3.0” as an approach to agricultural extension that capitalizes on the network structure of local agricultural knowledge systems. Over the last century, agricultural knowledge systems have evolved into networks of widely distributed actors with a diversity of specializations and expertise. Agricultural extension programs need to manage these networks in ways that maximize the synergy between experiential, technical, and social learning. Using empirical research from California farmers, we highlight the structure of these networks within and across contexts, and the importance of boundary-spanning relationships. We provide some initial recommendations about actions needed to realize the goal of Extension 3.0, which is to deliver relevant agricultural knowledge to the right people, at the right time and plac

Policy Coordination in an Ecology of Water Management Games

Policy outcomes in all but the simplest policy systems emerge from a complex of ecology of games featuring multiple actors, policy institutions, and issues, and not just single policies operating in isolation. This paper updates Long\u27s (1958) ecology of games framework with Scharpf\u27s (1997) actor-centered institutionalism to analyze the coordinating roles of actors and institutions on the context of the ecology of water management games in the San Francisco Bay. Actors participating in multiple institutions are analyzed using exponential random graph models for bipartite networks representing different assumptions about policy behavior, including geographic constraints. We find that policy coordination is facilitated mostly by Federal and state agencies, and collaborative institutions that span across geographic boundaries. Network configurations associated with closure show the most significant departures from the predicted model values, consistent with the Berardo and Scholz (2010) risk hypothesis that closure is important for solving cooperation problems

Perceptions and responses to climate policy risks among California farmers

This paper considers how farmers perceive and respond to climate change policy risks, and suggests that understanding these risk responses is as important as understanding responses to biophysical climate change impacts. Based on a survey of 162 farmers in California, we test three hypotheses regarding climate policy risk: (1) that perceived climate change risks will have a direct impact on farmer\u27s responses to climate policy risks, (2) that previous climate change experiences will influence farmer\u27s climate change perceptions and climate policy risk responses, and (3) that past experiences with environmental policies will more strongly affect a farmer\u27s climate change beliefs, risks, and climate policy risk responses. Using a structural equation model we find support for all three hypotheses and furthermore show that farmers’ negative past policy experiences do not make them less likely to respond to climate policy risks through participation in a government incentive program. We discuss how future research and climate policies can be structured to garner greater agricultural participation. This work highlights that understanding climate policy risk responses and other social, economic and policy perspectives is a vital component of understanding climate change beliefs, risks and behaviors and should be more thoroughly considered in future work

A comparative analysis of governance and leadership in agricultural development policy networks

Agricultural development initiatives feature many public and private organizations working together across sectors and scales to pursue the goals of food security and climate resilience. Policy networks are considered a crucial ingredient for the learning and cooperation needed to effectively implement agricultural development projects and increase community resiliency, yet very little comparative empirical data has been collected to assess where and how these networks operate. We contribute to filling this gap by characterizing the governance and leadership patterns within agricultural development policy networks that connect organizations working on climate resilience and food security activities in 14 smallholder farming communities across 11 countries in East Africa, West Africa and South Asia. We integrate theories of network governance and leadership in international development settings with social network analysis methods to analyze network structures and understand the roles of various actors working collaboratively toward agricultural development goals. We present two critical findings that advance our theoretical understanding of network governance and have implications for agricultural development policy globally. First, we find evidence for three distinct network types: shared and brokered networks, as predicted by the network governance literature, as well as a class of fragmented networks that exhibit extremely low levels of coordination at their core. Additionally, we find that while the presence of international development organizations is associated with greater overall network coordination, it is local and regional organizations that fill central network leadership positions most frequently. These findings suggest that resources may be an important factor in overcoming the cost of coordination, but social capital among local actors may be more important for developing network leadership

The Political Logic of Local Collaboration in Regional Planning in California

We study the effects of ideological polarization on regional planning networks. Over the last several decades, Americans have sorted themselves into local communities that are increasingly homogenous in their partisan and ideological make-up (Bishop 2008). Local governments from these communities face immense pressures to engage in regional planning; however, we hypothesize that differences in the political composition of local constituencies will render such intergovernmental cooperation difficult. Using data from a recent survey of California planners and government officials, we map regional planning networks in five California regions in real geographic space and test hypotheses about the factors that lead local governments to engage in regional planning activities. We find that, after controlling for physical distance and similarity of planning preferences, local governments whose constituents are similar politically are more likely to cooperate with one another in regional planning efforts than those whose constituents hold disparate political views

Testing Policy Theory with Statistical Models of Networks

Abstract This paper presents a conceptual framework for clarifying the network hypotheses embedded in policy theories and how they relate to macro-level political outcomes and micro-level political behavior. We then describe the role of statistical models of networks for testing these hypotheses, including the problem of operationalizing theoretical concepts with the parameters of statistical models. Examples from existing policy research are provided and potential extensions are discussed. This paper is forthcoming as the introduction to a special issue of the Policy Studies Journal on statistical models of policy networks