Environmental Problems do not have boundaries and Conservation Challenges affect everyone.
Climate change, biodiversity loss, water scarcity, and ecosystem degradation affect diverse groups of people across large areas. These problems transcend jurisdictional and other socially-constructed boundaries. Action to address these impacts cannot be coordinated without the input, buy-in, and consideration of the perspectives of the various groups implicated by the natural resource challenges in the landscape.
In North America, this participatory and cross-boundary approach to conservation is increasingly being referred to as Large Landscape Conservation. In a special issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, we argue that effective solutions to today’s most pressing natural resource management challenges demand working across jurisdictional and sectoral boundaries. This can be done through network governance.
Networks as a governance solution
At its core, network governance problem solving is fundamentally about integrating diverse needs, interests, visions, and cultures. Such integration of diverse interests – to promote livable communities, vibrant economies, and healthy landscapes – often springs from creating opportunities for interested and impacted people to come together with the best available information to address issues of common concern.
“Network governance commonly emerges when people realize…that the only way to achieve their interests is by actively working together.”
A network is an informal arrangement where two or more people exchange ideas, build relationships, identify common interests, explore options on how to work together, share power, and solve problems of mutual interest – whether or not they have the formal authority to do so. Networks include individuals and organizations that are autonomous and loosely linked; they don’t function like hierarchical organizations with authority flowing from top to bottom, nor do they operate like advocacy organizations, whose members rally around a single vision, leader, and set of policies. Network governance commonly emerges when people realize that they (and the organizations they represent) cannot solve a particular problem or issue by working independently and that the only way to achieve their interests is by actively working together.
Managing wildlife and natural resources at a landscape-scale allows numerous governments across multiple jurisdictions to collectively make management decisions on flora and fauna, especially those with large geographic ranges. Photo by Steven Gnam.
The North American application of network governance
In North America, network approaches illustrate a variety of catalysts and conveners, be they NGOs, the federal government, foundations or businesses. The Practitioner’s Network for Large Landscape Conservation formed in 2011 to support and connect these different initiatives and enable this work to operate at scales large enough to advance systemic and integrated approaches to resource management.
The mission of the Practitioners’ Network is to build capacity across scales and sectors and to improve policy frameworks that promote and support large landscape conservation. Embracing the tenets of the network society, the network allows individuals and organizations to come and go depending on their needs and interests. The network is flexible and adaptive, designed to provide a platform to share information and lessons learned and collectively advance the theory, practice, and performance of large landscape conservation. One initiative connected to the Practitioners Network is the Roundtable on the Crown of the Continent.
This story will be continued on Monday, May 30th. To learn about how network governance is playing out in North America, subscribe to the blog by clicking here.
Read More
Part two of this two-post series on the landscape approach in North America by Patrick Bixler will appear on the blog next week. Subscribe to the blog today to get Part 2 in your inbox.
Special Issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment: “Network governance and large landscape conservation”
Patrick Bixler is a Research Scientist at the Institute of Renewable Natural Resources and a Lecturer for the Applied Biodiversity Science program at Texas A&M University.
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