Systemic Risk and Network Formation in Social-Ecological Systems

In the last few decades, there have been great advances in the study of how the structure of policy networks affect performance at a systemic level, but more recently public policy and management scholars have begun exploring in more detail how networks form and evolve. In an article published in 2010, Berardo and Scholz (2010) advanced the so-called “risk hypothesis”, which claims that perceptions of high risk members of a network lead to the formation of bonding structures that favor the transmission of overlapping information that solve cooperation problems, while low risk leads to the formation of bridging structures that produce non-redundant information needed to solve coordination problems. The authors found a tendency to the formation of bridging structures in the networks they analyzed, but their work had an important limitation: all the networks were embedded in newly-formed policy arenas where risk is in general low. This leaves the risk hypothesis in need of further testing. In this paper I use a case study approach to empirically test whether high-risk situations lead in fact to the formation of bonding structures, as predicted by Berardo and Scholz. To do this, I study the configuration of the communication network among relevant stakeholders in a portion of a reservoir basin in Argentina that can be considered a social-ecological system under a great deal of environmental and social risk. Findings show that, in fact, there is a higher tendency to the endogenous formation of bonding structures, which provides further support for Berardo and Scholz’s ideas. Additionally, I discussed complementary results that create a more nuanced picture of how networks look like in highly-risky social-ecological systems