An official website of the United States government
In complex, polycentric environmental governance systems, actors may choose to collaborate with one another to reduce their collective vulnerability and enhance system function. However, collaboration can be costly, and little evidence exists for how particular collaborative forums impact the broader governance system in which they are embedded. To address this gap, we investigate the role of intermediate collaborative forums, which support collaboration among a subset of system actors, in polycentric governance systems. Empirically, we analyze the structural and functional role of an intermediate collaborative forum called the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association (AMWUA) within the municipal surface water governance network for the Phoenix Metropolitan Area (PMA) in Arizona, United States. To do this, we draw from 21 interviews with water professionals in the PMA, which we analyze through a combination of network analysis and qualitative coding. We find that AMWUA facilitates strong bonding capacities among members, allowing for streamlined bridging to the rest of the network that enhances information processing and advocacy of member needs. Our findings advance theory on the role of collaboration in polycentric systems and inform the design of collaborative institutions to improve environmental governance.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on May 1, 2027
The Inclusion Trade‐Off: Comparing the Design and Functionality of Collaborative Governance Forums
ABSTRACT Environmental challenges require collaboration across jurisdictions, often through forums or intermediary spaces for repeated interaction. A persistent forum design question concerns inclusion criteria, or which actors should be included. Ecology of Games, public choice, and collaborative governance detail various costs and benefits of expanding inclusion, but less attention has been paid to specific variations in inclusion criteria. To address this, we conduct a comparative case study of four water user associations in Arizona, U.S. that either restrict participation to a certain sector and/or to those holding specific water rights. We assess how inclusion criteria impact participants' perceptions of various dimensions of forum functionality, considering management concerns that may confound the relationship. Drawing on a survey and semi‐structured interviews of forum participants, we find that more restrictive forums benefit from an internal spillover of high coordination to other capacities that require increased buy‐in (e.g., lobbying) while more inclusive forums can create an external spillover of broader regional cooperation as participants interact with more diverse users. Management concerns, particularly the relative concern for groundwater versus surface water and financial resources, confound this relationship. Our findings provide new theoretical and practical insight into how inclusion rules affect forum functionality in complex governance systems.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10698298
- Publisher / Repository:
- Policy Studies Journal
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Policy Studies Journal
- Volume:
- 54
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0190-292X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
While MOOCs have been widely studied in terms of student engagement and academic performance, the extent to which engagement within MOOCs predict career advancement remains underexplored. Building on prior work, this study investigates how participation in discussion forums, specifically social presence and the use of course-relevant keywords, affects career advancement. Using GPT-assisted content analysis of forum posts, we assess how these engagement factors relate to both achievement during the course and post-course career advancement. Our findings indicate that social presence and use of course-relevant keywords has a positive relationship with course achievement during the MOOC. However, no significant relationship was found between career advancement and either social presence or course-related keywords in discussion forums. These findings suggest that while active engagement in MOOC discussion forums enhances academic achievement, it might not directly translate into career advancement, highlighting a possible disconnect between learning participation in MOOCS and professional outcomes.more » « less
-
Discussion forums are one of the favored platforms for knowledge sharing. Given their popularity, copious research exists on understanding the linguistic and behavioral characteristics of forum conversations, so as to inform the design of many downstream applications including discourse visualization, sentiment analysis, and question answering. However, prior investigations have mainly focused on general forums designed primarily for sighted users, and as such the applicability of their findings to dedicatedaccessibilitydiscussion forums frequented by blind screen reader users remains unanswered. To bridge this knowledge gap and facilitate the development of better-informed assistive technologies for blind people, we investigated language use in accessibility forums and identified unique linguistic and cognitive characteristics of discussions in these forums. To aid our investigation, we collected a dataset of 1000 accessibility forum threads and a baseline of 1000 general forum threads, while ensuring that the threads in both groups discussed similar topics. In our analyses, we found the language in accessibility forum conversations to be more task-oriented and less abstract, with significantly higher number of descriptive action verbs than in general forum conversations. Moreover, the accessibility threads had significantly higher authenticity scores than general threads, which indicates that blind users are less reserved in online discussions, and are instead more spontaneous and expressive in their writing. We lastly discuss the implications of our findings, including how assistive technologies can be enhanced to improve blind users’ experience in online discussion forums.more » « less
-
Abstract Designing urban water systems to respond to the accelerating and unpredictable changes of the Anthropocene will require changes not only to built infrastructure and operating rules, but also to the governance arrangements responsible for investing in them. Yet, inclusion of thispolitical‐economic feedbackin dynamic models of infrastructure systems and socio‐hydrology has lagged behindoperationalfeedback concerns. We address this gap through a dynamical systems application of the Coupled Infrastructure Systems (CIS) Framework, which provides the conceptual building blocks for analyzing social‐ecological systems through various classes of infrastructure and the flows of material and information among them. In the model, political‐economic feedback involves three decisions—infrastructure investment, rate‐setting, and short‐term demand curtailment—and each decision is constrained by institutional friction, the aggregation of decision and transaction costs associated with taking action. We apply the model to three cities in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area to compare how institutional friction interacts with a city's water resource portfolio and financial position to determine its sensitivity, or the degree to which its performance (e.g., providing sufficient supply to meet demand) changes given reductions in Colorado River water availability. We find that the slowing effect of institutional friction on investment and rate‐setting decisions can increase the sensitivity of a city's supply, but it can also promote objectives that compete with over‐response (e.g., rate burden). The effect is dependent on the initial operating capacity of the CIS and flexibility within the institutions, highlighting the need to consider political‐economic and operational feedback together when evaluating infrastructure systems.more » « less
-
Online discussion forums have become an integral component of news, entertainment, information, and video-streaming websites, where people all over the world actively engage in discussions on a wide range of topics including politics, sports, music, business, health, and world affairs. Yet, little is known about their usability for blind users, who aurally interact with the forum conversations using screen reader assistive technology. In an interview study, blind users stated that they often had an arduous and frustrating interaction experience while consuming conversation threads, mainly due to the highly redundant content and the absence of customization options to selectively view portions of the conversations. As an initial step towards addressing these usability concerns, we designed PView - a browser extension that enables blind users to customize the content of forum threads in real time as they interact with these threads. Specifically, PView allows the blind users to explicitly hide any post that is irrelevant to them, and then PView automatically detects and filters out all subsequent posts that are substantially similar to the hidden post in real time, before the users navigate to those portions of the thread. In a user study with blind participants, we observed that compared to the status quo, PView significantly improved the usability, workload, and satisfaction of the participants while interacting with the forums.more » « less
