Colloquium: Dr Manuel Fischer

Challenges related to governing water resources are manifold and complex and include increasing water shortages, aging infrastructure, more frequent and heavy flood events, increasing plastic pollution, biodiversity loss and many more. Governance structures and processes that aim at addressing these challenges are shaped by various overlapping and parallel institutions such as rules and authorities, a diversity of state and non-state actors with competing values and beliefs, substantive issues that actors need to deal with and actors’ patterns of interactions.

A network lens can be useful for providing a systematic, analytical approach to the study of such complexity. Policy or governance networks defined as an arrangement of interconnected individual and collective actors, constitute a first, basic conceptualization of networks. The talk specifically focuses on multi-level networks that are able to grasp both social networks of collective actors as well as ecological or technical interdependencies of a given resources system. It presents conceptual and theoretical ideas around social-ecological as well as socio-technical networks and illustrates them with empirical examples.