Toward an Understanding of Citywide Urban Environmental Governance: An Examination of Stewardship Networks in Baltimore and Seattle.

Efforts to create more sustainable cities are evident in the proliferation of sustainability policies in cities worldwide. It has become widely proposed that the success of these urban sustainability initiatives will require city agencies to partner with, and even cede authority to, organizations from other sectors and levels of government. Yet the resulting collaborative networks are often poorly understood, and the study of large whole networks has been a challenge for researchers. We believe that a better understanding of citywide environmental governance networks can inform evaluations of their effectiveness, thus contributing to improved environmental management. Through two citywide surveys in Baltimore and Seattle, we collected data on the attributes of environmental stewardship organizations and their network relationships. We applied missing data treatment approaches and conducted social network and comparative analyses to examine (a) the organizational composition of the network, and (b) how information and knowledge are shared throughout the network. Findings revealed similarities in the number of actors and their distribution across sectors, but considerable variation in the types and locations of environmental stewardship activities, and in the number and distribution of network ties in the networks of each city. We discuss the results and potential implications of network research for urban sustainability governance.

From partnerships to networks: new approaches for measuring U.S. National Heritage Area effectiveness.

National Heritage Areas (NHAs) are an alternative and increasingly popular form of protected area management in the United States. NHAs seek to integrate environmental objectives with community and economic objectives at regional or landscape scales. NHA designations have increased rapidly in the last 20 years, generating a substantial need for evaluative information about (a) how NHAs work; (b) outcomes associated with the NHA process; and (c) the costs and benefits of investing public moneys into the NHA approach. Qualitative evaluation studies recently conducted at three NHAs have identified the importance of understanding network structure and function in the context of evaluating NHA management effectiveness. This article extends these case studies by examining quantitative network data from each of the sites. The authors analyze these data using both a descriptive approach and a statistically more robust approach known as exponential random graph modeling. Study findings indicate the presence of transitive structures and the absence of three-cycle structures in each of these networks. This suggests that these networks are relatively ''open,'' which may be desirable, given the uncertainty of the environments in which they operate. These findings also suggest, at least at the sites reported here, that the NHA approach may be an effective way to activate and develop networks of intersectoral organizational partners. Finally, this study demonstrates the utility of using quantitative network analysis to better understand the effectiveness of protected area management models that rely on partnership networks to achieve their intended outcomes.