Complex societal challenges, such as climate change and environmental degradation, are encumbered by numerous interdependences across different policy issues. Coordination of interdependent policy issues is thus critical. However, coordination challenges persist, partly because coordinating interdependent policy issues among actors often involves high costs. While network governance literature often advocates for management strategies that steer the coordination between actors, little is known about what specific strategies can stimulate the emergence of collaborative relationships suitable for coordination of interdependent policy issues. To address this gap, we develop a typology of four different strategies operationalized as network motifs. We present a simulation modeling approach using Exponential Random Graph Models to evaluate if the identified network strategies facilitate actor coordination of interdependent policy issues and demonstrate the method on empirical data from water governance in Sweden. Results show that coordination of interdependent policy issues is enhanced by shared responsibilities, efforts to broaden expertise, and consideration of issue interdependencies in the search for collaborators. Results show less support for effective coordination of interdependent policy issues through a network manager. Taken together, the paper contributes both theoretical and methodological developments relevant for evaluating progress on coordination of interdependent policy issues and improving network interventions.

Semi-natural grasslands result from traditional agriculture and are among the most species-rich ecosystems in Europe. These grasslands were once widespread across Europe, but due to changing agricultural practices, only small remnants have remained until present day. Large-scale efforts to preserve and restore these valuable ecosystems encompass the continuation or reintroduction of extensive instead of intensive farming practices. Based on empirical insights from three regions in Estonia, Germany and Spain, we aim to highlight Profitability, Landscape-scale Trade-off and Lock-in Effects, Policy Fit & Interplay, Changing Rural Societies and Climate Change as being five common key challenges making such efforts difficult. We suggest three general pathways to leverage changes: A) emphasize a social-ecological perspective at the landscape scale where both traditional and new framings of extensive farming practices are constructed in accordance with local contexts; B) work towards a wider ecosystem service perspective of semi-natural grasslands. This involves shifting the perspective on grasslands from being agricultural “wastelands” to not only acknowledge their biodiversity, but also their role as cornerstones of resilient agricultural landscapes; and C) embrace experimental learning and policy alignment at the regional scale to better embed extensive farming practices in European land use polices. Policies and administrative practices should be adjusted to account for vastly different conditions across and within regions, where extensive farming practices are sometimes integrated into large-scale agricultural enterprises, and sometimes carried out as a non-commercial side activity at a very small-scale.

Collaboration in governing complex environmental challenges is the norm. However, collaboration does not necessarily deliver desirable outcomes, and the importance of forming collaborative networks that effectively address the challenges at hand has been emphasized in theory and practice. Evidence for what constitutes a suitable network structure is still scarce, and the understanding of what factors drive collaboration that constitutes such networks is limited. Utilizing a comparative approach, this study elucidates if and how varying political attention impacts the social tie formation among municipal street-level bureaucrats addressing flood risk mitigation in their daily work. Our results show that political attention, conceptualized as saliency and a broad framing of the issue, has a marked effect on network formation processes. When political attention is low, water & sewage experts (technical experts) dominate tie formation, while politicians and senior managers (decision makers) and planners (cross-sector experts) increase their relative efforts in forming collaborative ties when political attention is high. Further, political attention is also positively associated with appointed coordinators' abilities to collaborate with others. Both these processes coincide with desirable governance outcomes. Our study of local-level collaborative governance demonstrates a need to better understand the nexus of political attention, collaborative network formation, and environmental governance outcomes.

Novelty is a requirement demanded from scholars by reviewers holding the keys to publication as well as by funding bodies allocating project funds and thus sometimes enabling the possibility of an academic career. In fields such as water governance research, at the intersection of research and practice, an additional pressure comes from practitioners' need to find solutions and resources to try and implement different solutions for new and ongoing management problems. Academics find themselves spending a significant amount of time and effort presenting their results and contributions as novel findings, neglecting the importance of testing and refining existing theories (new or old) as a constitutive part of advancing the field. As a result, we observe a mushrooming of concepts and perspectives presented as novel and sometimes even as a new paradigm when such labels might not always be warranted. Through this commentary, we intend to discuss what role novelty plays in water governance research, including discussing if and to what extent such framing hinders knowledge cumulation. To substantiate our discussion, we interviewed four scholars with more than 30 years of experience in water governance research on their views about novelty and on whether striving for novelty impacts the scientific endeavor of knowledge cumulation. We also offer a reflection on possible ways forward to support an academic culture where the importance of testing theory and better utilization of previous work are given more attention.

1. Smallholder farms support the livelihoods of 2.5 billion people and their decisions on how to manage their land has profound consequences for the environment and the food security of billions of people. However, farmers' values, norms and resulting management practices are usually not formed in isolation.
2. Triangulating multiple analytical, modelling and simulation methods, we investigated if and how social influence exerted through peer-to-peer information exchange affect soil nutrition management among 2734 Indonesian smallholder cocoa farmers across 30 different villages.
3. The results show that the relational structures of these village-based social networks strongly relate to farmers' use of fertiliser. In villages with highly centralised networks (i.e. hub-and-spoke networks where one or very few farmers holds disproportionately central position in the village network), a large majority of farmers report the same fertiliser use, and that practice is typically to avoid using fertilisers. By contrast, in less centralised networks, fertiliser use varies widely.
4. The observed community-level distributions of fertiliser use can be most closely reproduced through simulations by complex contagion mechanisms in which social influence is only exerted by opinion leaders that are much more socially connected than others. However, even such leaders' abilities to influence others to change fertiliser use may be limited in practice.
5. The combination of our quantitative and qualitative findings provides significant policy implications for development programs targeting smallholder farming communities. An important practical lesson is that common interventions which primarily engage socially central farmers may not be effective in stimulating desired transitions in social-ecological systems.

Ecosystem regime shifts can have severe ecological and economic consequences, making it a top priority to understand how to make systems more resilient. Theory predicts that spatial connectivity and the local environment interact to shape resilience, but empirical studies are scarce. Here, we use >7000 fish samplings from the Baltic Sea coast to test this prediction in an ongoing, spatially propagating shift in dominance from predatory fish to an opportunistic mesopredator, with cascading effects throughout the food web. After controlling for the influence of other drivers (including increasing mesopredator densities), we find that predatory fish habitat connectivity increases resilience to the shift, but only when densities of fish-eating top predators (seals, cormorants) are low. Resilience also increases with temperature, likely through boosted predatory fish growth and recruitment. These findings confirm theoretical predictions that spatial connectivity and the local environment can together shape resilience to regime shifts.

Agricultural systems are important for the livelihoods and food security of millions of people. These systems are increasingly interconnected across scales and face challenges in responding to multiple, and coalescing types of environmental, social, and economic change. Most studies on how actors respond to change have focused on farmers and farming communities. In this study, we investigate the connectivity of farming systems to markets, to understand how social relationships across the supply chain influence how actors respond to multiple types of changes. We used a participatory network mapping method to interview actors across a fruit supply chain in the Western Cape, South Africa, that is connected to both global and national markets. We identified droughts, climatic variations, changes related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and other social shifts as the most important changes affecting the production and trade of fruit in this region. We also identified three types of responses to these changes: i) responses concerning the dynamics of trade relationships (e.g., changing or maintaining trade relationships); ii) responses based on changes at the individual level (e.g., changes in farm management); and iii) responses based on social relationships (categorized into four types, namely collaboration, knowledge transfer, financial assistance, and marketing coordination). Within these four types, we found that different types of social networks, that include actors operating at different scales and within and outside of supply chains, mediate responses to change. We also found that networks of collaboration, knowledge exchange and financial assistance show a positive correlation, where actors with an export orientation engage in multiple social relationships that enable responding to changes. However, we found limited participation of local market actors in most of these networks. Further investigating these social networks, and the actors participating in them, is essential to better understand and anticipate how and why agricultural systems respond to multiple types of changes, ultimately influencing their trajectory in an increasingly changing world.

Reviewing and synthesizing how an interdisciplinary network perspective can inform on governance and adaptation processes in regions undergoing rapid social-, economical-, and environmental changes. Increasing and intensifying the use of land represents a prominent sustainability challenge of particular importance in regions undergoing rapid change while at the same time exhibiting large natural and anthropocentrically induced variability. To reconcile the needs for both human prosperity and healthy ecosystems, a more integrated understanding of key biophysical and adaptation processes is paramount in such dynamic and deeply entangled social and environmental contexts. Interdisciplinary research utilizing a network perspective provides a novel methodological and theoretical approach to that end. We review and synthesize recent network-centric studies, and use this network perspective to show how rangeland managers in a dynamic pastoral region in the Qinghai Province of China form social relationships based on geographic proximity, social status and shared grazing areas. The results indicate that adaption to biophysical and socioeconomic changes is partly a social process in that rangeland managers develop their adaptive capacity jointly and in concert with others they trust and with whom they share grazing areas. Avenues for further development of this network perspective, in terms of how it might contribute important new insights about how to sustainably use land in dynamic landscapes undergoing rapid change, are suggested.

Success or failure of a polycentric system is a function of complex political and social processes, such as coordination between actors and venues to solve specialized policy problems. Yet there is currently no accepted method for isolating distinct processes of coordination, nor to understand how their variance affects polycentric governance performance. We develop and test a building-blocks approach that uses different patterns or “motifs” for measuring and comparing coordination longitudinally on Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Our approach confirms that polycentric governance comprises an evolving substrate of interdependent venues and actors over time. However, while issue specialization and actor participation can be improved through the mobilization of venues, such a strategy can also fragment overall polycentric capacity to resolve conflict and adapt to new problems. A building-blocks approach advances understanding and practice of polycentric governance by enabling sharper diagnosis of internal dynamics in complex environmental governance systems.

Policy actors address complex environmental problems by engaging in multiple and often interdependent policy issues. Policy issue interdependencies imply that efforts by actors to address separate policy issues can either reinforce (‘win–win’) or counteract (‘trade-off’) each other. Thus, if interdependent issues are managed in isolation instead of being coordinated, the most effective and well-balanced solution to the underlying problem might never be realised. This study asks if reinforcing and counteracting interdependencies have different impacts on perception and collaboration. Our empirical study of collaborative water governance in the Norrström basin, Sweden, shows that policy actors often avoid collaborating when the policy issues exhibit reinforcing interdependencies. Our evidence indicates a perceived infeasibility of acting on reinforcing interdependencies. We also find that actors do not consider counteracting interdependencies (‘trade-offs’) at all when they engage in collaboration. Further, even though actors were aware of counteracting and reinforcing interdependencies, our analyses suggest they might be less aware of the former. These findings illustrate that actors either avoid each other due to policy issue interdependencies or, at best, ignore existing interdependencies when engaging in collaboration. Our study highlights the importance of problem perception in accomplishing integrated solutions to complex environmental problems, and of how understandings of different types of interdependencies shape collaboration in environmental governance.