Meaningful progress toward a sustainable future requires new strategies to manage the intricate social and social-ecological interdependencies that define our world today. In this concluding chapter of our edited volume Handbook of Social Networks and the Environment, we synthesize some key insights from this collection that demonstrate how a network perspective can advance this agenda and discuss the challenges of studying networks, including intense data needs and data interdependencies. We argue that further methodological developments and mixed-method approaches are needed to enrich our understanding of structure-process feedback mechanisms and the dynamics of social ties across contexts, and that research needs to extend beyond affective or positive ties to also consider negative ties. We conclude with a call for further exploration of network comparisons and the interplay between diverse types of relationships. Ultimately, we hope that the chapters in this volume further encourage researchers to contribute to this burgeoning field by identifying gaps, employing robust theoretical foundations, and considering practical applications of network analysis in environmental governance and sustainability.

Flooding is an increasingly impactful and concerning phenomenon. A shift towards addressing flooding through an integrated systems perspective involves recognizing flood risk as a collective action problem with distributed characteristics. As flood planning is multi-faceted, associated issues must be addressed across multiple jurisdictions to align with the ecological space involved. Shifting to a systems perspective emphasizes the need for coordination across jurisdictional, spatial, and industry divides, prompting questions on how best to establish and maintain these critical relationships. Here, we show how a combination of different statistical multi-level social network modelling approaches can be employed to conceptualize, theorize, and empirically test assumptions on essential coordination. We conceptualize the multilevel networks as involving social network connecting organizations, an ecological network connecting spatially defined watershed areas, and a task network connecting interconnecting flood-planning activities. Results indicate that organizations participating in flood planning face challenges of cooperation where trust and agreement are needed. Flood planning effectiveness was supported when organizations collaborated with another effective organization and when collaborating on a shared task. The exploration and amalgamation of multiple statistical social network analysis (SNA) models provide a more targeted understanding of which organizations should collaborate with whom and illustrate the complementary nature of different modelling procedures.

Small-scale fisheries (SSF) are comprised of multiple types of actors organized in regional trade networks that are involved in activities from harvesting to exporting fisheries’ resources. Diversification, defined as how fishers and traders along these networks harvest, buy, and/or trade different fish resources (or species), is a prevalent strategy in SSF contexts to deal with an increasingly changing environment. In this chapter, we investigate fisheries diversification patterns along an SSF regional trade network, including fishers and traders. We propose a multi-level Social-Ecological Network (SEN) conceptualization that captures trade relationships (i.e., links) between fishers and traders and amongst traders, and connects the trade network with the diverse fish resources on which they rely. Based on this conceptualization, we find that fishers and traders have diversified portfolios of fish resources and investigate whether this diversification occurs amongst fish resources that are interdependent through market (i.e., fish substitutability in the end markets) or ecological (i.e., trophic) networks. In addition, we investigate whether and how the traders’ network interacts with traders’ diversification. Overall, our findings demonstrate the use of a SEN approach to investigate diversification along trade networks in multi-species SSF contexts, while highlighting the potential implications of the patterns found for fisheries sustainability.

This Handbook examines how social networks underpin environmental problems and also influence the spread of sustainable innovations, exploring issues of collaboration, power and social influence in environmental contexts. It provides an accessible framework for understanding the complex interplay between social dynamics and environmental problems, highlighting how social networks can shape and potentially solve pressing environmental challenges. Bringing together diverse case studies, leading specialists outline the role of social networks in environmental management, policy, risk, disasters, and climate adaptation.

In complex and uncertain contexts, collaboration on natural resource management is crucial for the effective adaptation of small-holder farmers. Empirical studies that explicitly investigate the effects of collaborative relationships on individual adaptability, however, remain limited. In this chapter, we present a case study of two different social networks among herders on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau of China to examine if and how social and social-ecological network (SEN) configurations impact the adaptability of individual herders. Adaptivity is assessed based on the extent to which herders breed diversified animal species, since diversified herds contribute to adaptive capacity in uncertain and changing environments. Multi-level network modelling results indicate that transitivity and clustering of affective ties were positively correlated with herd diversification, whereas such an effect was not found in the organization-based collaborative network. Herders who utilize grazing patches that are ecologically connected to other patches were also found to be more adaptive, suggesting that the livestock transportation costs favour herd diversification within geographically defined clusters of patches and/or the existence of social learning/contagion through a form of social-ecological structural equivalence. The above findings suggest that informal affective networks are superior to more formal networks developed within organizational frames in enhancing herders’ adaptability in the context of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau.

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.

As climate change and related issues like pollution and deforestation increasingly threaten human life and ecosystems, understanding the social dynamics that underpin these problems has become crucial. In this introductory chapter of the Handbook on Social Networks and the Environment, we highlight the critical role of social networks in driving environmental challenges and their potential to address these issues. We emphasize how human behaviour and relationships within networks shape environmental attitudes, beliefs, and actions, enabling the spread of knowledge and fostering collaborative problem-solving. We review the evolution of social network methods in environmental research, tracing their application from isolated efforts to recent advancements across disciplines. We outline the book's structure, organized around pressing global environmental issues, and summarize key social processes underpinning these issues, such as resource access, cooperation, social learning, and inclusive participation. We also examine the roles of various social structures, from dyadic ties to multilevel networks, in elucidating these key social processes. Concluding with reflections on causes, effects, and co-evolution in network research, we introduce social-ecological network approaches and offer a guide for readers. Taken together, this chapter underscores the importance of social and social-ecological networks in structuring environmental problems, aiming to inspire further exploration of network thinking to promote a sustainable and just future.

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.