Governing Through Networks: Working Toward a Sustainable Management of West Africa’s Coastal Mangrove Ecosystems - The Land/Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone of West and Central Africa - page 187

Fig. 1 Human-coastal and
marine ecosystem interactions

ATMOSPHERE / International
policy regimes

ECOSYSTEM / Macro-
level policy regimes

Laws &
regulations

COMMUNITY

Pollution

INDIVIDUAL

CO2 /
O2

Precipi-
tation

Social
groups

Power
relations

Economic
status

Health

Habitat
destruc-
tion

Political
climate

Educational
level

Urban /
coastal
devt.

Solar/
thermal
energy

Rising
seas /
Flooding

Economic
activity

Global
warming

Ecosystem
services

International
conventions

The Importance of Networks in Governance
for Conservation

trustworthiness, and can help achieve more effective,

equitable and sustainable outcomes at multiple levels'

(Jones 2011 , p. 21).
Whether initiated from the top-down or emerging from
the ground up, networks exhibit a variety of structures that
span formal arrangements to the more informal where
individual members possess a higher degree of information
and autonomy. Regardless of the diversity of their
arrangements, the horizontal nature of networks differs
significantly from traditional governance hierarchies, which
are characterized as vertical structures that hinder timely
communication and decision making. The 'new multi-
organizational forms arising from collaborative endeavour'
create policy opportunities (Skelcher 2005 , p. 5).
Decentralizing the formulation and implementation of
policies is one way of empowering lower levels and smaller
scales. And because '…there is too often a mismatch
between the scale of what is known about the world and the
level at which decisions are made and actions taken' (ibid.
p. 22), the implementation of sustainable solutions must be
coordinated across scales. Networked governance allows
this to happen by taking advantage of the fact that '…the
decentralized, fluid form of a network and the autonomy of

Recent years have borne witness to the proliferation of
various types of networked governance models and their
application to a multitude of policy areas and economic
activities (Borgatti and Foster 2003 ; Peter 2007 ). Tradi-
tional forms of governance organized around bureaucratic
command-and-control hierarchies have ceded more ground
to new forms of network governance (Lukas 2013 ). This is
particularly true in policy arenas distinguished by a signif-
icant amount of fragmentation, where political authority
over the policy problem is shared across many leaders.
These newer forms of governance gather both public and
private stakeholders who generally share similar visions and
values and agree to work in more or less formal arrange-
ments to achieve their shared goals. At their most basic
level, networks represent and are shaped by social ties and
interactions, and at a broader level encompass group pro-
cesses and systems involving a range of actors (Peter 2007 ).
'Such autonomous, self-organized systems, conceptualized
as ''polycentric governance'', have been shown to enhance
innovation,

learning, adaptation, cooperation and