Policy Coordination in an Ecology of Water Management Games

Abstract

Policy outcomes in all but the simplest policy systems emerge from a complex of ecology of games featuring multiple actors, policy institutions, and issues, and not just single policies operating in isolation. This paper updates Long's (1958) ecology of games framework with Scharpf's (1997) actor-centered institutionalism to analyze the coordinating roles of actors and institutions on the context of the ecology of water management games in the San Francisco Bay. Actors participating in multiple institutions are analyzed using exponential random graph models for bipartite networks representing different assumptions about policy behavior, including geographic constraints. We find that policy coordination is facilitated mostly by Federal and state agencies, and collaborative institutions that span across geographic boundaries. Network configurations associated with closure show the most significant departures from the predicted model values, consistent with the Berardo and Scholz (2010) "risk hypothesis" that closure is important for solving cooperation problems.

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