Christian Stein,Jennie Barron,Henrik Ernstson, Stockholm Environment Institute, , christian.stein@ecointerfaces.net
Given the cross-scale and multifunctional character of water, the decisions impacting on water involve a range of stakeholders related to each other through complex governance arrangements. Any transformation path towards more sustainable and equitable water use will need to work through these complex webs of social relations. There is however a lack of empirical research that addresses such multi-level water governance networks. This paper develops and applies social network analysis (SNA) to capture the cross-scale and multi-stakeholder governance networks in three catchments in Burkina Faso, Tanzania and Zambia. Using a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews, we traced relations between state agencies, NGO’s, and villages. SNA has proven valuable for analyzing multi-stakeholder governance arrangements and to engage with the social complexity of water resources governance across multiple scales. We discuss analytical strategies and emergent results and how we intend to build comparative work with other catchments.
Key words: Social network analysis, multi-level governance, catchment management