A system perspective to flood planning combining multiple multilevel collaboration networks

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.