Adaptation Strategies in Collaborative Environmental Management

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Collaborative governance structures coordinate actors across boundaries and sectors to address complex environmental challenges, including common‑pool resource management and disaster resilience. As environmental conditions and stakeholder needs shift unpredictably, static governance systems often fail to address emerging challenges and long-term sustainability goals. This panel therefore asks: How can collaborative networks adjust resource strategies, leadership roles, network configurations, and procedural mechanisms to sustain resilience under changing ecological and social conditions? Understanding adaptive capacity is critical for natural resource management and environmental policy because it enables governance systems to remain effective amid evolving challenges.

This question aligns with the APPAM Fall conference theme, “Forging Collaborations for Transformative and Resilient Policy Solutions,” by demonstrating how collaborative governance can be designed and refined to produce both transformative outcomes and enduring resilience. Our four papers explore adaptive strategies across diverse policy domains, including natural disaster hazard mitigation, watershed restoration, wildfire resilience, and fisheries management. They illustrate generalizable lessons for policy practitioners and scholars.

In paper 1, Lee examines how the Florida Division of Emergency Management platform helps local hazard mitigation groups diversify funding sources beyond federal grants, highlighting the platform’s role in institutionalizing long-term adaptation. In paper 2, Liu and Gao use a regression discontinuity design on Oregon watershed data to identify causal shifts in network leadership and funding allocation for 29,797 collaborative restoration projects at water quality thresholds, exploring how environmental performance feedback triggers structural and financial adaptations. In paper 3, Ulibarri introduces a data-driven diagnostic framework to detect “collaborative deficits” in community wildfire resilience planning and recommends context-sensitive adaptation interventions, such as forming new partnerships or reallocating resources, to improve local partnership effectiveness. In paper 4, Wang and Siddiki analyzes 190 policy actions of the South Atlantic Fisheries Management Council using text analysis with Large Language Model and multinomial logit regressions, demonstrating that stakeholder representation, knowledge diversity and conflict dynamics shape the adoption of adaptive policy options, with scientific and community inputs enhancing flexibility.

Collectively, these studies advance the theory and practice of adaptive collaborative governance across mixed methods, such as funding analysis, design-based causal inference, network analysis with survey data, and text analysis using Large Language Model. By comparing diverse policy contexts and empirical approaches, this panel equips practitioners and policymakers with the tools to design flexible governance structures capable of anticipating, responding to and transforming in the face of environmental change, eventually fostering more resilient and effective management of natural resources.

Policy Area

• Natural Resource, Energy, and Environmental Policy

Secondary Policy Area

• Public and Nonprofit Management and Finance

Chair

• Saba Siddiki, Syracuse University

Discussants

• Craig W. Thomas, University of Washington

• Tyler A Scott, University of California, Davis

Organizer

• Yixin Liu, Baruch College (City University of New York)

Individual Presentations

• Adaptive Strategies for Collaborative Watershed Management: A Regression Discontinuity Approach - Presenting Author: Yixin Liu, Baruch College (City University of New York); Non-Presenting Co-Author: Xue Gao, Florida State University

• Identifying interventions to support collaborative governance for wildfire resilience - Presenting Author: Nicola Ulibarri, University of California, Irvine

• Understanding drivers of adaptive policymaking: a case study of South Atlantic Fishery Management Council - Presenting Author: Shuping Wang, Syracuse University; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Saba Siddiki, Syracuse University

• Regulatory Capture, Trust in Government, and Civic Engagement - Presenting Author: Songsong Chen, Tsinghua University; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Jianhua Xu, Peking University