Swimming Together: Adaptation through Emergence of Knowledge and Learning in Networked Watershed Governance

Networked governance plays an important role in watershed planning and management to address complex environmental problems in social-ecological systems (SESs), in large part attributable to the need for multi-disciplinary knowledge. Networks integrate and make available different types of knowledge and foster social learning needed to respond to and cope with uncertainties, critical for building adaptive capacity for the governance of an SES. Through the case of a self-organized governance network of public, private, and nongovernmental organizations in the Chagrin River watershed in northeastern Ohio, we explore how such learning happens, revealing the types of learning that built adaptive capacity, the settings in which learning took place, and the practices that gave rise to learning. We also discuss how the network became the mechanism through which collaboration for watershed governance became adaptive.