Complex Governance Networks: A Comparative and Longitudinal Analysis of the Literature

Governance networks have been recognized and studied systematically by public administration researchers since the 1990s. The implications of complexity theory for governance networks entered the academic discourse in the 2000s. An integrated “complex governance networks” (CGN) conceptualization has not been articulate yet, however. In this presentation, we make the case for a CGN conceptualization with a systematic review of the literatures in public administration and related fields. In our review, we demonstrate that public administration and policy scholars have been relatively late in recognizing the implications of complexity theory, but their publications have increasingly integrated complexity concepts with governance and networks concepts in the 2010s. In our literature review, we aimed to answer the following questions. 1. How does the public administration literature compare with the related fields in the applications of governance, networks, and complexity concepts? How did these applications change over time? 2. How were the keywords related to governance, networks, and complexity concepts distributed in the public administration literature? How were these keywords linked to each other in this literature? How did these distributions and links change over time? 3. What was the geographic distribution of the studies? What were topical areas? Were they conceptual discussions, or did the authors develop models or conduct empirical studies? What methods did they use in the empirical studies? To answer these questions, we collected the literature information from the Web of Science journal publications database, using a set of keywords related to governance, networks, complexity, and self-organization. We investigated particularly the literature in English on public administration (inclusive of public policy) and a group of fields of study that are related to public administration: business/management, ecology/environment. economics, education research, health policy and administration, international relations and political science, and regional and urban studies. After our initial screenings and data cleaning, our dataset included 8,164 articles that were published between 1990 and 2019. We grouped and coded the articles in this final data set and conducted analyses in three stages: (1) we tabulated the frequencies of the keywords as they appeared in article titles and abstracts over the three decades in all the fields included in our study (research question #1), (2) we grouped and tabulated the keywords and conducted two-mode network analyses to identify the distributions of the keywords and the links between the keywords in the public administration literature (research question #2), and (3) we analyzed the contents of (a) the most frequently cited articles in public administration and (b) the “bridge articles” (articles that used more than one of the keywords in our study) to identify the distributions of the geographical locations and topical areas of the studies and the methods used in the public administration literature (research question #3). Our reviews show that public administration researchers lagged behind the researchers in business/management, ecology/environment, economics, and political science/international relations in their applications of complexity theory concepts to study collaborative/governance networks. However, these applications have increased in public administration over time. Also, complexity theory concepts were linked to governance networks and collaborative governance, particularly in the 2010s. Our reviews also show that the concepts of governance, networks, and complexity were applied in a wide spectrum of topical areas—from environment, to education, local government, economic development, emergency/disaster management, healthcare, water management, and democracy—and in studies worldwide—most frequently in the US and European countries, but also in Canada and some countries in Asia, Africa, and Oceania. These applications in wide ranges of topical areas and geographies show that these concepts have almost universal applicability. Our findings on the methodological applications indicate that the applications of these concepts began to mature in the sense that they moved from conceptual discussions only to refinements of conceptualizations (modeling) and empirical investigations of specific aspects of governance processes and networks. The most frequently used methodologies in the earlier publications were qualitative case studies and interviews; over time the applications of quantitative methods (particularly SNA methods and computational modeling) increased. This finding indicates that researchers were seeking to find generalizable patterns and structures in networks. Our findings support our contention that there is a need and grounding for a complex governance networks (CGN) conceptualization. This conceptualization is presented in a recently published book (Morçöl, 2023) and an upcoming journal article. Reference Morçöl, G. (2023). Complex governance networks: Foundational concepts and practical implications. New York: Routledge.

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