Developing collaborative advantage for water quality protection in agricultural watersheds: a policy network approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation aims to expand the theoretical base and improve the practice of collaborative, integrated water management (CIWM), one of the major bottom-up alternatives for more holistic and participatory styles of environmental governance in North America. The main institutional challenge for CIWM has been the creation of meaningful patterns of socio-political interaction within the geographical boundaries of watersheds. The particular concern in this dissertation is agricultural watersheds in North America that are embedded in ongoing processes of agricultural and rural change. These watersheds are becoming increasingly contested arenas by opposite attempts to, on one hand, increase agriculture's international competitive advantage through the reduction of government interference and, on the other hand, to protect noncommodity rural functions highly valued by newly arrived neighbors. The theoretical lens I chose to look through in this dissertation is the policy network perspective on governance, which focuses on the networks of interdependent actors who exchange resources and engage in reciprocal interactions in particular policy sectors. In order to pursue the dual aim of the dissertation, which included not only increasing understanding but also enabling change, I engaged in a cycle of participatory action research with a multi-stakeholder partnership in the Maitland River watershed, Ontario. Some of the main methodological, practical and theoretical contributions of this doctoral dissertation include, respectively: (a) a biographical exploration of the research process that adds to ongoing discussions regarding the nature, challenges and benefits of PAR as academic research on natural resource management and environmental governance; (b) a reflective space for multi-stakeholder self-assessment and partnership improvement in the Maitland River watershed; and, (c) a conceptual framework informed by the policy network perspective on governance and CIWM praxis that focuses on the intersection of actors, institutions and ideas regarding agricultural production and environmental stewardship in relevant policy arenas. In this regard, the analysis of water quality protection policies and programs in Ontario over the last fifteen years suggests that, instead of forcing watershed-based governance structures, the examination of more flexible ways of linking watershed imperatives to existing and emerging meaningful scales in agricultural areas of Ontario and elsewhere is warranted.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".