Collaborative water resources management: A multilayer social network analysis

• Collaborative management processes can be described as a multilayer network. • Policy issue synergies and tradeoffs can be used to describe stakeholder relations. • Issue interdependencies reveal new power relations of stakeholders. • The complex relations have a meaningful impact on the stakeholder network. • Despite stakeholder trade-offs, we discover a majority of synergies between them. One of the challenges of water governance lies in the management of trade-offs and synergies between policy issues. To address these interdependencies, both formal institutionalized and voluntary collaborative processes have emerged, bringing together a wide range of stakeholders with various interests to deliberate and seek consensus on management decisions. These stakeholders form networks characterized by complex relationships involving both collaboration and conflict, which can influence power dynamics and, consequently, the outcomes and legitimacy of the processes. In this study, we analyse how stakeholder relationships change when the synergies and trade-offs between policy issues are considered, and identify which stakeholders are influential across multiple parallel processes and the interests they represent. The case study focuses on two Finnish river basins facing pressures from human activities such as hydropower development, agriculture, forestry, and mining, and host multiple collaborative processes to manage these challenges. These processes are conceptualized as a multilayer social network. We introduce a novel method to infer positive and negative relationships between participants based on their interest in issues with synergies or trade-offs. The analysis yielded the following key findings: (i) most stakeholder interactions concern issues with synergies; (ii) the networks reveal complex relationships where synergies and trade-offs can significantly affect power dynamics; and (iii) individuals exert varying degrees of influence regarding synergies and trade-offs. The method developed and tested shows promise for analysing past processes and predicting the power relations, and informing more effective collaborative water resources management and governance.