Abstract / Summary:
Isolated mountain and Arctic (island) communities and ecosystems are suggested as being some of the most sensitive to climate change, while historically suffering from economic, cultural and political neglect leading to challenges in adaptive capacity. While a focus has been on determining resilience from a natural science climate exposure angle the social construct of adaptive capacity requires more attention.
A systematic identification of cross-sectoral social network patterns delivers a governance network in which positions of communities and communication flows can be analyzed in their influence on adaptive capacity. Social Network Analysis (SNA) has been shown to contribute to a better understanding of the role of both vertical and horizontal stakeholder integration and communication flows to a cross-sectoral governance network relating to resilience to global environmental change.
Little research has been done using SNA in a relational context of resilience of isolated communities vulnerable to environmental change and even less where tourism is a livelihood focus, often a major economic factor in mountain and Arctic regions.
One hypothesis is that the main barriers for resilience building are weak social ties and low participation and communication, high levels of which are found in more dynamic and resilient communities.. This hypothesis will be tested by identifying key socio-cultural, relational and behavioural factors that increase or inhibit adaptation and resilience in the two case study regions, the Norwegian Arctic Island of Svalbard and the Surselva-Andermatt Region in Switzerland. The focus will be on context-specific characteristics of communities’ adaptive capacity and the link to local context-specific characteristics within the existing local social networks and their embeddedness within the broader political and natural environment. SNA will be undertaken with an initial sample of key actors, and further snowball sampling will allow the collection of data on other stakeholders. The results of this transdisciplinary project will provide insights into the barriers and mechanisms supporting or preventing adaptive capacity to environmental change from a governance angle. Aspects of horizontal and vertical governance, and their interactions, will emerge. Comparing the case studies will contribute to identifying the case studies’ contextual aspects, especially cultural, and socio-graphic aspects of internationalization, and how these relate to more quantitative degree of centrality aspects. Since a first SNA data collection in Surselva sent out to all stakeholders simultaneously did not deliver the expected results for identifying gatekeepers for governance adaptation, a variation in SNA data collection is being applied to both case study sites, yielding an opportunity to compare the two methods for the Swiss case study site.
Contributions to the literature will be applying SNA in isolated communities and in tourism contexts and comparing different approaches to collect SNA data. Understanding the governance and business dynamics for increasing resilience to climate change will be improved. Practical outcomes will include interactions with policy makers, leading to specific recommendations for strengthening network governance for adaptive capacity. Communication with wider, non-scientific audiences will engage local people.
