Organizing urban ecosystem services through environmental stewardship governance in New York City

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Abstract

How do stewardship groups contribute to the management of urban ecosystem services? In this paper, we integrate the research on environmental stewardship with the social–ecological systems literature to explain how stewardship groups serve as bridge organizations between public agencies and civic organizations, working across scales and sectors to build the flexible and multi-scaled capacity needed to manage complex urban ecosystems. Analyzing data collected from a survey of stewardship groups in New York City, combined with open-ended semi-structured interviews with representatives from the most connected civic “hub” organizations, we use a mixed-method approach to understand the specific activities of bridge organizations in the process of preserving local ecosystem services. This paper concludes that the role of bridge organizations in the management of urban ecosystem services in New York City is increasing, that these groups have a specific bi-modal role in the network, and that an initial presence of heterarchic organizational relations was crucial in their development. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of these results.

Highlights

► We analyze survey data to identify the most connected bridge organizations that govern ecosystem services in New York City. ► We interview organization leaders to understand how their group's bridging role formed. ► Bridge organizations play an integral and increasing role in the management of urban ecosystem services in New York City. ► An initial condition of heterarchic relations was essential to the development of bridge organizations in New York City. ► The bi-modal role played by bridge organizations is integral to the governance of ecosystem services in New York City.

Introduction

Local environmental stewardship groups have increasingly linked site-based efforts to sustain urban ecosystem services with governance processes concerned with preserving quality-of-life in cities. As a result, contemporary urban environmental stewardship (UES) involves work to conserve, manage, monitor, restore, advocate for, and educate the public about a wide range of issues related to sustaining the local environment (for more details on this definition of stewardship see Fisher, Campbell & Svendsen, 2007). Urban Environmental Stewardship groups serve as direct managers of small parks and gardens, street trees, wetlands, and other sites that provide ecosystem services including air and water filtration; micro-climate regulation; drainage; and recreational/cultural benefits (Barthel, 2006, Bolund and Hunhammar, 1999, Boyer and Polasky, 2004). They also form a crucial component of the urban environmental governance structure by networking their activities with other local groups and citywide advocates and agencies. While stewardship networks have increased in size and complexity in many cities in recent decades, a number of authors point out that environmental governance structures continue to lack the capacity for coordinating the management of ecosystem services across multiple scales, as well as adapting stewardship activities flexibly to changing ecological conditions (see Cashore, 2002, Ernstson et al., 2010, Newman and Dale, 2005, Newman and Dale, 2007, Ostrom and Schlager, 1996, Pickett et al., 2008).

In this paper, we explore the ways that certain UES groups contribute to the management of urban ecosystem services by serving as “bridge organizations” that work across sectors and geographic scales. Specifically, we present the findings from a network survey of urban stewardship groups. These results are combined with a series of open-ended semi-structured interviews with the most connected civic organizational brokers to understand how and why UES groups take on the role of bridge organizations within urban settings. This paper has three sections. First, we briefly review the literature on UES and social–ecological systems, paying particular attention to the role of brokerage organizations described within these relatively fragmented lines of inquiry. Second, we outline our data and methods, which explains our mixed-methods approach for identifying bridge organizations and why New York City provides an ideal case for understanding our research question. Third, we present our findings and discuss how they help us understand stewardship better.

Section snippets

Urban environmental stewardship and social–ecological systems

In recent years, extensive research has been conducted to understand UES, looking at the preservation of gardens, parks, watersheds and other sites (e.g. Fisher et al., 2007, Fisher et al., 2012, Grove et al., 2005, Svendsen and Campbell, 2008). One of the reasons for this growth is that urban stewardship sites are seen as a source of human health and well-being (see Campbell & Weisen, 2009). As such, UES is a community-based social activity that aims to enhance quality-of-life in cities with

Case selection and research methods

This study explores how bridge organizations function within the environmental stewardship network of New York City. As a highly urbanized area with strong development pressures and a dense civil society, New York City is a particularly interesting case to examine relative to the problem of building adequate environmental governance structures. By the mid-19th century, the city had rapidly developed into a major metropolis and a dense civic sector formed to advocate for quality-of-life issues

Results

The network data were employed to identify bridge organizations. Table 1 reports the results from this analysis. It lists the results for organizations that were at or above the two standard deviation threshold for in-centrality and betweenness.

While our intention was not to conduct a full network analysis, our data provides some insights into group formations and clustering, in relation to ecosystem services. The partial network data demonstrates that groups that responded to the survey tend

Discussion and conclusion

Bridge organizations in social–ecological systems organize the activities of a cluster of local groups, requiring a high in-centrality, and coordinate resources and knowledge across scales, requiring a high betweenness. Data collected from open-ended semi-structured interviews illustrate how groups in New York City build flexible and adaptive structures across scales in the stewardship network, and that they also enable bonding ties between small sets of local stewardship groups in order to

Acknowledgments

This project was supported by funding from the USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station and a grant from the National Science Foundation (DEB-0948451). The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editors at Landscape and Urban Planning for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

James J. Connolly is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University. His Research focuses on the institutional and organizational challenges of urban environmental planning and development. He is a member of the research team for the Urban Long Term Research Area Exploratory Grant project studying the relationship between social and ecological developments in New York City over the past 25 years. He has published articles that focus on urban environmental

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    James J. Connolly is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University. His Research focuses on the institutional and organizational challenges of urban environmental planning and development. He is a member of the research team for the Urban Long Term Research Area Exploratory Grant project studying the relationship between social and ecological developments in New York City over the past 25 years. He has published articles that focus on urban environmental stewardship, environmental justice, and spatial analysis of advanced service industries. He is also co-editor of Searching for the Just City: Debates in Urban Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2009).

    Erika S. Svendsen, PhD is a social scientist for the USDA Forest Service, Northern Research Station. She works in collaboration with city agencies and non-profit partners to better understand the impact of community-based, environmental stewardship in urban areas. In conjunction with the New York City (NYC) Department of Parks and Recreation, Dr. Svendsen coordinates the Urban Field Station, which is both a physical place to conduct research and a network of scientists and practitioners dedicated to supporting urban ecosystems. She is also the co-chair of the MillionTreesNYC Research and Evaluation Subcommittee and was the director of GreenThumb, NYC's city-wide community gardening program, from 1997 to 2001. Her current research is focused on understanding civic stewardship patterns in cities, forms of hybrid governance and the study of personal motivations for urban stewardship.

    Dana R. Fisher is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland. She directs the new Program for Society and the Environment there. Her work focuses on understanding the ways that social actors engage in decision-making processes and the successes and failures of such efforts. Much of her research has looked at environmental policy, civic participation and activism more broadly. She has focused much of her attention on non-state actors (including civil society and social movements), looking at them at multiple scales, including the international comparative level, the national level in multiple nation-states (primarily the United States, Japan and countries of the European Union), and the local/grassroots level in the United States. She is the author of Activism, Inc. (Stanford University Press 2006) and National Governance and the Global Climate Change Regime (Rowman and Littlefield Press 2004). Fisher is currently researching the climate policy network in the United States as part of the US National Science Foundation-funded Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks (COMPON) project. She is also the Lead Investigator of the “Understanding the Dynamic Connections Among Stewardship, Land Cover, and Ecosystem Services in New York City's Urban Forest,” which is funded by the US National Science Foundation.

    Lindsay K. Campbell is a social scientist for the USDA Forest Service who works with the New York City Urban Field Station. Supported by the Forest Service's Scientist Recruitment Initiative, she is currently a doctoral candidate in geography at Rutgers University. She is also a member of the MillionTreesNYC Steering Committee and Research and Evaluation Subcommittees. Her current research explores the dynamics of urban politics, natural resource management, and sustainability policymaking.

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