How stakeholders structure their collaborations to anticipate and tackle the threat of mountain pine beetle in the Jasper–Hinton (Alberta, Canada) area

Abstract

The resilience of resource-based communities facing natural disturbances partly depends on the capacity of a wide diversity of stakeholders to share their expertise, articulate their efforts, and develop solutions that are both effective and equitable. Structural methods from network theory can be used to measure how efficiently and thoroughly collaborations happen among stakeholders and to identify ways to improve information flow. We applied network theory to represent and analyse the collaborations between individuals dealing with a significant mountain pine beetle outbreak in the Jasper–Hinton area of Alberta, Canada. For this, we interviewed and collected relational information from 90 respondents officiating in the area. Our results show unbalanced collaboration patterns among federal, provincial, and municipal institutions, as well as the forestry sector and research institutions, leading to clusters and, as a consequence, to gaps in the flow of information that are only partially bridged by a few actors. Such siloing of information is a key barrier to sustainability in natural resource management that may be addressed more transparently using network theory.