Collaborative Governance Organizations Attention in the Face of Emerging Ecological Adversity

To foster the resilience of Social-Ecological Systems (SES), governance structures must pay timely attention to emerging ecological adversity. Past research shows that both public and private organizations can be slow to acknowledge such threat. Collaborative governance organizations may be more adaptive, but their attention capacity is constrained, stretched between the diversity of topics to cover and the challenges of their own organizational structures. We seek to uncover the conditions that foster or hinder collaborative governance organizations allocating attention toward ecological adversity with conceptual insights from the literatures on SES resilience, collaborative governance, and organizational attention. Specifically, we study attention to ecological adversity in the context of four French river basin committees, examining meeting minutes over almost 30 years using natural language processing methods. By identifying tensions critical to attention allocation to emerging ecological adversity, we develop a model and recommendations to foster resilient collaborative attention in governance organizations.