Publications

María Mancilla García, Örjan Bodin. 2025. The Imperative of New and Shiny Clothes: A Discussion on Novelty and Its Effects in Water Governance Research. Environmental Policy and Governance. https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.2167

Novelty is a requirement demanded from scholars by reviewers holding the keys to publication as well as by funding bodies allocating project funds and thus sometimes enabling the possibility of an academic career. In fields such as water governance research, at the intersection of research and practice, an additional pressure comes from practitioners' need to find solutions and resources to try and implement different solution...

Per Becker, Örjan Bodin. 2025. The impact of political attention on collaborative environmental governance among municipal street‐level bureaucrats. Policy Studies Journal. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.70020

Collaboration in governing complex environmental challenges is the norm. However, collaboration does not necessarily deliver desirable outcomes, and the importance of forming collaborative networks that effectively address the challenges at hand has been emphasized in theory and practice. Evidence for what constitutes a suitable network structure is still scarce, and the understanding of what factors drive collaboration that c...

Johanna Hedlund, Florence Metz, Örjan Bodin. 2025. Networking strategies for coordinating interdependent policy issues: A motif approach. Policy Studies Journal. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12588

Complex societal challenges, such as climate change and environmental degradation, are encumbered by numerous interdependences across different policy issues. Coordination of interdependent policy issues is thus critical. However, coordination challenges persist, partly because coordinating interdependent policy issues among actors often involves high costs. While network governance literature often advocates for management st...

Agnes B. Olin, Ulf Bergström, Örjan Bodin, Göran Sundblad, Britas Klemens Eriksson, Mårten Erlandsson, Ronny Fredriksson, Johan S. Eklöf. 2024. Predation and spatial connectivity interact to shape ecosystem resilience to an ongoing regime shift. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-45713-1

Ecosystem regime shifts can have severe ecological and economic consequences, making it a top priority to understand how to make systems more resilient. Theory predicts that spatial connectivity and the local environment interact to shape resilience, but empirical studies are scarce. Here, we use >7000 fish samplings from the Baltic Sea coast to test this prediction in an ongoing, spatially propagating shift in dominance from ...

Petr Matous, Örjan Bodin. 2024. Hub‐and‐spoke social networks among Indonesian cocoa farmers homogenise farming practices. People and Nature. https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10578

Smallholder farms support the livelihoods of 2.5 billion people and their decisions on how to manage their land has profound consequences for the environment and the food security of billions of people. However, farmers' values, norms and resulting management practices are usually not formed in isolation. Triangulating multiple analytical, modelling and simulation methods, we investigated if and how social influence exerted t...

Michele-Lee Moore, Lan Wang-Erlandsson, Örjan Bodin, Johan Enqvist, Fernando Jaramillo, Krisztina Jónás, Carl Folke, Patrick Keys, Steven J. Lade, Maria Mancilla Garcia, Romina Martin, Nathanial Matthews, Agnes Pranindita, Juan C. Rocha, Shuchi Vora. 2024. Moving from fit to fitness for governing water in the Anthropocene. Nature Water. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-024-00257-y

We bring together two decades of research on cross-scale spatial and temporal connectivity of water in the Anthropocene to understand the implications for institutional fit and water governance, with a focus on river basin organizations and watershed-based bodies. There is strong evidence showing how hydrological cycles are tightly coupled across larger spatial scales than they were in the past, which implies a possible expans...

Örjan Bodin. 2023. Social-ecological networks: What are they, why are they useful, and how can I use them?. Book chapter. The Sage Handbook of Social Network Analysis.

This new edition of The Sage Handbook of Social Network Analysis builds on the success of its predecessor, offering a comprehensive overview of social network analysis produced by leading international scholars in the field. Brand new chapters provide both significant updates to topics covered in the first edition, as well as discussing cutting edge topics that have developed since, including new chapters on: · General ...

Tiffany H. Morrison, Örjan Bodin, Graeme S. Cumming, Mark Lubell, Ralf Seppelt, Tim Seppelt, Christopher M. Weible. 2023. Building blocks of polycentric governance. Policy Studies Journal. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12492

Success or failure of a polycentric system is a function of complex political and social processes, such as coordination between actors and venues to solve specialized policy problems. Yet there is currently no accepted method for isolating distinct processes of coordination, nor to understand how their variance affects polycentric governance performance. We develop and test a building-blocks approach that uses different patte...

Barbara Schröter, Claudia Sattler, Jean Paul Metzger, Jonathan R. Rhodes, Marie-Josée Fortin, Camila Hohlenwerger, L. Román Carrasco, Örjan Bodin. 2023. Exploring the role of boundary work in a social-ecological synthesis initiative. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-022-00811-8

Inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration in environmental studies faces the challenge of communicating across disciplines to reach a common understanding of scientific problems and solutions in a changing world. One way to address current pressing environmental challenges is to employ a boundary work approach that uses activities across borders of separated field of research. But how can this look like in practice? In this r...

Örjan Bodin, Haibin Chen. 2023. A network perspective of human–nature interactions in dynamic and fast-changing landscapes. National Science Review. https://doi.org/10.1093/nsr/nwad019

Increasing and intensifying the use of land represents a prominent sustainability challenge of particular importance in regions undergoing rapid change while at the same time exhibiting large natural and anthropocentrically induced variability. To reconcile the needs for both human prosperity and healthy ecosystems, a more integrated understanding of key biophysical and adaptation processes is paramount in such dynamic and dee...