Mehdi Ghorbani; Vahid Jafarian; Mohammad Reza Yazdani; Mahsa Abdolshahnejad
Abstract
Achieving integrated natural resource management fundamentally needs effective and coordinatedrelationship, collaboration, and synergy among various actors who have common but differentresponsibilities. In this sense, the foundation of comprehensive and integrated management is notcompatible with centralization ...
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Achieving integrated natural resource management fundamentally needs effective and coordinatedrelationship, collaboration, and synergy among various actors who have common but differentresponsibilities. In this sense, the foundation of comprehensive and integrated management is notcompatible with centralization and top-down strategies. The aim of this paper is analysis of networkand organizational cohesion of natural resources stakeholders in Semnan province. In this study,relations of existing organizations within the network have been investigated based on interorganizationalinformation transfer and collaboration through social network analysis method andapplying macro-level and middle indexes of institutional network including; the network size,density, ties reciprocity, and centralization at macro-level and core-periphery index at middle level.Policy monitoring emphasized in present paper’s title refers to this question that how successfullynatural resource integrated management policies have been realized at least within the fourth andfifth development programs. Therefore, present study is an attempt to address this questionquantitatively and relying on the results of indexes of structural analysis of natural resourcestakeholders’ network in the pilot area. The results of this study indicate that institutional cohesionis 40 percent (poor) and sustainability of institutional network based on reciprocity is about 47percent (medium). Additionally the core-periphery index showed that the density of institutionalnetwork of Semnan province in core actors’ subgroup is 77 percent and in periphery actors’subgroup is 25 percent. Research findings identify existing capacities for applyin integrated naturalresources management and reveal the necessity of reducing network centralization andstrengthening the relationship among various stakeholders of this section.
