What motivated you to address international water cooperation and conflict through the lenses of social network theory?

My main motivation was to step beyond my empirical comfort zone of fisheries and trade governance, to explore a new environmental issue. There’s a lot of work in freshwater governance at both domestic and international levels that I have long admired and taught, so when the editors of the book Networks in Water Governance kindly reached out to me to contribute a chapter, I saw an opportunity to explore what I might have to say to this literature.

What contributions does your chapter make to the literature on water governance?

My chapter makes four main contributions. First, it complements other chapters in the volume that apply social network theory and models to domestic freshwater governance with an example of its application to international water cooperation and conflict. Second, it picks up the regular application of statistical methods to the study of international water events, but makes an argument for and demonstration of the use of statistical network models that capture structural and temporal dependencies in when and with whom actors cooperate or come into conflict with. Third, it extends the literature on these dynamic network actor models (DyNAMs), offering the first example of its application to coevolving networks of both cooperation and conflict. Lastly, the theoretical and methodological emphasis of this chapter on the rate of cooperation and conflict, and not just on who cooperates or conflicts with whom, is especially novel.

Based on your findings, what are some of the future avenues for network research on water-related issues?

One of the main avenues the chapter opens is for the application of statistical network models to the study of international water events. The analysis of international event datasets more generally has relied heavily on statistical methods that treat each event (or the dyad implicated in each event) as independent, but this chapter shows that cooperation and conflict events have important endogeneities that can be well captured and explored using network models. I sincerely hope the chapter encourages more work in this exciting area, both to water-related and other international events data.

Another important avenue comes out of the chapter’s main theoretical argument and finding. One of the more elaborated hypotheses on network activity in the literature is what I call normative embeddedness: that actors will replicate the behaviour most common around them. So, cooperation begets cooperation and conflict begets conflict. But what I find in this chapter is instead what I call facilitative embeddedness: cooperation emboldens both more cooperation and conflict, whereas conflict seems to chill all activity, inducing slower and more cautious reactions. This angle opens up all news kinds of temporally related questions for networks and governance literatures that I’ll be exploring in my just-started SNSF project PANARCHIC (“Power and Networks and the Rate of Change in Institutional Complexes”.

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Read also this interview with Prof. Hollway on his new project >

Full citation of the chapter:
Hollway, James. “Network Embeddedness and the Rate of Water Cooperation and Conflict.” In Networks in Water Governance, edited by Karin Ingold and Manuel Fischer, 87–113. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

Interview by Buğra Güngör, PhD candidate in International Relations and Political Science; editing by Nathalie Tanner, Research Office.
Banner image: excerpt from a picture by CHAINFOTO24/Shutterstock.com.