| This study seeks to understand the emergence of collective action in complex settings in which a number of heterogeneous, independent actors continuously interact with each other. With a case study of watershed management in San Francisquito Creek, it investigates how actors in a complex adaptive system tackle shared, collective problems together. While understanding this collective action, this study identifies facilitators/inhibitors of the system's evolution process and explores the roles of advanced information technologies.; This research is an effort to extend existing research studies about collective action problems in watershed management situations. For that goal, this research employs a complex adaptive system's perspective and looks at the evolutionary process of a watershed management system with a particular attention to "information processing" or "learning" processes of participating actors. Paying attention to diverse features in the system, it further attempts to measure the collective capacity that refers to the extent to which participating actors voluntarily coordinate their actions for their shared problems. The collective capacity is measured through the examination of three important dimensions (technical structure, organizational flexibility, and cultural values) of actors in the system.; This research finds that the application of the complex adaptive system's perspective illustrates ways individual actors in the watershed management system interact with each other to learn about and tackle shared problems. When the actors collectively engage in information search and exchange activities, they are likely to voluntarily coordinate their actions and improve their capacity to understand collective action situations. Throughout the four-year period after the symmetry-shattering event, actors in the San Francisquito Creek Watershed management system have improved their technical structure, organizational flexibility, and cultural values, leading to the improvement of the system's capacity. Assessment of the three dimensions shows that cultural value is the most improved, and then organizational flexibility and technical structure follow. |
