| Both policy research and practical experience are increasingly showing that the causes of, impacts of and responses to a wide range of policy problems are characterized by interactions across multiple levels of organization, from international regimes, to national governments, to state governments, to individuals. As these interactions become more obvious, they create new and unforeseen challenges of integrating information and coordinating management from the local to global levels.; While there are numerous policy efforts to try to address these kinds of challenges which characterize a rapidly evolving landscape, what is missing from these ongoing efforts is a systematic way of thinking about and addressing the challenges involved in integrating information and decision making across multiple levels. This dissertation attempts to help fill this gap in both the scholarly and practitioner literatures by conducting an empirical analysis of water management in the U.S. Great Plains and providing an initial framework for understanding the interaction of information and decision making in the context of multi-level environmental problems. As such, the central question of this study is: What makes information and decision making systems effective at addressing multi-level problems?; Findings suggest that institutional structures do influence the effectiveness of managing multi-level problems. In addressing the problem of aquifer depletion, local areas that are embedded in polycentric structures are more effective managers than areas that either have more centralized or more autonomous systems. Such polycentric structures can be characterized as dense networks with richly linked and highly coordinated information and decision making nodes from local to national levels This study also identifies mechanisms through which institutions and actors coordinate, mediate, communicate, and allocate responsibility between nodes in the system. Finally, this research suggests ways in which these findings might be applicable to a range of issue areas and might inform a growing theory of information and decision making in a multi-level world. |
