Social networks among actors and stakeholders are gaining attention in studies of natural resource management, particularly those of adaptive management based on different forms of participation and co-management. In this sense, social networks have primarily been envisioned as enabling different actors to collaborate and coordinate management efforts. Here, we continue the discussion initiated by Newman and Dale (2005), which highlighted the fact that not all social networks are created equal. We discuss the relation between some structural characteristics and functions of social networks with respect to natural resource management, thus focusing on structural implications that are often overlooked when studying social networks within the context of natural resource management. We present several network measures used to quantify structural characteristics of social networks and link them to a number of features such as learning, leadership, and trust, which are identified as important in natural resource management. We show schematically that there may be inherent juxtapositions among different structural characteristics that need to be balanced in what we envision as social network structures conducive to adaptive co-management of natural resources. We argue that it is essential to develop an understanding of the effects that different structural characteristics of social networks have on natural resource management

A framework is constructed for how to relate ecosystem services to environmental justice. The benefits humans and society can derive from biophysical processes cannot be viewed as objectively existing “out there”, but as entangled in social and political processes. This is unpacked through the analytical moments of generation, distribution and articulation of ecosystem services. Social practice moderates the generation of benefits from biophysical processes (through urban development patterns and day-to-day management of urban ecosystems), but also who in society that benefits from them, i.e. the distribution of ecosystem services (viewed here as the temporal and spatial scales at which it is possible for humans to benefit from biophysical processes). Moreover, for biophysical processes to attain value in decision-making, a social practice of value articulation is needed. The framework then moves between two levels of analysis. At the city-wide level, an ecological network translates how urban ‘green’ areas, viewed as nodes, are interconnected by ecological flows (water, species movement, etc.) where nodes have different protective and management capacities. The network captures spatial complexity—what happens in one location, can have effects elsewhere. At the local level, urban struggles over land-use are studied to trace how actors utilize artifacts and social arenas to articulate how certain biophysical processes are of value. Competing networks of value articulation strive to influence land-use, and multiple local studies bring understanding of how power operates locally, informing city-wide analyses. Empirical studies from Stockholm, Cape Town and other cities inform the framework

Formal models used to study the resilience of social-ecological systems have not explicitly included important structural characteristics of this type of system. In this paper, we propose a network perspective for social-ecological systems that enables us to better focus on the structure of interactions between identifiable components of the system. This network perspective might be useful for developing formal models and comparing case studies of social-ecological systems. Based on an analysis of the case studies in this special issue, we identify three types of social-ecological networks: (1) ecosystems that are connected by people through flows of information or materials, (2) ecosystem networks that are disconnected and fragmented by the actions of people, and (3) artificial ecological networks created by people, such as irrigation systems. Each of these three archytypal social-ecological networks faces different problems that influence its resilience as it responds to the addition or removal of connections that affect its coordination or the diffusion of system attributes such as information or disease

Studies of infrastructure have demonstrated broad differences between Northern and Southern cities, and deconstructed urban theory derived from experiences of the networked urban regions of the Global North. This includes critiques of the universalisation of the historically–culturally produced normative ideal of universal, uniform infrastructure. In this commentary, we first introduce the notion of ‘heterogeneous infrastructure configurations’ (HICs) which resonates with existing scholarship on Southern urbanism. Second, we argue that thinking through HICs helps us to move beyond technological and performative accounts of actually existing infrastructures to provide an analytical lens through which to compare different configurations. Our approach enables a clearer analysis of infrastructural artefacts not as individual objects but as parts of geographically spread socio-technological configurations: configurations which might involve many different kinds of technologies, relations, capacities and operations, entailing different risks and power relationships. We use examples from ongoing research on sanitation and waste in Kampala, Uganda – a city in which service delivery is characterised by multiplicity, overlap, disruption and inequality – to demonstrate the kinds of research questions that emerge when thinking through the notion of HICs.