Attention Allocation and Emerging Ecological Adversity in Collaborative Governance Organizations

To foster the resilience of Social-Ecological Systems (SES), governance structures must pay timely attention to emerging ecological adversity. Past research shows that both public and private organizations can be slow to acknowledge such threat. Collaborative governance organizations may be more adaptive, but their attention capacity is constrained. We seek to uncover the conditions that foster or hinder collaborative governance organizations allocating attention toward ecological adversity. Specifically, we study attention to ecological adversity in the context of French river basin committees, examining meeting minutes over almost 30 years using natural language processing methods.