Birds of a Feather Fight Together: Forum Involvement in a Weakly Institutionalized Ecology of Policy Games

Policymaking in modern democracies often occurs in polycentric governance systems where decisions are made in multiple, relatively interdependent policy forums. The role and performance of policy forums, however, is likely to be influenced by their broader institutional context. Institutional contexts impose transaction costs that stakeholders must consider when self‐organizing, particularly in weakly institutionalized settings where the transaction costs of collaboration are high. Using social network analysis, we analyze forum participation dynamics in the Lower Valley of the Chubut River in Argentina; a weakly institutionalized setting where water policy problems are increasing in the face of growing population and climate change. Our findings show that forum participants tend to perceive certain types of collective action problems as more salient, and forums tend to attract participants with similar perceptions about cooperation problems (a specific type of collective action problem). These situations may lend forums not only to facilitate the generation of trust among stakeholders with similar perceptions, but also to reproduce certain perceptions about which are the dominant collective action problems, which can deepen conflict in the long run. Our findings shed light on the conditions under which policy stakeholders in weakly institutionalized settings may self‐organize to foster collective action.