SNA in Nature Resources Management

Nature resources management is difficult since the complexity and the flexibility of the human society. Generally, the ecological system offers public resources to the human, but recently so many actors fight with each other to occupy the resources at the most. Nature resources tends to use up and also causes lots of problems in management. An effective management in nature resources dues to the actors’ collective agreement for the management rules. It means that all of the participants willing to follow the same regulation and want to share information. We could see that the traditional top-down management is actually ineffective in nature resources area, people turn to find a new way that prefer to co-management by involving more different actors into this management process to solve this problem. To address the current nature resources management problems such as climate change, forest resource exhaustion and environmental pollution, searching how to overcome the cooperation in resources management is very important.

Use the Social Network Analysis (SNA) as the new tool in analyzing the nature resources management is especially suitable for different shareholders to solve the problems in the nature resources. Maybe SNA is even more effective than the formal regulations.

Social networking is building connections between actors to transfer the single actor into a connected group. So the more connections built, the more development functions will be. High social networking could help actors avoid conflict and improve the possibility of building the uniform rules. In the other side, in the better social networking environment, the collective actions will be increased. People could exchange their information and knowledge to improve the skills.

Some basic data we need to use in the SNA for nature resources management is:

1. How many shareholders in the nature resources area?

2. What are the main kinds of nature resources that considered?

3. How often the actors communicate with each other?

4. What is information the actors prefer to get?

Regarding the SNA as a new way to manage the nature resources could help build a perfect rules in this area and reduce the resources destroy by actors.