Patterns of Participation and Representation in a Regional Water Collaboration

Regional collaboration has become a popular means to manage shared resources and address cross‐jurisdictional boundary issues. The question of who participates in the process, who directly affects decisions, and who benefits from those decisions is critical for understanding the broader value created by regional collaborations. We apply a variety of text mining techniques to meeting minutes to measure how stakeholder participation evolved over nine years of an Integrated Regional Water Management collaboration. We observe that a diverse set of organizations representing differing interests participated to some extent in the process. However, a minority of organizations attended regularly, while most attended sporadically and/or only attended outreach events. Verbs used to describe interaction varied across meeting types, displaying egalitarian patterns of interaction among participants in core leadership meetings and more one‐way interaction among attendees of outreach meetings. We then estimate whether participation affects the likelihood of receiving funding through the IRWM program. Participants who attended the core group meetings most regularly were most likely to receive funding for their projects, suggesting that uneven patterns of participation matter for the substantive value created by the collaboration. 区域合作已成为管理共享资源和解决跨辖区边界问题的流行手段。谁参与这个过程，谁直接影响决策，以及谁从这些决策中受益，这些问题对于理解区域协作所带来的更广泛意义上的价值至关重要。我们将各种文本挖掘技术应用于会议纪要上，来观察利益相关方参与的区域综合水资源管理协作（IRWM）在九年的时间内是如何演变的。我们观察到代表不同利益的具有多元化的不同组织各自都在一定程度上参与了这一过程。然而，只有少数组织定期参加，大多数组织只是偶尔参加或者仅参加外展活动。用于描述组织间互动的动词因会议类型而异，核心领导层的会议体现了与会者之间的平等型互动模式，而外展会议的与会者之间更多地体现着单向互动模式。之后，我们估计会议的参与度是否会影响通过IRWM计划获得资助的可能性。我们发现，最经常参加核心小组会议的与会者最有可能为其项目获得资金，这表明不同的参与模式会影响到合作带来的实质价值。