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Changes in Social Networks and Narratives associated with Lake Erie Water Quality Management after the 2014 Toledo Water Crisis

Miles, Austin
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1593600584732076

Abstract Details

2020, Master of Science, Ohio State University, Environment and Natural Resources.
Harmful algal blooms (HABs), have been a growing issue in Lake Erie since the 1990s. The blooms, composed of toxin-producing cyanobacteria, are primarily caused by nutrient runoff in the form of phosphorus and nitrogen from agricultural lands around the Lake. HABs in Lake Erie have become an especially salient issue after the August 2014 Toledo Water Crisis, in which 500,000 people in the Toledo Metropolitan Area were deprived of the use of their tap water due to a `do not drink’ advisory prompted by toxins in the water originating from a HAB. In drawing an explosion of attention to HABs, the 2014 algal bloom functioned as a focusing event. A focusing event is an event, concentrated in a particular geographical area, that causes harm or reveals the potential for harm to human communities. To understand how the 2014 Toledo Water Crisis affected policy change processes implicated in managing Lake Erie, I investigate two issues pertaining to how this attention changed HAB management: first, the ways the crisis changed the social networks of the stakeholders involved in water quality management; and second, the ways that the crisis altered narratives about HABs. To address HABs, coordination across jurisdictions and the various levels of government is essential. Actors faced with these fragmentations of management built into government face a collective action problem and must coordinate their actions to compensate for this fragmentation. Understanding how the 2014 algal bloom as a focusing event altered social networks associated with water quality management in Lake Erie will help reveal the conditions under which coordination and collective action may arise. As a part of this process of addressing HABs, narrative will also be an important aspect. Policy debates are fought using narrative, and narrative affects the policy process. Understanding the narratives actors employ at a moment in which quickly mobilizing resources and people is essential can elucidate how actors leverage narrative to take advantage of a focusing event to effect policy change. In this study, I analyze these issues using text data extracted from news articles. The findings indicate that narrative strategies shifted to focus on different, more important causes of HABs (namely agriculture), as well as more generalized impacts of HABs rather than specifying particular impacts, such as to the economy. Analysis of the social networks indicated that latent bonding and brokerage structures increased after the water crisis, which suggests the potential for these network structures to emerge. Interpreted together, these results carry implications for the interplay between discourse and the emergence of network structures.
Ramiro Berardo (Advisor)
Saatvika Rai (Committee Member)
Matthew Hamilton (Committee Member)
Jeremy Brooks (Committee Member)
70 p.
Environmental Studies; Water Resource Management
Harmful Algal Blooms; Lake Erie; Focusing Events; Social Networks; Social Network Analysis; Narrative Policy Framework

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Miles, A. (2020). Changes in Social Networks and Narratives associated with Lake Erie Water Quality Management after the 2014 Toledo Water Crisis [Master's thesis, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1593600584732076

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Miles, Austin. Changes in Social Networks and Narratives associated with Lake Erie Water Quality Management after the 2014 Toledo Water Crisis. 2020. Ohio State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1593600584732076.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Miles, Austin. "Changes in Social Networks and Narratives associated with Lake Erie Water Quality Management after the 2014 Toledo Water Crisis." Master's thesis, Ohio State University, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1593600584732076

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1593600584732076
168
© 2020, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License Changes in Social Networks and Narratives associated with Lake Erie Water Quality Management after the 2014 Toledo Water Crisis by Austin Miles is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.