Modelling organization networks collaborating on health and environment within the ASEAN
Résumé
The emergence of infectious diseases is related to environmental factors such as biodiversity loss, land use and land cover changes, and regional impacts of climate change. The threat of worldwide pandemics led to the development of prevention and mitigation strategies implemented via public policies and national/international legal instruments. These measures involve networks of organisations engaged in a wide range of quite disparate activities.
We present two methods to evaluate the collaborative potential of a network of 16 organisations and identify measures to promote their coordination: 1) the first method uses Galois lattices to identify groups of organisations and issues forming a nexus able to tackle with the environment and health challenges. It also allows pointing out the divide between some sub-issues that should be considered together in order to develop an integrated approach of these problems as recommended for example by the One Health initiative; 2) the second method, inspired by the functioning of networks of cerebral cortex areas for the realisation of high-level cognitive functions, analyses the graphs induced by mutual information functions between organisations. Here we evaluate these functions based on the composition of the governing boards (altogether involving 91 organisations) and partnerships (altogether involving 263 organisations) of these organisations. The approach gives the opportunity to assess a priori the effects induced by a change in the profile of the collaborating organisations. The contributions of these two methods are then discussed and compared to other approaches developed for the analysis of social intelligence or socio-cognitive artificial systems.
Both methods are illustrated by the analysis of a network of several organisations involved in the management of health and environmental issues in Southeast Asia (hot spot for emerging infectious diseases and for biodiversity). Taken as a whole, our findings show that regional governance in the health-environment sector is polycentric and entangled, and provide guidance for improving governance on the basis of the competences and collaborations of participating organisations.