Social Networks of Institutions and Legal Processes: Case of Hydropower, Fish and Water Permits

Hydropower dams obstruct fish migration and typically require regulatory measures to mitigate or compensate for the losses in fish stock. These can be in the form of monetary payments or structural measure like fish passages. In Finland, these measures are provisioned in water permits which historically have been de-facto permanent as no practical legal instruments have existed to alter or review the permits. Changes in national legislation, however, have allowed the permit-issuing authority to review and alter the measures upon application. Altering the measures presents a conflict between two vital interests: the restoration of river courses and fish populations, and power production and energy security.
We explore this conflict by using a social network model to analyse the institutional setting of three regulatory processes aiming to alter water permits and the compensatory measures provisioned therein. This is approached through two research questions: what the legal framework is, and how is it utilized by relevant stakeholders. Our case is three major hydropower plants in Finland where the permit authority has reviewed the permits following legal argumentation from proponents of opposing interests. We first analyse and code the relevant legislation using Institutional Grammar (IG) Framework, which systematically represents and examines institutional and governance rules. Second, we transform the coded syntactic IG components into a social network consisting of nodes, edges, flows, and protocols. Finally, we use natural language processing (NLP) to parse the permit application documents, revealing how stakeholders —such as permit holders (power companies), fisheries authorities, and municipalities— utilize the network through legal argumentation.
The study increases the understanding of the ways the actors operating in the same governance context —in this case hydropower and its fisheries impacts— utilise the legal framework to promote their differing interests. Methodologically the study contributes to the fields of Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Policy Analysis in several ways. First, it allows for the systematic analysis of extensive policy and legal documents with the help of NLP, thus significantly reducing manual labor. Second, its network conceptualization includes protocols and flows, which are often overlooked in SNA studies. Finally, it further bridges IG with SNA by linking more syntactic components of IG with network theory allowing analysis of both the existing institutional setting and its operationalization. The method demonstrates how computational methods can be used to analyse the dynamics of environmental conflict through social and legal perspective.