Social network actors and novel information for adaptive capacity

Social network theory (SNT) and social network analysis are used in this chapter as a theoretical frame to examine how social networks function and if/how community members share information within the networks that then facilitate their coping or adaptive capacity to climate vulnerability. SNT has been used to interpret human relationships through nodes and ties, where a node is the individual actor in the network and ties are the relationships between the actors. Together with social network analysis, the theory has been applied to map human connections, patterns of communications, and their implications (Barnes, 1954; Granovetter, 1973; Rogers, 1986; Wasserman and Faust, 1994; Haythornthwaite, 1996).