National Park Service Internal Structures Toward Agency Resilience: A Mixed-Methods, Multi-Site, Mesoscale Investigation

Abstract

A park and recreation agency’s internal capacity building is vital toward enhancing its resilience. Yet, internal capacity-building is often underemphasized as agencies attend to external relationships. This omission can lessen the ability of an agency to respond nimbly to long-standing needs and emergent opportunities. Specifically, relationships among groups within an agency – what is deemed the intra-organizational mesoscale between individuals and whole organizations – can increase an agency’s ability to meet goals efficiently, building resilience through increased knowledge and social capital. The U.S. National Park Service (NPS) adopted this mesoscale in their Urban Agenda goal of One NPS, or building resilience-focused, agency-wide internal connections. We investigated intra-organizational group relationships in this context, examining relationships within (i.e., bonds) and across (i.e., bridges) three groups found in the NPS and commonly in other park and recreation agencies: parks, programs, and offices. Pairing qualitative interviews with quantitative social network analysis in Detroit, Tucson, and Boston, we examined the relative prevalence of relationships alongside present and potential supports and opportunities. These three urban areas exemplify different proximities to national park units, which are the typical face of the NPS, plus they each have programs and offices. Findings suggest that across these urban areas, parks tend to favor bonds and programs tend to favor bridges, with offices playing a supporting role to both. To further build resilience, cultivating bridges is key, especially with programs (i.e., park-program and office-program efforts and connections). This investigation may inform a more strategic focusing of an agency’s limited resources. We highlight five directions for managerial consideration toward this aim: build local bridges, especially with programs; consider heterogeneity with the “programs” group (or how programs appear to be more dissimilar from each other than do those in the parks or offices groups); reflect on parks’ centrality to NPS identity and relationships; seek organizational structures supportive of relationship development; and examine the mesoscale for resilience. These directions for strategic focusing of organizational resources are based in the long-standing work of the NPS but ultimately transcend this single agency, providing targeted guidance for park and recreation organizations in their internal capacity-building toward external, public-oriented goals.