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

Agencies focused on protected areas’ conservation and recreation require internal capacity-building to enhance their organizational resilience (the ability to adapt and persist). Yet, internal capacity-building is often underemphasized as agencies attend to external relationships. This omission can lessen an agency’s ability to adapt to emergent stressors and opportunities. Specifically, relationships within an agency’s groups (i.e., divisions)—the intra-organizational mesoscale between individuals and whole organizations—can increase an agency’s ability to efficiently build resilience-enhancing adaptive capacity. The U.S. National Park Service (NPS) adopted this mesoscale in their Urban Agenda goal of One NPS, or building resilience-enhancing, agency-wide internal relationships. We investigated intra-organizational relationships in this context, examining relationships within (i.e., bonds) and across (i.e., bridges) three NPS groups: parks (physical spaces), programs (community outreach), and offices (administrative functions). Pairing qualitative interviews with quantitative social network analysis in Detroit, Tucson, and Boston, we examined internal relationship prevalence, supports, and opportunities. The NPS has program and office presence in each of these three urban areas but different proximities to national park units, which are the typical face of the NPS. Across these urban areas, we found that the parks group exhibits more bonds (park-to-park relationships), the programs group exhibits more bridges (program-to-park or program-to-office), and the offices group exhibits a mixture of bonds and bridges. To further One NPS and organizational resilience, cultivating bridges among the three groups is key. This investigation may inform a more strategic focusing of an agency’s limited resources. We highlight five directions for protected area managers’ consideration toward this aim: build bridges locally among groups; consider group composition when identifying divisions (i.e., programs appear more heterogeneous or dissimilar from each other than do the park and office groups); reflect on parks’ centrality to NPS identity and relationships; seek organizational structures supportive of relationship development; and focus on the organizational mesoscale for resilience-enhancing adaptive capacity. These directions for strategic focusing of organizational resources are based in the longstanding work of the NPS but ultimately transcend this single agency, providing targeted guidance for protected area agencies in building internal capacity toward external, public-oriented goals.