Measuring What Matters

Social Network Analysis as a Forward-Looking Indicator for QI Development

Developing a new QI service for an emerging sector takes far longer than it might seem. Before a laboratory test or certification scheme can be offered to the market, an institution must first build staff capacity, acquire and calibrate instruments, develop and validate test methods, and often navigate accreditation processes. This full development chain can consume a substantial part of a development project's lifespan. The consequence for project monitoring is uncomfortable: standard output indicators (services launched, standards adopted) materialise too late to guide implementation decisions.

In PTB's regional project Quality Infrastructure for the Circular Economy in Latin America and the Caribbean (QI4CE, 2020–2024), we faced exactly this problem. The circular economy is a fast-moving field, and the QI organisations involved were often encountering it for the first time. We needed indicators that could tell us whether the project was on the right track before any new service reached the market.

Relationships before services

Our core hypothesis was that QI service development is essentially a social process. Before an institution can design a relevant service for the circular economy, it must first understand the actors within it, including their processes, quality problems, and unmet needs. That understanding only comes through sustained interaction. Once it exists, needs-based service design becomes possible, and co-development with users accelerates both the quality and the uptake of what is built. In short, relationships are a necessary precondition for relevant service innovation.

To test this, we applied longitudinal social network analysis (SNA) across three sectors: plastics, agri-food, and construction. SNA maps out who knows whom and who collaborates with whom, quantifying these relationships as networks of nodes (organisations) and links (interactions). Applied over time, it captures how a network grows, how diverse it becomes, and which actors are most central, that is, most embedded in collaboration. We tracked 150 QI organisations and 650 circular economy stakeholders over three annual survey rounds.

What the data showed

The figure below shows the innovation collaboration network in 2021 (left) and 2023 (right). The contrast is sharp: at the outset, a fragmented archipelago of nationally isolated clusters, each anchored by a single dominant actor. By the end of the project, a densely interconnected regional network with multiple transnational linkages.

Figure: Evolution of QI–CE innovation networks, 2021 (left) and 2023 (right). Each node is an organisation; colours indicate the country. Source: Harmes-Liedtke et al. (2026).

Quantitatively, innovation collaboration links grew by over 600% between 2021 and 2023. Organisations that participated intensively in project activities tripled their centrality scores, i.e. the size of their collaboration network, compared to non-participants. Crucially, these SNA metrics proved to be statistically significant predictors of actual service innovation: 68% of surveyed organisations developed new or adapted QI service offers, such as calibration services, proficiency testing schemes, new certification programmes, or adopted standards, during the project period.

From network metrics to monitoring signals

The practical implication is that SNA metrics (centrality, network size, organisational heterogeneity) can serve as leading indicators of QI service development. Consider a concrete example: if a national accreditation body shows rising centrality in the innovation collaboration network, meaning it is increasingly collaborating with plastics recyclers, certification bodies and standardisation institutes, that is a meaningful early signal that new conformity assessment service offers are in preparation, well before any accreditation scheme reaches the market. The distinction matters for measurement: our survey separated general cooperation on circular-economy topics from joint work on a concrete service, method or scheme. Both are worth tracking, but it is the second type of tie that anticipates a service reaching the market. The metric responds to project interventions, is observable at annual intervals, and anticipates the output indicators that will only appear later. One caveat should be stated plainly: the network responds to any intervention that touches it, whether a PTB project, another donor programme, a regulatory change, or an initiative the actors launch themselves. The attribution gap that plagues output indicators does not disappear. What SNA buys is earlier observation, not tighter causality, and reading it well requires knowing which other forces were at work in the same period.

The analysis also confirmed that organisations functioning as regional connectors, via bridging national silos and building transnational links, generated the highest innovation outcomes. Female leadership emerged as an additional driver of inclusive network development.

What this means for project monitoring

For QI projects that want to use this, we would suggest four practical steps.

• Build the network question into the regular monitoring survey rather than commissioning a separate study. Two or three questions per respondent are enough to reconstruct the network: who you work with, on what, and how intensively.

• Measure a baseline before the first intervention and repeat annually. SNA only becomes a leading indicator when it is longitudinal; a single snapshot says almost nothing.

• Pair the relational indicator with a service indicator from the start. Track rising centrality alongside the concrete service pipeline, i.e., methods under validation, schemes in preparation, accreditations applied for, so the correlation we found can be tested rather than assumed.

• Report the network measure as a signal to be interpreted, not as an achievement in itself. It should trigger a management conversation about where to focus next, not a claim of success.

That last point deserves emphasis, because the main risk in using these indicators is mistaking activity for progress. Networks can grow busily without producing anything: workshops attended, memoranda signed, working groups convened, and no test method validated at the end of it. In some settings this can become pure actionism, with visible activity and no tangible result; even in QI4CE, where the correlation held, roughly a third of the organisations surveyed had not brought a new or adapted service offer forward by the end of the project. A rising centrality score is therefore a question, not an answer. It should prompt the project team to ask what concrete service the new relationships are producing, and to intervene if the answer is nothing.

Our recommendation to colleagues designing new QI projects is to pilot this deliberately: apply the SNA indicator in a small number of projects across different country contexts, alongside the usual output indicators, and check whether increased interaction really does precede new service offers. QI4CE suggests it does in a fast-moving field where the actors barely knew each other at the outset. Whether the same holds in settings with denser existing relationships, or in institutional cultures where convening is easier than delivering, is an open question worth answering with evidence rather than assumption.

Read the full study — and join the conversation

These findings are published open access in Global Sustainability: Harmes-Liedtke, Matta, Muñoz & Canelas (2026), "Collaborative networks for circularity," https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2026.10058.

Have you used network-based indicators in your own QI projects, or are you grappling with the same monitoring gap? We would welcome an exchange with practitioners experimenting with similar approaches. Share your experience in the comments or reach out directly to the authors.