Editorial overview: Sustainability science: social–environmental systems (SES) research: how the field has developed and what we have learned for future efforts

Abstract

In 2009, Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for her contributions to the governance of commonly owned resources. She was the founder of the International Forestry Resources and Institutions program (IFRI), and the co-founder of the Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change (CIPEC), and the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, all of which provided lively arenas in which natural and social scientists from diverse disciplines collaborated. Forests and their transformations as well as ways to conserve them to serve people's needs was one of the urgent research topics Elinor Ostrom investigated. Her contributions were significant for forest management and conservation and informed her work on the commons and institutional diversity. Lessons from these Ostrom-led efforts proved that self-governance was possible but that it depended on multiple factors. In her work with economic experiments, Ostrom was able to replicate important findings that gave support to case studies from IFRI and CIPEC. She showed that panaceas did not exist for resource management challenges. Ostrom's work showed the value of building multinational, multidisciplinary, and comparative research bridging the social and natural sciences and the complexity of governance systems. These multiple layers and complexity are reflected in her Socio-Ecological Systems framework (SES).