Re-examining balinese subaks through the lens of cultural multilevel selection

Jeremy Brooks,William Burnside,Victoria Reyes-García

doi:10.1007/s11625-017-0453-1

Abstract

Overcoming environmental challenges requires understanding when and why individuals adopt cooperative behaviors, how individual behaviors and interactions among resource users change over time, and how group structure and group dynamics impact behaviors, institutions, and resource conditions. Cultural multilevel selection (CMLS) is a theoretical framework derived from theories of cultural evolution and cultural group selection that emphasizes pressures affecting different levels of social organization as well as conflicts among these levels. As such, CMLS can be useful for understanding many environmental challenges. With this paper, we use evidence from the literature and hypothetical scenarios to show how the framework can be used to understand the emergence and persistence of sustainable social–ecological systems. We apply the framework to the Balinese system of rice production and focus on two important cultural traits (synchronized cropping and the institutions and rituals associated with water management). We use data from the literature that discusses bottom-up (self-organized, complex adaptive system) and top-down explanations for the system and discuss how (1) the emergence of group structure, (2) group-level variation in cropping strategies, institutions, and rituals, and (3) variation in overall yields as a result of different strategies and institutions, could have allowed for the spread of group-beneficial traits and the increasing complexity of the system. We also outline cultural transmission mechanisms that can explain the spread of group-beneficial traits in Bali and describe the kinds of data that would be required to validate the framework in forward-looking studies.

Highlights

Environmental challenges, including the sustainable management of common pool resources (CPR), share three features
While a full review of the evidence for both perspectives is beyond the scope of this paper, we argue that the Cultural multilevel selection (CMLS) framework can be used to understand how such a system could have emerged through top-down forces and selection pressures
We have applied the CMLS framework to a well-known, complex social–ecological system to show how the framework can be used to understand the emergence and persistence of a sustainable social–ecological system. To this end we combined evidence from the literature with hypothetical scenarios to discuss: (1) the emergence of group structure, (2) variation in cropping strategies, institutions, and rituals adopted by groups, (3) how variation in yields as a result of different strategies, institutions, and rituals could have created the conditions for group selection pressures to outweigh individual selection pressures, and (4) the cultural transmission mechanisms that can explain the spread of group-beneficial traits

Summary

Introduction

Environmental challenges, including the sustainable management of common pool resources (CPR), share three features They are often the result of social dilemmas, or situations in which the interests of the individual conflict with those of the group (Gardner and Stern 1996). Environmental challenges are often embedded in social–ecological systems containing multiple groups and exhibiting hierarchical group structure (e.g., households, villages, communities, state/regional governments, etc.) (Ostrom 2010) Given these features, overcoming environmental challenges requires understanding when and why individuals adopt cooperative behaviors to overcome social dilemmas, how individual behaviors and interactions among resource users change over time, and how group. Generalizable insights into the causal mechanisms affecting change across organizational levels have been elusive (Waring et al 2015). We aim to demonstrate that a cultural multilevel selection framework can provide important insights about the evolution of social–ecological systems

Objectives

Conclusion