Revisiting the drought-food insecurity nexus: a social-ecological systems perspective

Advances in the study of Mexican fisheries with the social-ecological system (SES) perspective and its inclusion in fishery management policy

The social-ecological systems (SES) perspective stems from the need to rethink the ways humans relate to the environment, given the evidence that conventional conservation and management approaches are often ineffective in dealing with complex socio-environmental problems. The SES approach conceives non-scientific and scientific knowledge as equally necessary in the process of management and public policy formation. Thus, the adoption of the SES approach must also serve to make better decisions about what kind of science and technology would be ‘public policy-ready’ (as well as also ‘policy-relevant’); that is, a science oriented and conceived to provide concrete solutions to societal needs and demands. Here we review and reinterpret the SES perspective as a real paradigm change for conservation science. Under the lenses of philosophy, we try to untangle some weak points of the SES approach in order to advance to a conservation science closer to the process of science-based public policy creation and to enhance the intertwining with other types of knowledge. In this sense, we discuss how co-production of knowledge and decision-making process under the SES perspective are a huge step forward towards fulfilling the need to bring increasingly closer the spheres of science and policy, narrowing its interface. EDITED BY Patrick O’Farrell

Integrated Management of Coasts in Times of Global Change – A Social–Ecological System Perspective – Introduction and Volume Synthesis

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to look at the potential synergies between tourism and landscapes and examine the potential contribution of tourism to build social-ecological resilience in the Dutch Wadden.Design/methodology/approachThe authors reveal how a social-ecological systems perspective can be used to conceptualize the Wadden as a coupled and dynamic system. This paper is a conceptual analysis that applies this approach to the Dutch Wadden. The data used for the inquiry primarily comes from a literature review.FindingsThe authors argue that the social-ecological systems perspective is a useful approach and could be used to improve the governance of multi-functional socio-ecological systems in coastal areas. Opportunities for synergies between tourism and landscapes have been overlooked. The authors consider that tourism and nature protection are potentially compatible and that the synergies should be identified.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper is only a conceptual application rather than an empirical case study. Further research to actually apply the methodology is needed.Practical implicationsManagers of protected areas should consider applying a social-ecological systems approach.Social implicationsThe views of a wide variety of stakeholders should be considered in landscape planning.Originality/valueThe value of this paper lies in the articulation of the social-ecological systems perspective as a way to identify and understand the complex interactions between tourism and landscape, and the potential synergies between them.

This chapter offers insights from the environmental management paradigm of 'social-ecological systems' and related bodies of theory on people-environment relationships to assist the evolution of the One Health interdisciplinary endeavour of health promotion across human-animal ecosystem relationships. It also seeks to expand thinking about the social and cultural dimensions that are likely to prove important in the development of thinking and practice in the One Health field. It advocates consideration of cultural and economic relationships affecting people's interactions with domesticated and wild animal species and ecosystems, and exploration of the cognitive and behavioural aspects of these interactions.

Prager, S. D., and C. Pfeifer. 2015. Network approaches for understanding rainwater management from a social-ecological systems perspective. Ecology and Society 20(4):13. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-07950-200413

Current trends in the analysis of co-management arrangements in coral reef ecosystems: a social–ecological systems perspective

Non-technical summaryIt is no longer possible nor desirable to address the dual challenges of equity and sustainability separately. Instead, they require new thinking and approaches which recognize their interlinkages, as well as the multiple perspectives and dimensions involved. We illustrate how equity and sustainability are intertwined, and how a complex social–ecological systems lens brings together advances from across the social and natural sciences to show how (in)equity and (un)sustainability are produced by the interactions and dynamics of coupled social–ecological systems. This should help understand which possible pathways could lead to sustainable and fair futures.

The rapid development of urbanization has led to a continuous migration of rural labor to cities, while also facilitating the widespread adoption of digital technologies in both urban and rural areas. The existing literature predominantly focuses on the negative impact of labor outflow on rural collective action, with insufficient research addressing how to mitigate these adverse effects. By using the social–ecological systems framework, and based on survey data from 131 villages across 14 cities in Guangxi, China, this study finds that digital technologies can alleviate the negative impact of labor outflow on irrigation collective action. The relationship between labor outflow, irrigation collective action, and the use of digital technologies is particularly evident in villages located in non-plain regions, those with distinctive cultural resources, high collective economic income, and restructured planning, and where technological advancements have been promoted. The findings of this study highlight a beneficial relationship between the phenomena of labor outflow and the diffusion of digital technologies, both of which are consequences of urbanization. This suggests that issues arising from urbanization can also be addressed and resolved through urbanization itself. The conclusions offer a new perspective for understanding the interactions between variables in social–ecological systems and provide a reference for developing countries to find suitable paths for combating rural decline and achieving sustainable rural development amidst rapid urbanization.

Advancing sustainability through mainstreaming a social–ecological systems perspective

Rural areas in Tibet, with its complex terrain, fragile ecology, and poor facilities, are subject to a combination of social–ecological system elements, facing the typical risks of recurrent, marginal, and potential poverty. At present, the spatial differentiation and driving mechanism of rural spatial poverty risk in Tibet are not clear, which adversely affects the formulation of differentiated and precise governance strategies. Thus, based on the social–ecological system perspective, 967 poor rural villages in eastern Tibet were taken as an example, using intelligent techniques such as random forest, geographic detector, and multi-scale geographically weighted regression to identify the spatial differentiation characteristics and the driving mechanism of poverty. The results indicated that (1) the high poverty incidence of rural areas in eastern Tibet showed a scattered block distribution, of which approximately 37% of the villages presented a spatial distribution characterised by a high degree of clustering of the high poverty incidence. (2) Topography and the level of public facilities were key factors influencing the poverty levels of rural areas in eastern Tibet, in which the coupling explanatory power between the construction land slope index (CLSI) and several poverty-causing factors was high. (3) Geological disaster, land surface temperature, CLSI, traffic accessibility, livestock resources, cropland per capita, and tourism resources differentially drove the poverty incidence of rural areas in eastern Tibet, forming spatial partitions dominated by the risks of potential, marginal, and recurrent poverty. For different partitions, differentiated governance strategies of upgrading ecological environments, optimising geographical locations, and revitalising social resources were proposed to provide references for solving the problem of relative poverty in the new period.

Much is known about disaster mitigation (DM) actions, but little is known about the impact of migration as an exogenous shock. Rural farmers in mountainous areas are under the pressure of poverty, and also face the threat of geo‐hazards. Therefore, a more complex relationship exists between rural farmers' willingness to out‐migration for work and their DM behavior. To gain insight into the relationship between the two, we constructed the social–ecological system (SES) framework based on the survey data of 864 households in 53 villages in Chongqing, and verified our findings using the endogenous switching regression model and the mediation effect model. The results show that labor out‐migration has a negative correlation with the DM behavior of peasant households. When the total effect is further categorized into the direct effect and mediation effect; the negative total effect of labor out‐migration on the DM of farmers changes from a significant to an insignificant negative direct effect. It can be seen that labor out‐migration is not the direct cause of low motivation for DM, but the loss of leadership caused by labor out‐migration, the dilution of farmers' sense of place, and the decline of farmers' risk perception are the causes that ultimately lead to the decline of farmers' action ability for DM. This study confirms that the SES framework is suitable for empirical research on how labor out‐migration affects the ability of local villages to ensure DM action. These findings add new theoretical insights to the literature on DM.

Recent environmental science and management approaches have evolved to better account for the complex dynamics among people and nature through utilization of a social-ecological systems (SES) perspective. Deployment of an SES perspective has been particularly useful for research at the land-sea interface, as different management techniques (e.g., shoreline hardening, living shorelines) can produce varying ecosystem services valued by different stakeholder groups, creating tradeoffs for decision-makers. While participatory science has enhanced stakeholder involvement in decision-making, few studies have examined barriers to participation and broader social inequities facilitated by coastal and fisheries management. My dissertation used a combination of ecological and social science methodologies to examine the impacts of shoreline alteration on the SES of Key West, Florida. First, I utilized underwater habitat assessments and visual fish surveys to investigate how habitat complexity, species richness, and fish abundance vary along a natural to armored shoreline gradient. I found that species richness and fish abundance increased with habitat complexity, all of which were highest along riprap revetments. However, species-specific analyses highlighted the importance of mangroves for commercially and recreationally important species such as Gray Snapper. To understand how this ecological variation translated to ecosystem services for fisheries, I conducted creel intercept surveys with shore-based fishers with a focus on identifying hypothesized inequities resulting from shoreline alteration. Results showed that low-income fishers and fishers of color are more likely to report barriers to shore-fishing and dissatisfaction with fishing regulations and fishing access, resulting in resource and spatial inequities. Importantly, low-income fishers and fishers of color were also more likely to be fishing for subsistence when compared to higher-income and white fishers, and they were fishing along natural mangroves and remote fishing locations not currently represented in state and federal agency intercept survey sampling protocols. Finally, to examine the impact of shoreline alteration on the community more broadly, I conducted intercept interviews with Key West residents post-Hurricane Irma to elicit mental models of the SES post-disaster. Mental models based on the participatory modeling technique of fuzzy cognitive mapping (FCM) indicated that residents perceive storm impacts differently based on their area of employment and subsequent direct experiences with differing system components. As a community, residents perceived natural shorelines (mangroves) to mitigate impacts of the storm on the environment, whereas seawalls were perceived to mitigate impacts on housing and beaches on tourism. Model results highlighted the tradeoffs of each shoreline type and the benefit of having a variety of infrastructure to achieve resiliency. Together, these studies highlight the importance of examining impacts and tradeoffs of various coastal management strategies for all stakeholders, particularly those who are traditionally underrepresented. Through coupled social-ecological research and enhanced participatory methods, more equitable management can be achieved.--Author's abstract

More sustainable environmental behavior and management is necessary if we are to sustain human well-being; however, current educational practices are not well aligned to support the development of environmentally informed citizens, including adequate teacher preparation. Classroom teachers are in a unique position to develop student skills and knowledge for sustainable environmental behavior through their teaching. Yet, teachers report a gap in their understanding of social-ecological systems, which presents a barrier to developing environmental citizens, or those enacting the skills and knowledge necessary for sustainable environmental behavior. This study focuses on the impact of a teacher professional development workshop designed to develop teachers’ understanding of local social-ecological systems. We explore the effects of the workshop through the framework of environmental citizenship which has five components: Ecological Literacy, Civics Literacy, Self-Efficacy, Values Awareness, and Practical Wisdom. The quasi-experimental design included a pre- and post-survey of teacher participants’ environmental citizenship. The Wilcoxon signed-rank test showed that the median posttest scores were significantly higher than the median pretest scores, indicating a statistically significant increase in environmental citizenship for all five components. The environmental citizenship of teachers has not been reported in the literature, despite the emerging importance of environmental citizenship dispositions for delivering social-ecological systems content. Although the nature of the study limits our ability to generalize beyond this case, our findings suggest that environmental citizenship may increase as a result of teacher professional development, with potential to inform the type of education that leads to fostering environmental citizenship in students.

The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 and the spread of COVID-19 is explored using a social-ecological systems (SES) framework. From an SES perspective, the pandemic is the outcome of feedback loops and cascading interactions within an anthropologically disturbed system. However, the SES framework tends to overemphasize human agency as drivers of system disequilibrium. Drawing on posthumanism theory in social science, the agency of the non-human world also plays a critical role in disturbances in SES. Non-human agency is incorporated into the SES framework, applying it to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 and the spread of COVID-19, and public health responses. The paper is interdisciplinary, and a non-systematic literature review was combined with Socratic dialogue to examine how human-induced changes trigger feedbacks in SES, such as SARS-CoV-2. The non-human world, embedded within a coupled system of material relations; the natural/biological element, that finds expression in the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 and in generating the genome novel recombinant, which aligns with the conceptualization of the non-human as “vibrant”, all play a role in shaping systems dynamics. This calls into question the anthropocentric view that human agency has the capacity to drive ecosystem dynamics. The implications for SES theory are discussed and we conclude with a case for a new ethics of interdependency to better serve SES analysis. The implications for practice, particularly considering projected future novel virus outbreaks, are discussed.