Abstract
When environmental processes cut across socioeconomic boundaries, traditional top-down government approaches struggle to effectively manage and conserve ecosystems. In such cases, governance arrangements that foster multiactor collaboration are needed. The effectiveness of such arrangements, however, depends on how well any ecological interdependencies across governed ecosystems are aligned with patterns of collaboration. This inherent interdisciplinary and complex problem has impeded progress in developing a better understanding of how to govern ecosystems for conservation in an increasingly interconnected world. We argue for the development of empirically informed theories, which are not only able to transcend disciplinary boundaries, but are also explicit in taking these complex social-ecological interdependences into account. We show how this emerging research frontier can be significantly improved by incorporating recent advances in stochastic modeling of multilevel social networks. An empirical case study from an agricultural landscape in Madagascar is reanalyzed to demonstrate these improvements.
Highlights
Ecosystems consist of numerous species and habitats interconnected across geographical and temporal scales (e.g., Christensen et al 1996)
We argue for the development of empirically informed theories, which are able to transcend disciplinary boundaries, but are explicit in taking these complex social-ecological interdependences into account. We show how this emerging research frontier can be significantly improved by incorporating recent advances in stochastic modeling of multilevel social networks
A primary advantage of exponential random graph models (ERGM) is that it enables empirical analysis to focus on a limited set of theoretically important building blocks in models that still capture the essential structural characteristics of the entire social-ecological network
Summary
Ecosystems consist of numerous species and habitats interconnected across geographical and temporal scales (e.g., Christensen et al 1996). A central hypothesis from contemporary research has been that governance arrangements incorporating collaboration across multiple scales and jurisdictions are needed to meet the collective dilemmas arising from a world being socially and ecologically increasingly interconnected (Folke et al 2005, Klijn and Skelcher 2007, Ansell and Gash 2008, Brondizio et al 2009, Walker et al 2009, Cosens 2013, McAllister et al 2015a) Building on this general call for collaboration, we argue that it is important to make more precise assertions about how, and under what conditions, collaboration improves governance of complex and boundary-spanning ecosystems. Effective collaboration requires knowledge on how ecosystems’ components interact across various geographical and jurisdictional boundaries
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