Social-ecological Complexity Research Articles

Four Cultural Narratives for Managing Social-ecological Complexity in Public Natural Resource Management

Public Natural Resource Management (NRM) agencies operate in complex social-ecological domains. These complexities proliferate unpredictably therefore investigating and supporting the ability of public agencies to respond effectively is increasingly important. However, understanding how public NRM agencies innovate and restructure to negotiate the range of particular complexities they face is an under researched field. One particular conceptualisation of the social-ecological complexities facing NRM agencies that is of growing influence is the Water–Energy–Food (WEF) nexus. Yet, as a tool to frame and understand those complexities it has limitations. Specifically, it overlooks how NRMs respond institutionally to these social-ecological complexities in the context of economic and organisational challenges—thus creating a gap in the literature. Current debates in public administration can be brought to bear here. Using an organisational cultures approach, this paper reports on a case study with a national NRM agency to investigate how they are attempting to transform institutionally to respond to complexity in challenging times. The research involved 12 elite interviews with senior leaders from Natural Resources Wales, (NRW) and investigated how cultural narratives are being explicitly and implicitly constructed and mobilised to this end. The research identified four distinct and sequential cultural narratives: collaboration, communication, trust, and empowerment where each narrative supported the delivery of different dimensions of NRW’s social-ecological complexity mandate. Counter to the current managerialist approaches in public administration, these results suggest that the empowerment of expert bureaucrats is important in responding effectively to complexity.

How Feasible Is the Scaling-Out of Livelihood and Food System Adaptation in Asia-Pacific Islands?

The sustainable development and food security of islands in the Asia-Pacific region is severely compromised by climate change, sea level rise and compounding socio-economic issues. To achieve a step-change in food production and climate adaptation, livelihoods must rapidly transform. Food security programs continue to apply the ‘pipeline’ model of scaling-out technological innovations, but do not account for the social-ecological complexity of islands. We tested the feasibility of scaling-out adaptation strategies in two provinces in the region: Nusa Tenggara Barat in Indonesia, and West New Britain in Papua New Guinea. Guided by a sub-district typology of resource use, we trialled a participatory, systems-based livelihood adaptation pathways approach in sub-district case studies. The process aimed to mainstream social learning and future uncertainty into community development decision-making, yielding ‘no regrets’ adaptation strategies to transform livelihoods. We tested two assumptions: first, that because the contexts of all villages were homogenous, strategies were sufficiently similar to enable scaling-out across the provinces; second, that the sub-district typologies would assist scaling-out within each type. The results showed that the first assumption was untenable: there was very little similarity amongst villages’ strategies; only sustainable fisheries management was scalable amongst coastal villages. The second was marginally tenable, because there were strong similarities amongst villages in an off-shore island type. When pooled into classes of adaptation strategy, most related to practice and behaviour change, and addressed systemic social issues; very few were technological. Our results suggest that scaling-out livelihood and food system innovations is not feasible due to the complex social-ecological contexts within islands, caused by steep climate gradients, natural resource and cultural diversity. We discuss the limitations of a resource use typology that aimed to mitigate this complexity and guide scaling-out. Instead we argue that appropriate social learning approaches akin to livelihood adaptation pathways must be mainstreamed into existing community development decision cycles, thereby ‘scaling-up’ and ‘scaling-deep’ to tackle institutional, political and cultural barriers to transformation. We discuss the implications of our recommendations for government and donor support for food security programs in islands of the Asia-Pacific region, and future research priorities.

Recreation as a Social-Ecological Complex Adaptive System

The environment and society are both the context for and product of human actions and interactions. Outdoor recreation is the primary interaction many people have with the environment and it is an interaction that greatly contributes to human well-being. To sustainably manage the social and ecological components of outdoor recreation, an integrative and dynamic systems perspective is needed. Analyses that link recreation management and recreational experiences to both social and ecological outcomes across multiple sales and over time are not developed. This article will outline how a number of fragmented recreation management frameworks such as the recreation experience model, beneficial outcomes, the recreation opportunity spectrum, limits of acceptable change, and constraints theory can be organized within a larger social-ecological framework. The outdoor recreation meta-framework presented here links structuration theory from the social sciences with theories of complex adaptive systems and hierarchical patch dynamics from ecology to understand the human and ecological drivers for and responses to outdoor recreation.

Managing for the middle: rancher care ethics under uncertainty on Western Great Plains rangelands

Ranchers and pastoralists worldwide manage and depend upon resources from rangelands (which support indigenous vegetation with the potential for grazing) across Earth’s terrestrial surface. In the Great Plains of North America rangeland ecology has increasingly recognized the importance of managing rangeland vegetation heterogeneity to address conservation and production goals. This paradigm, however, has limited application for ranchers as they manage extensive beef production operations under high levels of social-ecological complexity and uncertainty. We draw on the ethics of care theoretical framework to explore how ranchers choose management actions. We used modified grounded theory analysis of repeated interviews with ranchers to (1) compare rancher decision-making under relatively certain and uncertain conditions and (2) describe a typology of practices used to prioritize and choose management actions that maintain effective stewardship of these often multi-generational ranches. We contrast traditional decision-making frameworks with those described by interviewees when high levels of environmental and market uncertainty or ecological complexity led ranchers toward use of care-based, flexible and relational frameworks for decision-making. Ranchers facing complexity and uncertainty often sought “middle-ground” strategies to balance multiple, conflicting responsibilities in rangeland social-ecological systems. For example, ranchers’ care-based decision-making leads to conservative stocking approaches to “manage for the middle,” e.g. to limit risk under uncertain weather and forage availability conditions. Efforts to promote heterogeneity-based rangeland management for biodiversity conservation through the restoration of patch burn grazing and prairie dog conservation will require increased valuation of ranchers’ care work.

A wider view of assessments of ecosystem services in coastal areas: the perspective of social-ecological complexity

A wider view of assessments of ecosystem services in coastal areas: the perspective of social-ecological complexity

Learning to live with social-ecological complexity: An interpretive analysis of learning in 11 UNESCO Biosphere Reserves

Learning is increasingly considered a means to achieve sustainability in practice and has become a prominent goal of sustainability interventions. The UNESCO World Network of Biosphere Reserves see ...

Competing Place Meanings in Complex Landscapes: A Social–Ecological Approach to Unpacking Community Conservation Outcomes on the Wild Coast, South Africa

ABSTRACTDespite a general awareness of the social–ecological complexities within which conservation interventions are embedded, approaches to understanding a diversity of local perspectives of heterogeneous landscapes and how they matter for the outcomes of these interventions are seldom demonstrated. We apply a social–ecological approach to exploring the multiple place meanings related to key landscape elements around a proposed community conservation intervention on the Wild Coast, South Africa, by identifying and analyzing three narratives about this impending change. These narratives mobilize competing meanings of the landscape to argue for or against the conservation project. By linking place meanings to locally defined landscape units (ecotopes), we engage multiple interpretations of the heterogeneous and changing landscape to gain a holistic and more inclusive picture of social–ecological landscape processes such as increasing woodlands and field abandonment. The obstruction of this particular intervention indicates the importance of engaging with multiple cultural values of nature.

Exploring Social-Ecological Complexities of Wetlands of International Importance (Ramsar Sites): the Carlos Anwandter Sanctuary (Valdivia, Chile) as a Case Study

Complexity is an accepted characteristic of social-ecological systems. However, its analysis has been mostly theoretical with few empirical studies. Complex systems share three features: radical openness (the system cannot be understood unless an extended, global, environment is considered), radical uncertainty (emergence and non-linearity make them impossible to be fully predictable) and contextuality (no unique way to know them). Social-ecological systems listed as important under international treaties, such as wetlands within the Ramsar Convention, share these features, which can be explored using case studies. In this article, we explore the complexities derived from the 2004 ecological change (i.e. the local collapse of an emblematic bird species) in the Carlos Anwandter Sanctuary, a Chilean coastal wetland, by means of two ten-year windows (scientific publications and Internet web pages). We based our analysis on the question: what is the state of knowledge, ten years after its ecological change? Results show many answers; science has several hypotheses with low testing possibilities. Still, civil society decided that only one (a forestry company guilty of producing the change) is valid. We discuss the role of international organizations when dealing with social-ecological conflicts and identify the conundrum that can develop in response to how these are handled.

Assessing the adaptive capacity of multi-level water governance: ecosystem services under climate change in Mälardalen region, Sweden

Adaptive and multi-level governance is often called for in order to improve the management of complex issues such as the provision of natural resources and ecosystem services. In this case study, we analyse the contemporary multi-level governance system that manages water resources and its ecosystem services in a fresh water lake in Sweden. We assess the relative importance and barriers of three commonly highlighted components of adaptive governance: “feeding ecological knowledge into the governance system”, “use of ecological knowledge to continuously adapt the governance system”, and “self-organisation by flexible institutions acting across multiple levels”. Findings reveal that the trickiest aspect of adaptive governance capacity to institutionalise is the iterative nature of feedbacks and learning over time, and that barriers to the spread of knowledge on social-ecological complexity through the governance systems are partly political, partly complexity itself, and partly a more easily resolved lack of coordination. We call for caution in trusting crisis management to build more long-lasting adaptive capacity, and we conclude that a process of institutionalising adaptive capacity is inherently contingent on political process putting issues on the agenda.

Integrative Governance of Environmental Water in Australia's Murray-Darling Basin: Evolving Challenges and Emerging Pathways.

Integration, a widely promoted response to the multi-scale complexities of social-environmental sustainability, is diversely and sometimes poorly conceptualized. In this paper we explore integrative governance, which we define as an iterative and contextual process for negotiating and advancing the common interest. We ground this definition in a discussion of institutional factors conditioning integrative governance of environmental water in Australia's Murray-Darling Basin. The Murray-Darling Basin is an iconic system of social-ecological complexity, evocative of large-scale conservation challenges in other developed arid river basins. Our critical assessment of integrative governance practices in that context emerges through analysis of interviews with policy participants and documents pertaining to environmental water management in the tri-state area of southwestern New South Wales, northwestern Victoria, and the South Australian Riverland. We identify four linked challenges: (i) decision support for developing socially robust environmental water management goals, (ii) resource constraints on adaptive practice, (iii) inter-state differences in participatory decision-making and devolution of authority, and (iv) representative inclusion in decision-making. Our appraisal demonstrates these as pivotal challenges for integrative governance in the common interest. We conclude by offering a perspective on the potential for supporting integrative governance through the bridging capacity of Australia's Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder.

Discourses, Narratives and Purposeful Action – Unraveling the Social–Ecological Complexity within the Brahmaputra Basin in India

AbstractIssues of disaster and governance in the Brahmaputra Basin of India have been part of different debates within the epistemic boundaries. This study of a social–ecological regime shift, from a prosperous paddy cultivated region within the north bank of the Upper Brahmaputra Valley to a sediment deposited wasteland, unravels the complex relations between narratives of a problem and purposeful action. It is found that policy and practice solutions may not always be grounded in the problem situation but can be shaped by wider discourses and social learning. The study illustrates the continuation of engineering solutions without deeper understanding of their influence on social dynamics, the typification of community behaviour with an ignorance of cultural legacies, and a lack of prioritization of adaptation needs in the novel social–ecological conditions of the region. The conceptual frameworks of flood control debates contribute to distinct discourses influencing policy and praxis, while the discontented riparian community is motivated, by actors influenced by identity and space politics, towards political autonomy. Such influences of opposing discourses may reinforce the narrative of a trust gap between the Indian polity and its Northeast Region. The study further identifies a latent capacity for flexibility in the community, which requires more attention from policy and praxis to explore management solutions in such a complex social–ecological system. The paper argues for science, policy and practice engagements in such contexts and the use of transdisciplinary heuristics for their design to facilitate shared understanding. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

A social–ecological approach to landscape epidemiology: geographic variation and avian influenza

Landscape structure influences host–parasite–pathogen dynamics at multiple scales in space and time. Landscape epidemiology, which connects disease ecology and landscape ecology, is still an emerging field. We argue that landscape epidemiology must move beyond simply studying the influence of landscape configuration and composition on epidemiological processes and towards a more comparative, systems approach that better incorporates social–ecological complexity. We illustrate our argument with a detailed review, based on a single conceptual systems model, of geographic variation in drivers of avian influenza in Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and Southern Africa. Our three study regions are similar in some ways but quite different in others. The same underlying mechanisms apply in all cases, but differences in the attributes of key components and linkages (most notably avian diversity, the abiotic environment, land use and land cover, and food production systems) create significant differences in avian influenza virus prevalence and human risk between regions. Landscape approaches can connect local- and continental-scale elements of epidemiology. Adopting a landscape-focused systems perspective on the problem facilitates the identification of the most important commonalities and differences, guiding both science and policy, and helps to identify elements of the problem on which further research is needed. More generally, our review demonstrates the importance of social–ecological interactions and comparative approaches for landscape epidemiology.

Erratum

Erratum

Social ecological complexity and resilience processes.

A social ecological model of resilience avoids the reductionism of simple explanations of the complex and multisystemic processes associated with well-being in contexts of adversity. There is evidence that when stressors are abnormally high, environmental factors account for more of an individual's resilience than do individual traits or cognitions. In this commentary, a social ecological model of resilience is discussed.

Modelling Tourism in the Galapagos Islands: An Agent-Based Model Approach

Currently tourism is the main driver of change in the Galapagos Islands, affecting the social, terrestrial, and marine sub-systems. Tourism also has direct and indirect consequences for the unique archipelago's natural habitats and for the human well-being. Describing the mechanisms that drive and affect most the tourism development in Galapagos is a preliminary condition to developing a better understanding of the interaction structure of factors that shape the Galapagos archipelago as a social-ecological complex system. In this paper, we present a first attempt to represent the touristic market in Galapagos trough an Agent Based Model (ABM) of touristic activity, focusing on touristic offers, reservations, and touristic activities. The model is based on an individual-based representation of tourists' consumption preferences and touristic accommodation offers in the Galapagos Islands. Tourist agents are created to mimic the real world by assigning average characteristics of individuals who visit the Galapagos Archipelago of Ecuador. The accommodation offers (i.e., hotels and cruises) are generated in accordance with actual conditions derived from data collected through field surveys. The model includes a market agent that can change the prices, create and delete accommodation offers following an evolutionary algorithm. We carried out preliminary simulations that show a close agreement between real world data and model outputs. Furthermore we used the model to generate three 'what if' scenarios in order to study how emergent patterns in the touristic market in Galapagos are affected by changes in the archipelago environment. In this way we illustrate how the model can be used as a useful tool to help public policy makers to explore the consequences of their decisions.

The politics, science and policy of reference points for resource management

Reference points are specific values related to the state of a resource to which targets and limits for harvest management can be set. Although reference points evolved within fisheries science, they are likely to be widely applicable across a range of ecosystems and environments, as the principles behind their development and implementation apply to any harvested system. This special issue ofEnvironmental Conservationtakes a critical look at the ways in which reference points have been used previously, including the political, scientific and management contexts that have hindered and enabled their implementation. Through these experiences, a range of recommendations are made, highlighting the importance of social context in which biological reference points are developed and in favour of approaches that deal explicitly with uncertainty. When implemented without qualification, reference points have proven effective at preventing fisheries collapse and rebuilding depleted stocks; where they have not, management failures have occurred. Given the social-ecological complexity of fisheries management, the papers in this special issue provide a strong argument for the application of reference points across a range of resource management problems.

Hotspot and relationship identification in multiple landscape services: A case study on an area with intensive human activities

The identification of the relationships between different landscape services is important in social–ecological complex systems, especially in areas with intensive human activities. In this paper, Beijing and its peripheral regions are taken as a case study to calculate and map the intensities of five classic landscape services including material production, carbon storage, soil retention, habitat conservation, and population support based on grid maps. Overlap and correlation analyses were used to identify multiple service hotspots and the relationships between landscape services. The results show that (1) landscape services have spatial heterogeneity: high-intensity area of material production and population support is on the southeast plains of this region and high-intensity area of soil retention and habitat conservation is on the northwest; (2) approximately 96.03% of the region can provide at least one type of landscape services, whereas approximately three-quarters of the area provide multiple services, with the multiple service hotspots surrounding Beijing and Tianjin; (3) correlations exist between all pairs of landscape services, but strong correlations (correlation coefficient >0.5 or <−0.5) exist between four pairs, which are soil retention and habitat conservation (0.672), soil retention and population support (−0.613), habitat conservation and population support (−0.540), and material production and population support (0.529); (4) the services can be divided into two trade-off service bundles: the “natural” bundle, which contains carbon storage, soil retention, and habitat conservation, and the “artificial” bundle, which contains material production and population support. Only 4.19% of the area in this region contains these service bundles simultaneously. Finally, an improved understanding of the relationships between services was illustrated, and the importance of such services was highlighted for decision-makers and stakeholders.

TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: SUSTAINABLE ENERGY SYSTEMS IN THE AFRICAN CONTEXT

Technology assessment is an important component for effective technology management (TM) and occurs in initial technology life-cycle phases. However, technology assessment practices have largely evolved in developed countries. Current technology assessment methods also do not consider social-ecological complexity, which is important if the sustainability of technologies is to be assessed; this is especially true of energy systems in developing countries. This paper subsequently investigates how the understanding of the principles of sustainability science may lead to better assessment practices that can be used upfront, in the TM cycle, by policy- and decision-makers of renewable energy technologies in the African context.

Biodiversity conservation across scales: lessons from a science–policy dialogue

One of the core challenges of biodiversity conservation is to better understand the interconnectedness and interactions of scales in ecological and governance processes. These interrelationships constitute not only a complex analytical challenge but they also open up a channel for deliberative discussions and knowledge exchange between and among various societal actors which may themselves be operating at various scales, such as policy makers, land use planners, members of NGOs, and researchers. In this paper, we discuss and integrate the perspectives of various disciplines academics and stakeholders who participated in a workshop on scales of European biodiversity governance organised in Brussels in the autumn of 2010. The 23 participants represented various governmental agencies and NGOs from the European, national, and sub-national levels. The data from the focus group discussions of the workshop were analysed using qualitative content analysis. The core scale-related challenges of biodiversity policy identified by the participants were cross-level and cross-sector limitations as well as ecological, social and social-ecological complexities that potentially lead to a variety of scale-related mismatches. As ways to address these cha&shy;llenges the participants highlighted innovations, and an aim to develop new interdisciplinary approaches to support the processes aiming to solve current scale challenges.

Building on qualitative datasets and participatory processes to simulate land use change in a mountain watershed of Northwest Vietnam

In this article we investigate if qualitative soil fertility datasets derived during participatory processes can be combined with a corresponding land use change model (i) to improve the understanding of the social-ecological complexity of land use change and (ii) to allow testing of alternative scenarios even in data-poor environments. To test this hypothesis, a participatory assessment approach was combined with the spatially explicit, soil fertility driven FALLOW (Forest, Agroforest, Low-value Landscape Or Wasteland?) model. For a case study village in Northwest Vietnam, participatory evaluations with two age groups of farmers were employed in an iterative way to derive qualitative and quantitative model input data to test scenarios of current and improved management on upland soil fertility evolution with FALLOW. The indigenous colour-based soil quality classification was successfully integrated into the Trenbath FALLOW soil module. The model baseline scenario was validated by calculating the goodness-of-fit of model outputs with land cover maps (F t 0.78) from remote sensing. Model scenario analysis suggested a masking effect of ongoing soil fertility decline by use of fertilizers and hybrid crop varieties, indicating a resource overuse that becomes increasingly irreversible without external interventions. Simulations further suggest that success of introduction of improved cropping management methods becomes less effective with increasing soil degradation and cannot fully restore initial soil fertility. We conclude that the coupled semi-quantitative approach is useful at the village level as it generated meaningful insights into local land use change dynamics without the need for long-term and data-intensive studies.