social-ecological systems

Posts Tagged ‘social-ecological systems’

29 Oct

Welcome to the Anthropocene

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized. Tagged: climate change, collaboration, complex adaptive systems, social-ecological systems, sustainability. 2 comments

It’s the time of year when the academic calendar starts to get long in the tooth, and I only occasionally have time to peek out from behind the curtain of campus. When I did this recently, I realized that there were a few phrases that I use regularly in my teaching and research that seem commonplace to me, but my friends outside of academia had no idea what I was talking about. This concerned me both because I was so out of touch but also because these seem, to my mind, to be crucially important concepts for today’s society. The two phrases were the Anthropocene and the Great Acceleration. I remember having similar feelings several years ago when I referred to global climate change, and I was met with either blank stares or a “you mean global warming” question. Happily, I generally hear global climate change today. I hope that soon I won’t encounter blank stares when I mention the Anthropocene.

To begin, the Anthropocene captures the idea that human society has so fundamentally altered the planet that we are no longer in the geological epoch known as the Holocene but now in a new human-dominated epoch, the Anthropocene. This is introduced by Will Steffen and others in a wonderful paper in Ambio in December 2007 (Steffen, W., Crutzen, P. J., & McNeill, J. R. (2007). The Anthropocene: are humans now overwhelming the great forces of nature. Ambio: A Journal of the Human Environment, 36(8), 614-621.). [Note: there are references to the Anthropocene going back several more years to 2000, but this article is 1) one of the most highly cited and 2) a really good read.]

The basic idea is that in the Pre-Anthropocene period, humans didn’t have the capacity or the technological means to dominate nature (the Earth Systems). This started to change in the Industrial Era (Stage 1 of the Anthropocene) from around 1800-1945. With the onset of industrialization, the expansion of the use of fossil fuels, and the advancements of technology, we began to transform the earth on a global scale. This shift from local effects to global was the key change.

Stage 2 of the Anthropocene (1945-present) is when things really started changing. This is known as the Great Acceleration. Pressure on the global environment intensified. Often people talk about exponential growth in population or the global economy, but the Great Acceleration goes far beyond that, as shown in the figure below.

The figure is from the very informative website: http://anthropocene.info/en/home. This website explains these ideas in much more detail with great references for further, more specific questions. This is interesting for a number of reasons. Of importance to me are a number of questions about the ramifications for social-ecological systems and what this means for changing how we govern and collectively make decisions in such an environment – in a world being altered at an accelerating pace, with increasing connectivity around the global between people and their aggregate actions. Ultimately, if humans are shaping the world in entirely new directions, can we also collectively decide the type of world that we want to live in and make decisions to get there.

I’ll end with one final comment. There is a proposal to formally adopt the Anthopocene as a geological epoch. It is currently under review with the International Commission on Stratigraphy, with a current target decision date of 2016. The question is whether geologic formations would show a distinct demarcation for when the Anthropocene began.

8 Oct

Linking Complexity and Indigenous Knowledge

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized. Tagged: American Indian Studies, anthropology, complex adaptive systems, complexity, social-ecological systems, sustainability. 2 comments

Let me begin by saying that I’m treading on ground that I’m only beginning to explore. However, I find it fascinating to think about linking cutting edge science with traditional knowledge systems. In a similar fashion to how ultra-conservative politicians often sounding like left-wingers and hyper-liberals sounding like John Birchers, it’s interesting to explore recent work in complex adaptive systems with very different ways of understanding the world.

Last week in my undergraduate course, Systems Thinking, my TA, Edward Dee, spoke about the Navajo knowledge system in which he was raised, and he began to clarify his own thinking about how many commonalities exist between complex adaptive systems and the Diné concept of hozho or the broader elements of Sa’ah Naagháí Bik’eh Hózh==n. (SNBH), which is often translated as “one’s journey of striving to live a long, harmonious life.” Edward noted common features of these two world views – in taking a holistic perspective, linking the social and ecological as a single entity, seeing emergent behavior (as in the example of the Red Ant Way in Diné tradition or how individual interactions lead to a collective behavior unpredicted by the individual actions in complexity jargon), and drawing on multiple ways of understanding.

In following up on his class, I came across a blog posting on hozho that clearly explains what I was trying to comprehend in a straightforward layperson’s account. The website is at resilience.org, which surprised me as I consider myself a scholar of Resilience Thinking. The website draws on the academic literature of resilience but does so in the pursuit of “resilient communities” as part of the Post Carbon Institute. I know very little about this organization at this point, but I did find the post on hozho to be very nice. Click here to see the article: http://www.resilience.org/stories/2011-02-14/desperately-seeking-hozho

Enjoy. I’ll post more as I learn more about the topic.

1 Aug

Ozone under a Social-Ecological Systems Lens

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized. Tagged: collective action, common-pool resources, social-ecological systems. Leave a comment

With my colleagues Graham Epstein, Chanda Meek, and Irene Perez-Ibarra, we have a manuscript coming out in the International Journal of the Commons this month, “Governing the Invisible Commons: Ozone Regulation and the Montreal Protocol”. We are very excited to see this in print for a number of reasons.

We wanted to highlight both how the SES framework and, as an extension, the SES Meta-Analysis Database could be used for pollution cases, and we wanted to show the insights gained by such an analysis in general. This goes against some commonly held beliefs on the generalizability of case studies. We believe that the manuscript makes important independent contributions related to the relevance of CPR theory and the SES framework to large-scale pollution cases. As the analysis shows several factors associated with CPR theory such as proportionality, political participation, and nested governance are associated with substantial reductions in ODS emissions. This suggests that common-pool resources and scale may not act as a boundary for CPR theory which may apply to a wider range of goods and environmental problems. Second, the SESMAD approach draws attention to the complexity of social-ecological systems which is often lost in narrow theoretical accounts. Many past studies apply a a single theoretical lens to analyze the Montreal Protocol, and focus on one or a few variables. Given well-known problems with applying singular models to cases, we believe that our approach which draws attention to some of the real-world complexity of the case is, at a minimum, a useful complement to other studies and at best draws attention to the multiplicity of factors whose interactions led to its success. Given the general failure of a Montreal Protocol type approach to resolve problems associated with climate change, it would seem that such considerations possess both theoretical and policy-relevant value.

We think that the greatest strength of the case study utilizing the framework is its development of a systematic approach to perform within-case analysis using snapshots over time. This allowed us to identify important changes that may have contributed to the general success of the Montreal Protocol. However, we acknowledge weaknesses in reducing the level of measurement associated with some variables, the loss of dimensionality of others, and the averaging over heterogeneity in some as well.

(Thanks to my co-authors for their brilliant insights.)

Ozone Layer from 1979-2008 from NASA

25 Jul

Social-Ecological-Technical Systems

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized. Tagged: academia, complexity, social-ecological systems, sustainability, teaching. 2 comments

In the next month, I will kick off a new required course designed for ASU’s School of Sustainability’s incoming graduate students. The course is called “Social-Ecological-Technical Systems”. This literature based seminar course will guide students in developing an integrated approach/framework for thinking about complex adaptive systems in a sustainability context. While overviews of content, theories and methods from each of the SETS domains (Social, Ecological and Technical Systems) will be presented, the primary focus will be on how to bring these domains together. The goal is to enable students to explore the SETS interfaces (intersections) from an integrated perspective and to equip students to make those linkages in their research and in subsequent elective courses.

Translated into everyday language, we hope to get students thinking in a more holistic manner across a wider range of knowledge domains. Most of the sustainability problems confronting humanity are not pure social, political, or economic in nature. Nor are they environmental problems apart from human contribution and influence. Likewise, the causes of and solutions to these problems are also not exclusively technical. Rather, they are a conflagration of these three knowledge domains. While we cannot expect anyone to be a master of all, we do hope to provide a baseline standard and recognition of how various fields inform our study of phenomena of interest and contribute to our understanding of them. As such, the course will require reading seminal literature on a wide range of topics – biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services, environmental and natural resource economics, industrial ecology, and resilience/robustness and many others. If you have suggestions for topics that we should be covering or readings that we should do, please let me know. We have a planned syllabus, but this has great scope and potential as a grand experiment.

30 May

Short Introduction to Resilience Thinking

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized. Tagged: ecosystem services, RAYS, resilience, social-ecological systems. Leave a comment

Courtesy of the wonderful Communications and Marketing people at Stockholm Resilience Centre, the soon-to-be released book by the Resilience Alliance Young Scholars group, Principles for Building Resilience: Sustaining Ecosystem Services in Social-Ecological Systems with Cambridge University Press, has a 20 page brochure that provides a wonderful short course on resilience available in hard copy or free online at: http://www.stockholmresilience.org/21/research/research-news/4-22-2014-applying-resilience-thinking.html

The pamphlet highlights the content of the forthcoming book and provides examples that put the theory into practice. The book identifies seven principles that are considered crucial for building resilience in social-ecological systems and discusses how these principles can be practically applied. The seven principles are 1) maintain diversity and redundancy, 2) manage connectivity, 3) manage slow variables and feedbacks, 4) foster complex adaptive systems thinking, 5) encourage learning, 6) broaden participation, and 7) promote polycentric governance systems.

Each chapter of the book introduces and defines one of the principles and then proceeds to detail how the principle enhances resilience and the context in which resilience may be compromised. Importantly, the book chapters go beyond theory to identify how the principles can be operationalized and applied (the application of resilience thinking to real-world situations). Further the chapters identify gaps in both research and application. While the chapters are chock full of examples, they also contain longer case studies that draw out the nuances of the chapter.

The hope is that the wonderfully informative brochure will generate enough interest to warrant the purchase of the book. The book is written in a manner conducive for both experienced resilience scholars looking for a compendium of research findings as well as grad students and scholars new to the field and looking for a guide. In effect, it is the book that the editors and authors wished was available for them as they started learning the concepts.

28 Feb

Studying irrigation in China using QCA

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized. Tagged: China, CSID, irrigation, QCA, social-ecological systems. Leave a comment

This week I had the honor of presenting with the Chinese scholar and economist, Chai Ying. Chai is a visiting scholar to ASU’s Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity from Guangdong University of Finance and Economics. We presented her research on 20 small-scale irrigation systems under China’s decentralized irrigation management program. Drawing on theories of the commons and previous irrigation research in China, Chai identified 5 variables linked to improved efficiency of government involvement in irrigation. Her study first measured efficiency of government spending across four key outputs – the increase in the area under irrigation, the amount of irrigation infrastructure that was improved, increase in food capacity, and reductions in the water used. She used linear programming to assess the efficiency of providing these outputs for a given amount of government spending.

Next, we used Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to look at how different causal clusters of institutional arrangements combined to lead to efficient outputs. Again, the causal variables were chosen based on past theoretical studies. The causal variables examined were: market-based pricing of water, routine (regular) fiscal investment, administrative coordination by the local-level of government, self-organized management of the irrigation system, and the hiring of a water monitor/guard.

The results combined in 3 configurations:

Having routine fiscal investment and administrative coordination – what we term governance by the government
Having either market-based pricing, self-organization, and administrative coordination or market-based pricing, self-organization, routine fiscal investment and a water guard – what we view as a form of mixed governance with elements of formal government and self-governance combined
Having a self-organized system of governance

The analysis is still in the preliminary phases, and based on the Q&A after the talk, we have both a number of interesting insights and a number of areas that need more work. We hope to finalize the manuscript and submit over the next few months!

Here is a photo from Chai of one of the irrigation canals:

27 Nov

What do we mean by Common-Pool Resource Theory?

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized. Tagged: collective action, common-pool resources, resilience, SESMAD, social-ecological systems. Leave a comment

I have frequently seen people use the term common-pool resource (CPR) theory, and I’ve often been confused by what they mean beyond that they are concerned with the tragedy of the commons and related ideas. However, some add in a great deal of collective action theory, concepts from resilience, and ideas about social-ecological systems. In this text, I won’t try to defend a particular set of hypotheses, theories, or other constructs about what should be counted and what shouldn’t. Instead, I’d like to talk about a nice public good regarding our understanding of CPRs that springs from the Social-Ecological Systems Meta-Analysis Database (SESMAD) project that I’ve written about before.

At the end of October, ASU hosted the most recent SESMAD meeting. We met to put the culminating touches on a coding manual for the project database, an attempt to make sure that all project contributors would take a similar approach to diagnosing and coding a case for the database (and appeasing our concerns with inter-coder reliability).

Our first thought was that this would be a painful (soul-sucking, perhaps) but necessary activity that would help further the project and improve the internal validity of the project. We began with all project members taking on a sub-set of the 200+ variables in the database and defining them, discuss their importance in the CPR literature, and providing relevant citations and sources. The database, itself, could then be used to provide examples of how we coded these variables across a number of cases. We then used our time together in Arizona to edit these variable write-ups and create our coding manual. It turned out to be much more enjoyable than we initially thought.

This brings me to the creation of a public good. I have personally always struggled with the idea of a single coherent and unifying theory of CPRs. However, this manual represents a nearly exhaustive listing of the variables seen to influence the sustainable governance of CPRs according to the current literature. As our database goes online in January, scholars will have access to a thorough list of key CPR variables with definitions, an understanding of their importance, with relevant examples and citations. This can serve as a one-stop source for students and scholars in the study of the commons. It lacks the structure of a theory, but it enables the construction of a multitude of well-defined hypotheses and theories and provides clarity and consistency for its users. I hope that its use goes far beyond our project.

27 Oct

Social-Ecological Systems and the Concept of Territoire

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized. Tagged: resilience, science-policy, social-ecological systems. Leave a comment

Over the past 10 days, I had the good fortune of participating in two Workshops – one on transboundary conservation and the other on social-ecological systems. For the moment, I’d like to discuss a bit of the conversation at the latter. I had the honor of serving as a keynote speaker to one of the warm-up events for the Resilience 2014 conference in Montpellier, France next year (May 4-8, see http://www.resilience2014.org/). The workshop title was “Confronting “socio-ecological systems” and “territoire” as suitable lenses to tackle resilience issues”. It attempted to combine the work of resilience scholars, such as myself, and our work on complex adaptive systems/resilience/coupled human-environment systems with the work of (predominantly) French geographers and anthropologists using territoire to analyze a similar set of problems.

I learned a great deal about territoire and how this guides analysis and understanding. What surprised me the most was the amount that the two approaches had in common – the importance of scale, of socio-spatial relations, and the linking of people and their environment. I had expected a great deal more discussion coming from a post-structural, post-modern, Foucaultian analysis, which I must say that I’m not smart enough to truly understand. Instead, the discussion revolved around all of the similarities in approaches.

A number of points emerged, however, that warrant further discussion, points that will hopefully come out of the proceedings from the workshop. At least these were the five main take-aways for me.

Both social-ecological systems and territoire approaches share a number of important commonalities (as related above).
The drawing of boundaries for analysis is critical to enable understanding in either approach.
Many social-ecological system analyses seem to favor one aspect of the system over the other – often heavily SOCIAL-ecological or social-ECOLOGICAL. Balanced approaches are far less common.
The theme for the Resilience 2014 conference – Resilience and Development – fits well with key traits implicit in the territoire scholarship, notably poverty, inequality, and the need for development.
Resilience scholars need to do a better job at more explicitly acknowledging the normative aspects of their work.

I had initially intended to write about this final discussion point, given other recent research projects, but I’d like to revisit this in more detail in the coming weeks. For now, here’s my introduction to French geography.

19 Jun

Thoughts on Sustainable Development Goals

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized. Tagged: Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, social-ecological systems, sustainability. Leave a comment

In 2000, the UN established the Millennium Development Goals to set aspirational targets for international development across a range of issue areas including poverty alleviation, education, gender equality, child and maternal health, environmental sustainability, reducing HIV/AIDS and communicable diseases, and building a global partnership for development. With a target date of 2015, many of these goals remain both unattained and unattainable. As a result, at last year’s Rio+20 sustainable development summit UN member states agreed to start a process of designing a new set of “sustainable development” goals to replace the MDGs. The working group proposing the new list of goals is tasked to select goals over the next year that are “action-oriented, concise and easy to communicate, limited in number, aspirational, global in nature and universally applicable to all countries while taking into account different national realities, capacities and levels of development and respecting national policies and priorities”.

Since Rio+20 a huge number of potential goals have been generated by development experts, agencies, NGOs, government bureaucracies, and researchers. One prominent example that integrates the SDGs into research on the planetary boundaries literature is Griggs et al’s piece last month in Nature (Griggs, D., Stafford-Smith, M., Gaffney, O., Rockström, J., Öhman, M. C., Shyamsundar, P., … & Noble, I. (2013). Policy: Sustainable development goals for people and planet. Nature, 495(7441), 305-307.). In this piece, the authors propose viewing the goals for a system whereby the economy services society that is itself nested within the Earth’s life-support system. From here, they elicit a number of potential SDGs.

In response to this piece (see our comments in the 20 June 2013 edition of Nature) and to the broader set of literature, the Beijer Young Scholars highlight the necessity to incorporate a scientific understanding of social change into goal formulation at scales ranging from the individual to that of the international community. Without a view of what change is feasible, how goals interact with each other, and means of overcoming negative institutional inertia, the international community will once again be left with a list of noble, yet unachieved, goals similar to the MDGs. It is our hope that we can use our knowledge to improve upon past outcomes.

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