Frontiers in socio-environmental research: components, connections, scale, and context (original) (raw)
Related papers
Climate Research, 2016
The concepts of resilience and ecosystem services broaden the opportunities for assessing sustainability of social-ecological systems (SESs). The lack of operational frameworks for assessing the resilient provision of ecosystem services by SESs impedes greater integration of resilience thinking in natural resource governance. The greatest challenge so far has been to understand the capacity of the SES to (re)organize itself and sustain the flow of benefits from nature to people under various global and local pressures and trade-offs between ecosystem services users. To assess the resilience of an SES within a single framework, we propose a new approach which is a combination of: (1) the Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) framework; (2) social-ecological indicators; and (3) scenario building. Practical application of the approach is demonstrated with the example of European polar and altitudinal treeline areas. The DPSIR framework analyzes causal relationships between the components of the SES. Social-ecological indicators quantify processes in the SES and estimate trends in the DPSIR factors. Combined top-down and bottom-up scenarios envision plausible development paths of the SES in the future based on expected global environmental and social changes which create context specific dynamics between DPSIR factors at specific localities. The proposed approach represents the analytical framework of the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) action SENSFOR (Enhancing the resilience capacity of SENSitive mountain FORest ecosystems under environmental change) and can be applied to promote systemic resilience thinking in any SES.
Social-ecological system framework: initial changes and continuing challenges
Ecology and Society, 2014
The social-ecological system (SES) framework investigated in this special issue enables researchers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds working on different resource sectors in disparate geographic areas, biophysical conditions, and temporal domains to share a common vocabulary for the construction and testing of alternative theories and models that determine which influences on processes and outcomes are especially critical in specific empirical settings. We summarize changes that have been made to this framework and discuss a few remaining ambiguities in its formulation. Specifically, we offer a tentative rearrangement of the list of relevant attributes of governance systems and discuss other ways to make this framework applicable to policy settings beyond natural resource settings. The SES framework will continue to change as more researchers apply it to additional contexts; the main purpose of this article is to delineate the version that served as the basis for the theoretical innovations and empirical analyses detailed in other contributions to this special issue.
Ecology and Society, 2018
The social-ecological systems framework (SESF) is arguably the most comprehensive conceptual framework for diagnosing interactions and outcomes in social-ecological systems (SES). This article systematically reviews the literature applying and developing the SESF and discusses methodological challenges for its continued use and development. Six types of research approaches using the SESF are identified, as well as the context of application, types of data used, and commonly associated concepts. The frequency of how each second-tier variable is used across articles is analyzed. A summary list of indicators used to measure each second-tier variable is provided. Articles suggesting modifications to the framework are summarized and linked to the specific variables. The discussion reflects on the results and focuses on methodological challenges for applying the framework. First, how the SESF is historically related to commons and collective action research. This affects its continued development in relation to inclusion criteria for variable modification and discourse in the literature. The framework may evolve into separate modified versions for specific resource use sectors (e.g., forestry, fisheries, food production, etc.), and a general framework would aggregate the generalizable commonalities between them. Methodological challenges for applying the SESF are discussed related to research design, transparency, and cross-case comparison. These are referred to as "methodological gaps" that allow the framework to be malleable to context but create transparency, comparability, and data abstraction issues. These include the variable-definition gap, variable-indicator gap, the indicator-measurement gap, and the data transformation gap. A benefit of the framework has been its ability to be malleable and multipurpose, bringing a welcomed pluralism of methods, data, and associated concepts. However, pluralism creates challenges for synthesis, data comparison, and mutually agreed-upon methods for modifications. Databases are a promising direction forward to help solve this problem. In conclusion, future research is discussed by reflecting on the different ways the SESF may continue to be a useful tool through (1) being a general but adaptable framework, (2) enabling comparison, and (3) as a diagnostic tool for theory building.
Exploring the social-ecological systems discourse 20 years later
Ecology and Society
This paper explores the 20-year evolution of the social-ecological systems framework (SESs). Although a first definition of SES dates back to 1988, Berkes and Folke more thoroughly used the concept in 1998 to analyze resilience in local resource management systems. Since then studies of interlinked human and natural systems have emerged as a field on its own right, promoting interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration in a wide set of fields and practices. As the SES concept celebrates its 20-year existence we decided to make an overview of how authors use the concept in relation to research that deals with social and ecological linkages. Hence, we conducted a review of the SES concept using the Scopus database, analyzing a random set of journal articles on social-ecological systems (n = 50) regarding definitions of SES, authors' main sources of inspiration in using the concept, as well as document type, subject area, and other relevant information. Although there is a steady increase of SES publications, we found that 61% of the papers analyzed did not even provide a definition of the term social-ecological system(s), a shortcoming that makes case comparisons difficult and reduces the usefulness of the concept. We also found three common SES frameworks that authors seem to be most commonly inspired by, referred to here as the original, the robustness, and multitier frameworks, respectively. The first can be characterized as a descriptive framework, the latter two more as diagnostic frameworks, useful for modeling. Although it would be a bit presumptuous of us to come up with a more thorough definition of the SES concept in this paper, we urge SES scholars to be more meticulous in making explicit what they mean by a social-ecological system when conducting SES research.
Condition, Tendency, and Dynamic Interactions in a Resilience Context of a Social-Ecological System
Journal of Natural Resources and Development
In this paper we will analyze the dynamics of a social-ecological system (SES), which requires an integrated understanding of both the interrelatedness of biophysical and socioeconomic components and the adaptive capacity of these system's components to external drivers. Social-ecological resilience, the adaptive cycle metaphor and livelihood development are presented as the guiding conceptual framework to analyze local strategies, aiming towards the sustainable use of natural resources and to encourage the participation of the community in the management of ecosystem services, thereby improving human well-being. Furthermore, in the light of recurring unpredictable changes, adaptive capacity building and a high responsiveness to these changes may serve as fundamental assets to increase both ecological resilience, including the protection of biodiversity, and social resilience, including social and human capital and institutional capacity. An integrated analysis of SESs considers i) the interplay of internal and external factors and their role in SES dynamics, ii) potential thresholds whose crossing may shift the system into an undesirable state, and iii) cross-scale spatial and temporal interactions. Ultimately, an SES approach favors ecosystem stewardship in that it enhances the sustainable use of natural resources and ecosystem services, and simultaneously resilient livelihood development. Review article Over the past six decades, the effects of global environmental change (climate change, land use change, loss of biodiversity, invasion of exotic species) and social change (urbanization, migration, globalization) have had a drastic impact on the distribution, availability and condition of natural resources and ecosystem goods and services [1], [2]. In particular, human appropriation of land and continuous land use change are currently the leading global change drivers due to pressing needs to support more than seven billion people with food, fiber, forage, water, and shelter. Without changes in land use policies, deforestation, land conversion, intensification of agriculture, exploitative water use, and air pollution may continue and likely negatively influence ecosystem functioning and will in the long-term jeopardize the provision of ecosystem goods and services [3] with direct impacts on human wellbeing [4]. These complex conditions emerge from continuous interrelations and feedback among the socioeconomic and biophysical components of these land use systems and thus require a conceptual framework that fully integrates both human and ecological dimensions. The concept of a complex social-ecological system (SES) was first introduced by Berkes and Folkert in 1998 to address human's dependency on ecosystem goods and services and the reciprocal influence of ecosystem dynamics on human decision-making, including terrestrial and aquatic systems. A SES consists of the subsystems of nature and humans, with all their biophysical and social-cultural-politicaleconomic characteristics, respectively. Each subsystem has its own inherent elements, structures, functions and interconnections, which are changing over time. The subsystems are coupled, in that they are interrelated and interacting, while the nature, dynamics, and strength of interaction(s) may change over time in a non-linear fashion [5], [6]. These ecological and human subsystems are also self-organizing and highly adaptive in response to internal or external biophysical and socioeconomic drivers of change [5].
Vulnerability of socio—ecological systems: A conceptual Framework
Ecological Indicators, 2018
The analysis of vulnerability of socio-ecological systems to threats of different types such as extreme climate events or change in land use draws attention to the factors and processes that determine whether the ecological, social and integrated socio-ecological systems are likely to experience harm due to exposure to the threat. During the last years there has been an increasing attention to the analysis of the vulnerability of socio-ecological systems when facing the lost or degradation of ecosystem services. However, despite the existence of conceptual frameworks and empirical applications to evaluate vulnerability of socio-ecological systems some open questions and challenges still remain. How to conceptually differentiate key concepts such as sensitivity, exposition, vulnerability and threat? How to consider the differences in socioeconomic characteristics of the beneficiaries and in their capacity to adapt to new conditions of the ecological system? How to link ecological vulnerability with the social system analysis to obtain an integrated risk assessment of the socio-ecological system? This paper presents a conceptual framework for vulnerability assessment of socio-ecological systems that addresses the mentioned open questions based on a review of both theoretical and empirical literature related to vulnerability and socio-ecological systems. The paper identifies the attributes and indicators of the dimensions of vulnerability for understanding both the social vulnerability and ecological vulnerability separately and then jointly, in interaction with each other. The framework offers a way to communicate with practitioners and policy makers on identifying and improving the factors that reduce vulnerability. It can thus serve as a tool for targeting the implementation of policies and practices aimed at reducing vulnerability.
What do We Talk about When We Talk about Social-Ecological Systems? A Literature Review
Sustainability
In the last decade, probably in response to global changes and the environmental crisis, the use of the term “social-ecological system” (SES) in scientific literature has grown. This is certainly a sign that the need and importance of transdisciplinary research has been recognized. Here, we explore whether the use of the term is a buzzword or, rather, actually represents a key concept in the integration of social and ecological research. We compiled a database of publications (N = 1289) that mentioned SES in the title, keywords and abstract. Subsequently, we analyzed the authors’ affiliations, type of work (conceptual, empirical or review), study site, prevailing human use, temporal and spatial scales of the analysis, kind of variables analyzed (socioeconomic or biophysical), and the method/s used to integrate them. We detected four time spans in the use of the term (1975–1997, 1998–2006, 2007–2012, 2013–2016). Our results suggest that SES is a widely invoked concept in the study of...