Savannas and Dry Forests

Linking People with Nature

Andrea Berardi, Jay Mistry, Jay Mistry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351902083
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences biologiques
• Subtopic: Biologie

Parched landscapes, biodiversity loss, encroaching deserts and deforestation are some of the environmental crises taking place in tropical savannas and dry forests throughout the world. To date, much research into these regions has treated humans as 'outside' or as an 'impact' only. However, over and over again, examples show that, in fact, humans are not external factors, but integral components of these systems. Humans are key determinants of savannas and dry forests, affecting patterns and processes, as well as impacts on natural resources. Unless we understand the human-environment relationship in these regions, we will never truly identify the causes or be able to provide solutions. This book therefore focuses on the roles of the past, present and future human perceptions and actions on savannas and dry forests. It examines how the views of local farmers, NGO workers, government officials and international scientists differ on the links between the social and ecological components of savannas. It deals with these multiple perspectives by using systems diagramming and conceptual modelling to provide a clearer and more explicit understanding and to promote better communication between the various actors concerned.

Chapter One
Introduction

Jayalaxshmi Mistry and Andrea Berardi

Making the Links

Parched landscapes, biodiversity loss, encroaching deserts, deforestation. These are some of the apparent environmental crises taking place in tropical savanna and dry forests throughout the world that are reported in the popular media today. Yet the simplistic cause and effect explanations and resulting management prescriptions have done little to resolve these issues. One of the main reasons for this is the lack of understanding of the complexity inherent in savanna and dry forest systems; climate variability, socio-political upheavals, demographic change, changing land use practices and tenure, are a few of the many factors contributing to the present situation. Therefore, unless we understand the human-environment relationship in savannas and dry forests, in all its complexities and intricacies, and at a range of spatial and temporal scales, we will never truly identify the causes or be able to provide solutions. Nevertheless, there is still the mindset prevalent within the scientific community today (ultimately conveyed to the public domain) that the biophysical world is somehow separate to human society. This dichotomy between the natural and social sciences has been discussed and debated, and the need to integrate the two disciplines has been hailed as the ‘new ecology’ (Botkin, 1990; Scoones, 1999; Kottak, 1999; Zimmerer, 1994). Furthermore, recent work suggests that we should be viewing the world as a ‘social-ecological system’ (Berkes and Folke, 1998), where there are no boundaries between the human and the ecological, and where interactions between the two domains sustain these incredibly complex savanna and dry forest systems over space and time.

However, making the links between people and nature is not as easy as it seems. The paucity of inter- and multi-disciplinary research, and the resistance of human and physical scientists to collaborate, was clearly seen at the international conference on Tropical Savannas and Dry Forests which took place in Edinburgh in 2003. Termed ‘Biodiversity, Environment and Development’ it aimed to bring together scientists from a range of disciplines to present and explore issues surrounding tropical savanna and dry forests. Yet, the way the conference was structured, with distinct and separate themes and no overarching integrative discourse, continued this separation of natural phenomena from human issues. It is true that the conference was hugely successful in assembling scientists of diverse backgrounds, but how many plant ecologists sat in on the social anthropologists’ presentations, and vice versa? Not many. Were there any cross-disciplinary discussions between the different scientists, notwithstanding the compartmentalised structure of the conference? Very few. The scheduling of the sessions did not help. Botany and environmental science/global change were held during the first few days while human-environment was saved for the end. This meant that those with an ecology background could pack up and head for home before the human sessions even began. There was no effort to intermix the schedule. On retrospect, perhaps an ‘old-school’ regional geography perspective would have been better i.e. each day could have focused on a region and sessions could have covered the breadth from botany to human-environment.

The conference clearly reflected the divisions still prevalent in the research community. Yet, it is imperative to have a holistic approach to understanding tropical savannas and dry forests if we are to tackle some of the management issues pertinent to these systems today. Over one fifth of the world’s population live in or around savanna and dry forest areas (Frost et al., 1986; Bullock et al., 1995), with many communities relying on natural resources for their livelihoods. There are many management themes in these systems such as biodiversity conservation, wildfire impact, desertification, deforestation, and poverty alleviation to name a few, and all have both an ecological and social dimension which need to be addressed. For example, savannas are one of the most burned landscapes in the world, but how can we tackle fire management unless we know why and how people burn, government policies on fire management, as well as the ecological consequences of burning?

In this chapter, we begin with an overview of the various ideas and theories relating to the human-nature relationship, and their influences on savanna and dry forest studies. This is in no way exhaustive, but we hope to give the reader an idea of the evolution of savanna and dry forest studies and its links with concurrent theoretical debates. This is followed by an explanation of why we have chosen a socio-ecological approach as the central focus of the book. The chapter ends with a synthesis of the contributions, highlighting the main themes running through the book.

Paradigm Shifts in the Human-nature Relationship – From Ecological Equilibrium to Social-ecological Complexity

The separation of people and nature has a long tradition in Western thought, the roots of which can be traced back to Greek times where people were seen as dominating or mastering nature (Merchant, 1980; Worster, 1993). With people out of the picture, ideas of equilibrium and the ‘balance of nature’ dominated, and associated notions of stability, homeostatic regulation and stable points and cycles, became the underlying concept for many strands of ecological enquiry and their subsequent management applications (Scoones, 1999). For example, Clements’s (1916) theory of succession, where vegetation assemblages change towards a stable ‘climax’, and Lotka (1925) and Volterra’s (1926) predator-prey models where carrying capacities and maximum sustained yields in animal populations were identified, became the guide for managing rangelands in semi-arid and arid savannas (Behnke and Scoones, 1993). Island biogeography (cf MacArthur and Wilson, 1967), and its ideas of a stable relationship between species diversity and area became a basis upon which biodiversity policy could be created and protected areas designed, most notably in the case of national parks in African savannas (Homewood, 2004; Leach and Mearns, 1996).

The equilibrium paradigm states that historical effects, spatial heterogeneity, stochastic factors and environmental perturbations play a negligible role in ecosystem functioning and dynamics. In essence, ecosystems were considered ‘closed’ i.e. the fundamentals drivers of change were internal and the reaching of a stable state was an inevitable consequence of this. However, from the 1970s, ignited by mathematical ecologists working on (in)stability models (for example, Holling, 1973; May, 1977, 1986), research began to show that historical effects, spatial heterogeneity, stochastic factors and environmental perturbations are fundamental in ecological systems, including savannas and dry forests (for example, Behnke et al., 1993; Dublin et al., 1990; Ellis and Swift, 1988; Walker, 1993; Westoby et al., 1989). As a result, there has been increasing support for alternative ‘open system’ paradigms to interpret ecosystem functioning and dynamics, including the non-equilibrium paradigms and the multiple-equilibria paradigms (DeAngelis and Waterhouse, 1987; Holling, 1973). This paradigm shift spawned new concepts including complexity, nonlinearity, high levels of spatial and temporal variability, resilience and surprise, all concepts that can be equally applied to nature and humans (Holling, 1986; Berkes and Folke, 1998; Berkes et al., 2003). Whereas many previous studies in savannas and dry forests treated humans as ‘outside’ or as an ‘impact’ on these systems, more recent examples show that in fact, humans are integral components of savanna/dry forest systems (e.g. Bassett and Crummey, 2003; Behnke and Scoones, 1993; Cline-Cole, 1998; Dougill et al., 1999; Fairhead and Leach, 1996; Igoe, 2004; Laris, 2002; Mortimore, 1998; Scoones, 1997; Sullivan, 1996; Tiffen et al., 1994; Warren, 1995). Humans are key determinants of savannas and dry forests, affecting patterns and processes, as well as impacts on natural resources. As such, policy makers and the scientific community alike have gradually come to the realisation that management of these systems has to come about through an understanding of the dynamic, non-linear spatio-temporal interactions between humans, the organisational systems they create and the biophysical environment.

A Socio-ecological Approach to Tropical Savanna and Dry Forest Management

Early attempts to link nature and society came about through various theories including environmental determinism (i.e. the environment is the causal agent for the behaviour of social systems), historical possibilism (i.e. humans choose what they want to use in nature, and it is those cultural decisions, not nature itself, which influence the trajectory of human societies and cultural change), and cultural ecology (which determines regularities of form, function and process which recur cross-culturally among societies found in different cultural areas) (Moran, 1979, Steward, 1955, see Davidson-Hunt and Berkes, 2003 for detailed history). However, it was through the development of systems theory between the 1940s and the 1970s by biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, psychiatrist William Ross Ashby and others from disciplines such as physics, engineering, anthropology, mathematics and neurophysiology, that we finally had a transdisciplinary tool for the development of human-in-ecosystem models (Davidson-Hunt and Berkes, 2003).

Beginning in the 1960s, many geographers were drawn to systems theory (General Systems Theory) due to its integrative and holistic aspects which provided the potential for bridging the biophysical/human divide in the discipline (Stoddart, 1965; Zimmerer, 1996). By the 1970s a number of cultural ecologists in geography and anthropology had adopted an ecosystem approach (e.g., Nietschman, 1972; Rappaport, 1971; Butzer, 1980). A classic work of the period was Rappaport’s (1968) book, Pigs for the Ancestors, which used an ecosystem approach to study energy and material flows through the ‘human ecosystem’ of the Tsembaga people of Papua New Guinea. Through this integration, many ecological concepts such as niche, carrying capacity and succession were applied to human-ecological systems. Cultural ecologists working within the systems paradigm tended to explain specific cultural practices in terms of their relationship with an ecosystem in homeostatic equilibrium. However, by the 1980s, this ecosystem approach was widely criticised, in part, because of its assumption that cultural practices were linked with functional, equilibrium-maintaining processes in a ‘closed system’, while it was increasingly clear that the processes of globalization (incorporating rural societies into an open political-economic system) were well under way (e.g. Ellen, 1982; Watts, 1983).

Systems theory emphasises the view of integrated wholes, whose essential properties arise from the relationships between component parts. It emphasises connections and feedbacks, and that understanding of systems comes from examining how the parts operate together, not from looking at them in isolation. Systems theory promoted the transdisciplinary study of the organization of phenomena, independent of their substance, type, spatial or temporal scale of existence. It allows us to investigate the principles common to all complex entities, and develop the models which can be used to describe them.

In the development of this book, we have been influenced by and have tried to integrate various concepts which have arisen out of Systems Theory so as to propose ‘models’ of tropical savanna and dry forest systems. But, we acknowledge that there is no single approach to current Systems thinking and practice. Integration between different disciplinary perspectives on social and biophysical interactions is limited because key contributors in the research community employ different epistemological assumptions. Two important orientations can be identified which can be characterised under the positivist and constructivist traditions.

A positivist approach aims to represent and reproduce the important structures and dynamics of a situation, for analysis and prediction. Iterative approximations are fitted against data and subsequently refined. Examples of thinking in this mode include plant and soil process models, and general climate models. The integration of natural science and social science in this tradition is often conceptualised in terms of bringing social variables and dynamics into natural science models. A constructivist approach, on the other hand, aims to make explicit different understandings of a context in order to achieve new accommodations between stakeholders as the basis of satisfactory progress on issues that are causing difficulty. Models are used as epistemic objects and become tools for exploring a situation which represent only one of many possible points of view. Examples include conceptual modelling of human activity systems, inquiry based on metaphor and rich pictures in soft systems methodology (see Checkland and Scholes, 1990).

These traditions reproduce to some degree more traditional divisions between the natural and social sciences in terms of application (natural science/social science), content (quantitative/qualitative) and methodological assumptions (hard systems/soft systems). But we argue that when one looks at what practitioners actually do, then these distinctions begin to break down. The purpose of this book is to explore pluralist approaches in the understanding of tropical savannas and dry forests that draw on the strengths of both positivist and constructivist traditions.

An important focus of this book is describing and analysing different approaches for integrating social and biophysical processes, and the development of a platform for constructive negotiation on our understandings. The idea is not only to develop models of tropical savanna and dry forest systems, but also to explore a systemic approach to modelling, and how such an approach can be used as a tool for learning amongst contributors and the wider community. In terms of positivist practice, the challenge is to integrate social and physical processes within coherent models, at a sufficient level of detail to reveal significant dynamics. In terms of constructivist practice, the challenge is to bring multiple stakeholders into the process and open up the modelling technique to a wider group including practitioners, policy makers and researchers, rather than a core of disciplinary ‘experts’.

In the following sections, we propose to blend a positivist approach that builds on a range of recent theoretical developments including hierarchy theory, hierarchical patch dynamics, the human ecosystem model and social-ecological systems, and begins to introduce a constructivist approach that surfaces the values of the individual authors and uses diagramming as a key communication tool between contributors and readers.

Scale, Hierarchy and Patch Dynamics

The importance of scale and hierarchy in tropical savannas came about in the late 1980s when hierarchy theory was used as a conceptual tool for positioning ecological determinants of savannas over time and space (Solbrig, 1991). Plant available moisture and plant available nutrients were considered the two main determinants of savannas, placed at the top of the hierarchy as having overriding influence, with fire and herbivory seen as ‘modifiers’ of the system (Stott, 1991). Although it was reg...