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Part I
Introduction
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CHAPTER 1
IN QUEST OF A THEORY OF ADAPTIVE CHANGE
C. S. Holling, Lance H. Gunderson, and Donald Ludwig
In all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.
âHenry Wadsworth Longfellow
In the last decades of the twentieth century, cascades of changes occurred on a global scale. Collapse of the former Soviet Union and its continuing struggle for stability and for ways to restructure have propagated international reverberations far beyond its borders. Increases in connectivity through the Internet are stimulating a flowering of novel experiments that are affecting commerce, science, and international community. Migrations of people, some forced by political upheaval and some initiated as a search for new opportunity, are both threatening and enriching the international order. There have been dramatic changes in global environmental systemsâfrom climate change that is already upon us, to the thinning of the stratospheric ozone layer. Novel diseases have emerged in socially and ecologically disturbed areas of the world and have spread globally, through the increased mobility of people. The tragedy of AIDS, and its origins, transformation, and dispersion because of land-use and social changes, is a signal of deep and broad changes that will yield further surprises and crises. More and more evidence indicates that global climate change has already produced an increase in severe weather that, combined with inappropriate coastal development, has caused dramatic rises in insurance claims and human loss of life. Still other more subtle changes linking ecological, economic, and social forces are occurring on a global scale, such as the typical example described in Box 1-1, regarding the collapse of fisheries.
These examples of global environmental change signal that the stresses on the planet have achieved a new level because of the intensity and scale of human activities. Are these activities leading to a world with impoverished natural endowments, even deeper inequities among peoples, and the ultimate collapse of civil society? Or is that too easy a conclusion? Contradicting projections of collapse is the possibility that human foresight and innovation can reverse those trends and develop paths that sustain natural diversity and create opportunity.
Box 1-1. Fishing down the Food Web
D. Ludwig
Although total catch levels for marine fisheries have been relatively stable in recent decades, analysis of the data shows that landings from global fisheries have shifted from large piscivorous fishes toward smaller invertebrates and planktivores (Pauly et al. 1998). This shift can be quantified through assignment of a fractional trophic level to each species, depending on the composition of the diet. The values of these trophic levels range from 1 for primary producers to over 4.6 for a few top predators such as a tuna in open water and groupers and snappers among bottom fishes. For data aggregated over all marine areas, the trend over the past forty-five years has been a decline of the mean trophic level from over 3.3 to less than 3.1. In the Northwest Atlantic, the mean trophic level is now below 2.9. There is not much room for further decreases, since most fish have trophic levels between 3 and 4. Indeed, many fisheries now rely on invertebrates, which tend to have low trophic levels.
Global trends appear to show a decline of 0.1 trophic level per decade. This is an underestimate of the actual change, since data from many areas, especially in the tropical developing countries, are lumped into categories such as âmixed fishesâ that do not reflect changes in trophic level. Moreover, the analyses performed so far did not consider the decline in trophic level that occurs within species due to the increased removal of older fishes, which tend to have higher trophic levels than the young of the same species. It is likely that a continuation of present trends will lead to widespread fisheries collapses. These trends cast doubt on the idea of estimating future catches by extrapolation of present trends.
The costs of this devastation are difficult to observe since the massive exploitation of stocks is often associated with a displacement of small-scale traditional fisheries by large industrial ones. The small fishers are then jobless, and they move to cities. The costs of this conversion of members of society from being productive to being unproductive are borne by the society as a whole and are not ascribed to displacement from the fishery.
We do not intend to evaluate the degradation and potential for collapse of human and natural systems in this book. That has been done as well and as objectively as can be expected elsewhere (McNeill 2000). Even raising the question triggers controversy that is not particularly well founded on objective fact or adequate theory.
Instead, our purpose is to develop an integrative theory to help us understand the changes occurring globally. We seek to understand the source and role of change in systemsâparticularly the kinds of changes that are transforming, in systems that are adaptive. Such changes are economic, ecological, social, and evolutionary. They concern rapidly unfolding processes and slowly changing onesâgradual change and episodic change, local and global changes.
The theory that we develop must of necessity transcend boundaries of scale and discipline. It must be capable of organizing our understanding of economic, ecological, and institutional systems. And it must explain situations where all three types of systems interact. The cross-scale, interdisciplinary, and dynamic nature of the theory has lead us to coin the term panarchy for it. Its essential focus is to rationalize the interplay between change and persistence, between the predictable and unpredictable. Thus, we drew upon the Greek god Pan to capture an image of unpredictable change and upon notions of hierarchies across scales to represent structures that sustain experiments, test results, and allow adaptive evolution.
We start the search for sufficient theory by turning to examples where there is adequate historyâexamples of interactions between people and nature at regional scales. There we see patterns of change that are similar to the more recent global onesâbut examples where there has been more history of response. These include dramatic changes in the ecosystems and landscapes of ecosystems, with subsequent changes for society and economic conditions. There have been spasms of biodiversity loss as a consequence of the intersection of climate extremes, poor land use, and global economic pressures. In places, such as in some nations in southeast Africa, these exacerbate political instability. The results are not only erosion of the natural world but also erosion of trust in the institutions of governance. But in other places there has been notable learning. Degraded systems have been restored, organizations restructured, and management revitalized.
How do we begin to track down the cause of the failures and explain the occasional successes? Consider some recent resource management failures:
- Some fisheries have collapsed in spite of widespread public support for sustaining them and the existence of a highly developed theory of fisheries management.
- Moderate stocking of cattle in semiarid rangelands has increased vulnerability to drought.
- Pest control has created pest outbreaks that become chronic.
- Flood control and irrigation developments have created large ecological and economic costs and increasing vulnerability.
A number of cases point to a common cause behind such examples of failure of management of renewable resources (Holling 1986; Gunderson et al. 1995a). In each case, a target variable (fish stock, meat production, pest control, or water level) is identified and successfully controlled. Uncertainty in nature is presumed to be replaced by certainty of human control. Social systems initially flourish from this ecological stabilization and resulting economic opportunity. But that success creates its own failure.
We now know that the stabilization of target variables like these leads to slow changes in other ecological, social, and cultural componentsâchanges that can ultimately lead to the collapse of the entire system. A pattern of events emerges: at the extreme, the ecological system fails, the economic system reconfigures, and the social structures collapse or move on. Moderate, stabilized grazing by cattle reduces the diversity of the rangeland grasses, which eventually leads to fewer drought-resistant species, less permeable soils, and poor water retention. Pest control leads to more luxuriant growth of the host plants and hence creates more favorable conditions for survival and reproduction of the pest. Effective flood control leads to higher human settlement densities in the fertile valleys and a large investment in vulnerable infrastructure. When a large flood eventually overwhelms the dams and dikes, the result is often a dramatic reconfiguration of the social and economic landscape along the river. And, as described in Box 1-1, the initial success of fisheries leads to an increase in investment and overexploitation of the resource. When the fish stock shows signs of distress, management agencies become paralyzed, the public loses trust in governance, and human institutions are unable to make the required adjustments.
The pattern common to these examples leads to the first of two paradoxes that complicate any quick and easy predictions of collapse and disaster:
- Paradox 1. The Pathology of Regional Resource and Ecosystem Management
Observation: New policies and development usually succeed initially, but they lead to agencies that gradually become rigid and myopic, economic sectors that become slavishly dependent, ecosystems that are more fragile, and a public that loses trust in governance.
The Paradox: If that is as common as it appears, why are we still here? Why has there not been a profound collapse of exploited renewable resources and the ecological services upon which human survival and development depend?
The observed pattern of failure can be analyzed from an economic and human behavioral standpoint. According to one view, resources are appropriated by powerful minorities able to influence public policy in ways that benefit them. Hence inappropriate measures such as perverse subsidies are implemented that deplete resources and create inefficiencies (Magee, Brock, and Young 1989). A fundamental cause of the failures is the political inability to deal with the needs and desires of people and with rent seeking by powerful minorities.
But as part of the fundamental political causes of failure, there are, as well, contributing causes in the way many, including scientists and analysts, study and perceive the natural world. Their results can provide unintended ammunition for political manipulation. Some of this ammunition comes from the very disciplines that should provide deeper and more integrative understanding, primarily economics, ecology, and institutional analysis. That leads to the second paradox: the trap of the expert. So much of our expertise loses a sense of the whole in the effort to understand the parts.
- Paradox 2. The Trap of the Expert
Observation: In every example of crisis and regional development we have studied, both the natural system and the economic components can be explained by a small set of variables and critical processes. The great complexity, diversity, and opportunity in complex regional systems emerge from a handful of critical variables and processes that operate over distinctly different scales in space and time.
The Paradox: If that is the case, why does expert advice so often create crisis and contribute to political gridlock? Why, in many places, does science have a bad name?
We begin unraveling these paradoxes with an examination of the obstacles that arise not just from multiple, competing scientific perspectives but also from disciplinary hubris. The complex issues connected with the notion of sustainable development are not just ecological problems, or economic, or social ones. They are a combination of all three. Actions to integrate all three typically shortchange one or more. Sustainable designs driven by conservation interests can ignore the need for a kind of economic development that emphasizes synergy, human ingenuity, enterprise, and flexibility. Those driven by economic and industrial interests can act as if the uncertainty of nature can be replaced with human engineering and management controls, or can be ignored altogether in deference to Adam Smithâs âinvisible handâ of the perfect market. Those driven by social interests often presume that nature or a larger world presents no limits to the imagination and initiative of local groups.
Compromises among those viewpoints can be arrived at through the political process. However, mediation among stakeholders is irrelevant if it is based on ignorance of the integrated character of nature and people. The results may be momentarily satisfying to the participants but ultimately reveal themselves as based upon unrealistic expectations about the behavior of natural systems and the behavior of people. As investments fail, the policies of government, private foundations, international agencies, and nongovernmental organizations flop from emphasizing one kind of partial solution to another. Over the last three decades, such policies have flopped from large investment schemes to narrow conservation ones to, at present, equally narrow community development ones.
Each approach is built upon a particular worldview or theoretical abstraction, though many would deny anything but the most pragmatic and nontheoretical foundations. The conservationists depend on concepts rooted in ecology and evolution, the developers on variants of free-market models, the community activists on precepts of community and social organization. All these views are correct, in the sense of being partially tested and credible representations of one part of reality. The problem is that they are partial. They are too simple and lack an integrative framework that bridges disciplines and scales.
Partial Truths and Bad Decisions
The fields of economics, ecology, and organizational or institutional analysis have developed tested insights. Yet there is growing evidence that the partial perspectives from these disciplines generate actions that are unsustainable. One way to generate more robust foundations for sustainable decision making is to search for integrative theories that combine disciplinary strengths while filling disciplinary gaps. But before we can begin such a task, we should examine the partial constructs that characterize these fields.
Economics
Modern neoclassical economics has gone far in discovering the process whereby millions of decisions made by individuals give rise to emergent features of communities and societies (e.g., the rate of inflation, productivity gains, the level of national income, prices, stocks of various types of capital, cultural values, and social norms). Two factors make economic theory particularly difficult. First, individual decisions at any moment are themselves influenced by these emergent features and by past decisions. Learning, practice, and habit influence the moment as much as present prices do. Second, the emergent features that can be well handled by standard neoclassical economic theory and policy concern only fast-moving variables that define present conditions. The more slowly emergent properties that affect attitudes, culture, and institutional arrangements are recognized but are poorly incorporated. The high discounting commonly employed in applications of neoclassical economic theories does not allow the possibilities beyond a decade or two in the future to influence present decisions.
Economists know that success in achieving financial return from fast dynamics leads to slowly emergent, nearly hidden, changes in deeper and slower structures, changes that ultimately trigger sudden crisis and surprise. But the complexities that arise are such that many modern economists are frustrated in their attempts to understand the interactions between fast- and slow-moving variables that create emergent dynamics (Stiglitz 1998). Chapters 7, 8 and 10 begin to expose the consequences and solutions.
Ecology
Ecosystem ecologists, on the other ha...
