The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods for Social-Ecological Systems

Reinette Biggs, Alta de Vos, Rika Preiser, Hayley Clements, Kristine Maciejewski, Maja Schlüter, Reinette Biggs, Alta de Vos, Rika Preiser, Hayley Clements, Kristine Maciejewski, Maja Schlüter

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000401530
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Sciences biologiques
• Sous-sujet: Écologie

The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods for Social-Ecological Systems provides a synthetic guide to the range of methods that can be employed in social-ecological systems (SES) research.

The book is primarily targeted at graduate students, lecturers and researchers working on SES, and has been written in a style that is accessible to readers entering the field from a variety of different disciplinary backgrounds. Each chapter discusses the types of SES questions to which the particular methods are suited and the potential resources and skills required for their implementation, and provides practical examples of the application of the methods. In addition, the book contains a conceptual and practical introduction to SES research, a discussion of key gaps and frontiers in SES research methods, and a glossary of key terms in SES research. Contributions from 97 different authors, situated at SES research hubs in 16 countries around the world, including South Africa, Sweden, Germany and Australia, bring a wealth of expertise and experience to this book.

The first book to provide a guide and introduction specifically focused on methods for studying SES, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainability science, environmental management, global environmental change studies and environmental governance. The book will also be of interest to upper-level undergraduates and professionals working at the science–policy interface in the environmental arena.

Part 1

1

What are social-ecological systems and social-ecological systems research?

Reinette Biggs,^1,2 Hayley Clements,¹ Alta de Vos,³ Carl Folke,² Amanda Manyani,¹ Kristine Maciejewski,¹ Berta Martín-López,⁴ Rika Preiser,¹ Odirilwe Selomane¹ and Maja Schlüter²

¹ centre for sustainability transitions, stellenbosch university, stellenbosch, south africa

² stockholm resilience centre, stockholm university, stockholm, sweden

³ department of environmental science, rhodes university, makhanda, south africa

⁴ social-ecological systems institute, faculty of sustainability, leuphana university, lüneburg, germany

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021339-2

The Anthropocene: the challenge of understanding the world in new ways

The period since the Second World War has been marked by rapid and accelerating changes to many aspects of human society and the environment (Clark, Crutzen, and Schellnhuber 2004; Steffen et al. 2011; Steffen et al. 2015a). There is accumulating evidence and rising concern about the potential consequences these changes hold for key Earth system processes at a global scale, and human well-being and prosperity into the future (Krausmann et al. 2013; Steffen et al. 2015b). The Anthropocene, as this new era of extensive human impact on the Earth has come to be known (Crutzen 2006), manifests in a closely intertwined set of social and ecological changes. Technological advances, increasing human population, rising levels of wealth and consumption, and the institutional arrangements we have developed to govern our economies and societies interplay with one another, and drastically affect the Earth’s climate, biological diversity, freshwater and biogeochemical flows, and levels of novel pollutants in the environment (Steffen et al. 2015a). These environmental changes, in turn, contribute to increasingly frequent and severe droughts (Dai 2013; Trenberth et al. 2014), floods (Milly et al. 2002; Nicholls 2004), heatwaves (Guo et al. 2018; Oliver et al. 2018) and the emergence of novel pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2 (Everard et al. 2020; O’Callaghan-Gordo and Antò 2020; Schmeller, Courchamp, and Killeen 2020) that can lead to massive societal disruption and hardship, especially among the poor (Wheeler and Von Braun 2013; Barbier and Hochard 2018).

The intertwined social and ecological changes that underlie the Anthropocene are further reflected in a world that has become highly connected through technology and trade (Green et al. 2019; Keys et al. 2019; Nyström et al. 2019). Nowadays, it is difficult to keep track of the geographic origin of our food, or to account for the various components making up the mobile phones we use every day. While this connectivity has brought about impressive improvements to many people in terms of the distribution of food and other resources around the world, it has also resulted in conglomerations of markets and resources, making it difficult to trace and hold accountable those polluting rivers and degrading ecosystems. Large and often geographically distant supply chains of resources have increased access to and human consumption of many goods, but simultaneously have had devastating consequences for biodiversity and species habitats, without consumers feeling accountable for or being aware of these impacts (Lenzen et al. 2012; Wilting et al. 2017; Liu et al. 2018). Vast and globally extensive supply chains have also contributed to widespread inequalities between and within countries (Costinot, Vogel, and Wang 2012; Galaz et al. 2018). This multi-dimensional connectivity also means that decisions in one country or part of the world can have far-reaching consequences for other places or countries – economically, socially and ecologically. Small-scale fishers, for example, are now often directly and indirectly connected to distant markets, causing them to be more vulnerable to seemingly unrelated threats and disturbances, such as economic changes in distant economies (Crona et al. 2015; Stoll et al. 2018). Similarly, the interdependence of countries in food supply reduces resilience and increases vulnerability as supply chains are broken (Kummu et al. 2020).

The pressing environmental and social sustainability challenges we face in the 21st century are clearly deeply intertwined. These challenges result from the confluence and interaction of multiple, mutually reinforcing social and ecological processes at multiple scales (Folke et al. 2016), where social processes include economic, political, cultural and technological processes, and ecological processes include biotic (e.g. population dynamics, food web interactions) and abiotic (e.g. nutrient flows, climate patterns) processes. The climate emergency and other environmental changes are underlain by a complex, interacting array of social changes, which themselves are shaped by the environment and environmental disruptions. Similarly, problems of poverty and inequality are often linked to and exacerbated by environmental change and disruption. Ethiopia, for example, has become one of the most food-insecure nations in the world due to complex interactions between environmental degradation, diminishing land holdings, outbreaks of crop and livestock disease, poor infrastructure, political insecurity, and pre- and post-harvest crop losses that have systematically eroded the productive assets of households (Mohamed 2017; Bahru et al. 2019). Factors outside a country also play a role in perpetuating food insecurity in that country, such as discourses about how to address these problems driven by notions of intensification, commercialisation (Jiren et al. 2020) and land acquisition by other countries for their own benefit (e.g. Hules and Singh 2017). The key sustainability challenges of the 21st century cannot be addressed without recognising the systemic, intertwined nature of these problems (Liu et al. 2015).

The recognition that environmental and social sustainability challenges are inherently systemic and intertwined, and the escalating urgency to address these challenges, have driven a paradigm shift in how social and natural systems are studied (Schoon and Van der Leeuw 2015). In most scientific disciplines, humans and nature have been treated as separate entities (Folke et al. 2016). Ecology, for example, has often viewed social systems only as external drivers of ecosystem dynamics (Carpenter et al. 2012; Cumming 2014), whereas economics and other social sciences have considered natural systems simply as resources for extracting capital gains or providing a basis for livelihoods (Gunderson and Holling 2002; Berkes, Colding, and Folke 2003). In recent decades, however, this thinking has been widely contested and is changing, partly influenced by the rise in systems sciences and complexity thinking (see Chapter 2; Preiser et al. 2018). Scholars in different disciplines are increasingly viewing human systems as interdependent, inseparable and intertwined with ecosystems, embedded within and dependent upon the biosphere and the broader Earth system (Folke et al. 2016; Reyers et al. 2018; Schlüter et al. 2019). Furthermore, there is growing recognition of the need for knowledge production processes that account for and engage with the complex interconnections and interplay between the social and the ecological, and the emergent and often unexpected processes, features, problems and opportunities to which they give rise (Preiser et al. 2018).

What are social-ecological systems?

‘Social-ecological systems’ (SES) is an emerging concept for understanding the intertwined nature of human and natural systems in this new, interconnected and interdependent way. The SES concept developed in the early to mid-1990s through collaboration of scholars working in the interdisciplinary areas of ecological economics and common-pool resource systems (e.g. Berkes 1989; Ostrom 1990; Costanza 1991). Specifically, the volume Linking Social and Ecological Systems: Management Practices and Social Mechanisms for Building Resilience combined a systems approach and adaptive management with a focus on dynamic institutions and diverse systems of property rights, with 14 case studies analysing ecological resilience and local and traditional systems engaged in ecosystem management (Berkes and Folke 1998). The concept of SES is based on the notion that ‘the delineation between social and natural systems is artificial and arbitrary’ (Berkes and Folke 1998), emphasising that people and nature are intertwined. Nature no longer merely sets the space in which social interactions take place; likewise, people are not just an external driver in ecosystem dynamics (Folke et al. 2011; Schoon and Van der Leeuw 2015). Social-ecological systems are therefore not merely social plus ecological systems, but cohesive, integrated systems characterised by strong connections and feedbacks within and between social and ecological components that determine their overall dynamics (Folke et al. 2010; Biggs, Schlüter, and Schoon 2015).

As such, SES are a type of complex adaptive system. These systems comprise many interdependent parts that interact in ways that give rise to emergent, system-wide patterns that cannot be predicted from the properties of the individual system components. Furthermore, these system-wide patterns, in turn, influence the behaviour of the individual system parts and their interactions with other parts, creating a feedback process that shapes the evolution of the system over time and allows it to adapt to changing contexts (Lansing 2003). The continuous interplay between microlevel entities to form emergent macrolevel patterns ‘implies that SES are more than the sum of the ecological or the social parts’ (Reyers et al. 2018). Furthermore, it means that SES can adapt to changing conditions, learning and self-organising in response to internal or external pressure (Levin et al. 2013). An example of these dynamics is the emergence of adaptive governance, where individuals interact and collaborate, often in response to a crisis, connecting and creating social networks around shared visions and narratives (Folke et al. 2005). As a result, bridging organisations and new institutions emerge and become connected to other levels of governance, influencing them, but also being influenced by them. It has been shown that an entire SES may shift and start to evolve new pathways as a result of this interplay. Examples range from landscape management in Sweden, to large-scale coral reef management in Australia, to a system of global adaptive governance of the regional resources of the Southern Ocean (Schultz et al. 2015).

A recent review by Preiser et al. (2018) identifies six organising principles of complex adaptive systems that help to further inform our understanding of the nature of SES. The first is t...