hidden
Image Database Export Citations

Menu:

The Adaptive Governance of the Commons: Understanding Shifts in Modes of Governance in Community Forestry Systems

Show simple item record

dc.contributor.author van Laerhoven, Frank en_US
dc.date.accessioned 2009-07-31T14:37:25Z
dc.date.available 2009-07-31T14:37:25Z
dc.date.issued 2009 en_US
dc.date.submitted 2009-07-14 en_US
dc.date.submitted 2009-07-14 en_US
dc.identifier.uri https://hdl.handle.net/10535/1522
dc.description.abstract "Under what conditions can social-ecological systems be expected to develop sustainably? Social-ecological systems (SESs) - such as for example community forests and their users - have been compared to 'moving targets:' Due to the interactions and interdependence between the systems' components, SESs are characterized by change, change that can often not be anticipated in terms of intensity and direction. Sustainability is therefore not a steady-state equilibrium that can be developed towards to. I argue that the long-enduring success of community forest systems - success defined in terms of forests not degrading and its users staying happy - is intimately related to a user group's ability to adapt its mode of governance, when confronting change. I hold that forest users that engage in experimentation, learn from experience and are able to adapt to change are more likely to avoid forest degradation or social disintegration. In this research, I focus on the conditions that are expected to make this happen. The particular social-ecological systems that I propose to look at, involve a total of fifty community forestry systems in Guatemala, Honduras, Bolivia, and Mexico, respectively. I line up the following variables to explain variation in community forestry systems - ability to develop sustainably: Diversity in types of actors, social memory, functional redundancy, and trust among actors. These explanatory variables are operationalized through social network analysis metrics - i.e. quantifiable algorithms regarding relevant social network characteristics. I propose to derive the indicators related to the dependent variable (the sustainable development of community forestry systems - the social as well as the ecological side of the picture) from an existing database, compiled by the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) research program." en_US
dc.subject sustainability en_US
dc.subject human ecology en_US
dc.subject social behavior en_US
dc.subject community forestry en_US
dc.subject participatory management en_US
dc.subject IFRI en_US
dc.subject Workshop en_US
dc.title The Adaptive Governance of the Commons: Understanding Shifts in Modes of Governance in Community Forestry Systems en_US
dc.type Conference Paper en_US
dc.type.published unpublished en_US
dc.coverage.region South America en_US
dc.coverage.region Central America & Caribbean en_US
dc.subject.sector Social Organization en_US
dc.subject.sector Forestry en_US
dc.identifier.citationconference Workshop on the Workshop 4 en_US
dc.identifier.citationconfdates June 3-6, 2009 en_US
dc.identifier.citationconfloc Indiana University Bloomington en_US


Files in this item

Files Size Format View
van_Laerhoven_wow4.pdf 131.1Kb PDF View/Open

This item appears in the following document type(s)

Show simple item record