Journal Article

Permanent link for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10535/5

Browse By

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2

Exploring Resilience and Transformability of a River Basin in the Face of Socioeconomic and Ecological Crisis: An Example from the Amudarya River Basin, Central Asia
(2011) Schlüter, Maja; Herrfahrdt-Pähle, Elke
"Water from the Amudarya River is a vital and strategic resource for semi-arid Uzbekistan because of its heavy reliance on irrigated agriculture. The Uzbek water management regime, however, has proven to be rather reluctant to adapt to changing environmental and socio-political conditions despite recent massive pressures caused by political, environmental, or donor-induced developments in the region. The aim of this paper is to explore reasons for the low adaptability of the Uzbek water sector and assess implications for the resilience of the Uzbek social-ecological system (SES). By analyzing past losses of resilience as well as first attempts at institutional change in land and water management, we identify drivers as well as structural factors and mechanisms that act as barriers for adaptation and transformation towards a more sustainable system. With the collapse of the Aral Sea fisheries and the basin-wide large scale soil salinization, the SES in the Amudarya River Basin has shifted to a new, less desirable regime. However, the high resilience of the social system is keeping it in its current undesirable state and further degrades its long-term resilience. Our analysis identifies reinforcing feedbacks caused by ecological dynamics, vested interests, and a patronage system that contribute to the resistance to change and keep the system locked in its current unsustainable state. These factors are rooted in the history of the SES in the river basin, such as the economic dependence on cotton and the state-centered management approach. The window of opportunity for significant changes of the larger scale institutional setting that might have been open after the breakup of the Soviet Union was or could not be used to achieve a transformation to more sustainable resources use. Measures aimed at an incremental improvement of the current situation are not sufficient to prevent further losses of resilience. Resilience and transformability of the larger scale SES (political, economic, and institutional settings) are needed to enable the smaller scales (regional and local water management) to adapt and change. However, we identified opportunities for change arising from the slow acceptance of bottom-up management institutions in the water sector and from the extensive restoration capacity of the ecosystems."
Mechanisms of Resilience in Common-pool Resource Management Systems: An Agent-based Model of Water Use in a River Basin
(2007) Schlüter, Maja; Pahl-Wostl, Claudia
"The concept of resilience is widely promoted as a promising notion to guide new approaches to ecosystem and resource management that try to enhance a system's capacity to cope with change. A variety of mechanisms of resilience specific for different systems have been proposed. In the context of resource management those include but are not limited to the diversity of response options and flexibility of the social system to adaptively respond to changes on an adequate scale. However, implementation of resilience-based management in specific real-world systems has often proven difficult because of a limited understanding of suitable interventions and their impact on the resilience of the coupled social-ecological system. We propose an agent-based modeling approach to explore system characteristics and mechanisms of resilience in a complex resource management system, based on a case study of water use in the Amudarya River, which is a semiarid river basin. Water resources in its delta are used to sustain irrigated agriculture as well as aquatic ecosystems that provide fish and other ecosystem services. The three subsystems of the social- ecological system, i.e., the social system, the irrigation system, and an aquatic ecosystem, are linked by resource flows and the allocation decision making of actors on different levels. Simulation experiments are carried out to compare the resilience of different institutional settings of water management to changes in the variability and uncertainty of water availability. The aim is to investigate the influence of (1) the organizational structure of water management, (2) information on water availability, and (3) the diversity of water uses on the resilience of the system to short and long-term water scarcity. In this paper, the model concept and first simulation results are presented. As a first illustration of the approach the performances of a centralized and a decentralized regime are compared under different scenarios of information on water availability. Under the given conditions of a regularly fluctuating inflow and compliance of agents with orders from a national authority, the centralized system performs better as long as irrigation is the only type of water use. Diversification of resource use, e.g., irrigation and fishing, increases the performance of the decentralized regime and the resilience of both. Systematic analysis of the performance of different system structures will help to identify properties and mechanisms of resilience. This understanding will be valuable for the identification, development, and evaluation of management interventions in specific river basins."

Browse By

Browsing Journal Article by Subject "Amudarya River"