Resource History Matters: Resource System Path Dependence in the Anthropocene

Abstract

"Path dependence occurs when early decisions in an institution’s or technology’s history has irreversible implications on its future development and efficiency. The design of a machine or the interpretation of a law are both examples of processes of adoption and development where early events determined future outcomes for the subject’s use and application. This paper argues that, like these examples, social-ecological systems (SES) also exhibit path dependence as system managers and appropriators alter system functions. Resource systems vulnerable to path dependence can experience significant and permanent changes in resource system functions as appropriator and manager decisions narrow the range of future options for resource system use. In defining resource system path dependence, this paper examines subtractability and the effects of resource system management on resource system attributes. The paper also refashions institutional analysis’s conception of a resource’s subtractability to distinguish between appropriable resource units between appropriators and the effects of appropriation on the resource system. With these elucidations, subtractability can address two issues; whether a resource unit can be fully appropriated at a moment in time and the ability of the resource system to continue to produce resource units across time. The human-ecology concept of resilience and adaptive cycles is also used to clarify the process of resource path dependence as a series of thresholds that, once crossed, cannot be feasibly reversed."