Digital Library of the Commons

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The Interface Between Natural and Social Systems
(1993) Berkes, Fikret
"This is a background paper on the focus area, interface between social and natural systems. Following definitions, the paper attempts to present some perspectives on the linkage between social and natural systems, and to cover some aspects of the state of knowledge about how natural resource systems and social systems interact under different property rights regimes, and how that interaction affects the performance of natural resource systems."
Resilience and the Co-Evolution of Ecosystems and Institutions
(1995) Folke, Carl; Berkes, Fikret
"Resilience is the ability of a system to cope with change without collapsing. It is the capacity to absorb external perturbations, by actively adapting to an ever changing environment. Reduction in resilience means that vulnerability increases, with the risk that the whole system flips from one equilibrium state to another. Such flips are often a consequence of the misuse of the environment and the inertia of institutions to change. Smaller unpredictable perturbations that previously could be handled turn into major crises when extreme events intersect with internally generated vulnerability due to loss of resilience. To avoid such situations there is a need for institutions with the ability to respond to and manage environmental feedbacks, institutions that can cope with unpredictable perturbations before they accumulate and challenge the existence of the whole social-ecological system. This implies that it is not enough to only understand the institution in question. The dynamics of the ecosystems that form the biophysical precondition for the existence of the institution need to be taken into account as well. This study focuses on the linked social-ecological system, and its dynamic interrelationships. We regard it as one system with its social and ecological components co-evolving over time. It is in this context that we study traditional and newly-emergent social-ecological systems. We are analyzing 1) how the local social system has adapted to and developed a knowledge system for dealing with the dynamics of the ecosystem(s) including the resources and services that it generates, 2) specifically, how the local system maintains ecosystem resilience in the face of perturbations, and 3) those combinations of property rights arrangements, institutions, and knowledge systems which accomplish the above successfully. Examples will be presented from the Cree Indians of the Canadian eastern subartic and their resource management, and pastoral herders and rangeland management in semi-arid Africa."
Community-Based Management and Sustainable Development
(1989) Berkes, Fikret; Kislalioglu, Mina
"Should a fishery be managed by limiting the number of licenses? Should it be managed by harvest quotas? How should the resource be allocated? How can conflicts among groups of fishermen be settled? What is the role of territorial use rights (TURFS)? How and on what basis can decisions be made about such management measures as mesh sizes and closed seasons? Research in the area of management interventions does not fall clearly into the realm of any one discipline: biology, oceanography, economics, political science, geography, planning, sociology, anthropology."
Co-Management Across Levels of Organization: Concepts and Methodological Implications
(2003) Carlsson, Lars; Berkes, Fikret
From Page 2: "There is a growing literature on social-ecological linkages and sustainable use of natural resources. This research can be divided into two broad categories. The first category consists basically of case studies that reveal the existence of an extremely rich variety of systems of management of common-pool resources. The second type of research sets out to find empirical and theoretical support for the prospects of suggesting, and deliberately building management systems that fulfill well-known criteria for sustainable use (Burger et al., 2001; Berkes and Folke, 2002). In both types of research, the concept and principles of co-management have been an integral part. This paper is based on the presumption that the two lines of research could be merged and synthesized. The paper deals with three broad questions: 1) What is co-management and how should the phenomenon be understood?; 2) What is co-management good for?; and 3) How can real-life instances of co-management be investigated and analyzed?"
Can Cross-Scale Linkages Increase the Resilience of Social-Ecological Systems?
(2003) Berkes, Fikret
"Resilience thinking helps commons researchers to look beyond institutional forms, and ask instead questions regarding the adaptive capacity of social groups and their institutions to deal with stresses as a result of social, political and environmental change. One way to approach this question is to look for informative case studies of change in social-ecological systems and to investigate how societies deal with change. From these cases, one can gain insights and construct principles regarding capacity building to adapt to change and, in turn, to shape change. "A number of examples exist to indicate that cross-scale linkages, both horizontal (across space) and vertical (across levels of organization), speed up learning and communication, thereby improving the ability of a society to buffer change, speed up self-organization, and increase the capacity for learning and adaptation (Lee 1993; Young 1999). This paper will deal with two cases, one involving aboriginal co-management in the Canadian North, and the other, cross-scale management of ocean fisheries."
Co-Management: The Evolution in Theory and Practice of the Joint Administration of Living Resources
(1991) Berkes, Fikret; George, Peter; Preston, Richard J.
"The joint administration or cooperative management (comanagement) of living resources is the potential solution to the contentious divergence between two alternative systems: centralized, state-level versus local-level and community-based systems of resource management. But co-management does not have a simple prescription. There are 'levels' of co-management, from informing and consultation, through degrees of power-sharing between the central government and local resource users." "Studies in the James Bay area indicate that the capability of local-level management or self-management is important not only from a fish and wildlife management point of view. It is also important to the social and economic health of many native communities. Because of the continuing importance of living resources, the economic development of native communities is linked to their ability to manage their own resources. This, in turn, is linked to larger questions of self-government."
Application of Ecological Economics to Development: The Institutional Dimension
(1993) Berkes, Fikret
"Ecological Economics (EE) is more than the sum of conventional economics and conventional ecology. Among the defining characteristics of Ecological Economics are: (a) the holistic view of the environment-economy system; (b) the view of the economic system as a subset of the natural system of the earth (the human household as part of nature's household}); (c) a primary concern with natural capital, resources and environmental services, which are the basis of any economic activity (in the EE view resources are not considered free. They are considereed to have a status similar to human-made capital, thus the term, natural capital); and (d) greater concern with a wider range of human values than those normally considered by economists, including, for example, a moral obligation for future generations."
Knowledge, Learning and the Resilience of Social-Ecological Systems
(2004) Berkes, Fikret
"There are two broadly conceptualized ways in which conservation knowledge may evolve: the depletion crisis model and the ecological understanding model. Regarding the first one, R.E. Johannes argues that developing conservation thought and practice depends on learning that resources are depletable. Before they could develop conservation practice, points out Johannes, fishers of the Pacific islands first had to learn that their natural resources were limited -- but 'they could only have done so by depleting them.' Thus, such learning typically follows a resource crisis, as also seen in the James Bay caribou case and others. Regarding the second mechanism, there is large amount of evidence that suggests that the development of conservation practice often follows the elaboration of environmental knowledge by a group of people, leading to increasingly more sophisticated understanding of the ecosystem in which they dwell. "The adaptive co-management concept may be useful in suggesting a way in which these two mechanisms may be integrated. Adaptive co-management may be defined as a process by which institutional arrangements and ecological knowledge are tested and revised in a dynamic, ongoing, self-organized process of learning-by-doing. Adaptive comanagement combines the dynamic learning characteristic of adaptive management with the linkage characteristic of cooperative management. Local groups can self- organize, learn and adapt through social networks. This self-organizing process of adaptive co-management, facilitated by knowledge development and learning, has the potential to increase the resilience (shock-absorbing capability) of common property systems. Hence, it can be concluded that conservation and management knowledge develops through a combination of long- term ecological understanding and learning from crises and mistakes. It has survival value, as it increases the resilience of integrated socialecological systems to deal with change."
Cross-Scale Institutional Linkages: Perspectives from the Bottom Up
(2000) Berkes, Fikret
"How do national and international-level institutions affect the capabilities of local users to govern and manage local resources? The question reflects the practical reality that local commons institutions are embedded in and affected by regional, national and global influences. There seem to be two broad categories of influences. First, decisions and developments in the outside world affect the local use of resources. Second, national governments and other national-level organizations are making commitments to manage international and global commons that obligate them to influence the actions of local resource users. This paper is mainly about the first category of influences, (1) understanding how higher-level institutions affect local institutions, and (2) identifying promising institutional forms for cross-scale linkages. "The commons literature is full of examples of destructive state intervention, such as excessive centralization, as found in many parts of Africa, which has stifled existing local institutions and prevented self-organization. However, the literature also contains many examples in which the state has created enabling legislation or has otherwise facilitated the development of local-level institutions. A literature has developed also on forms of institutions with potential for cross-scale linkages. One of these forms is co-management, linking local-level institutions with the government level. A second is multistakeholder bodies. A third is institutions oriented for development, empowerment and co-management (examples: CANARI in St. Lucia, West Indies; number of NGOs in Bangladesh). A fourth is the class of institutions for linking local users with regional agencies (example: epistemic communities leading to the Mediterranean Action Plan). A fifth concerns research and management approaches that enable cross-scale linkages (examples: adaptive management and participatory rural appraisal). Finally, a sixth is the emerging class of institutions for 'citizen science' (examples: watershed associations in Minnesota, USA; Peoples Biodiversity Registers, India)."

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