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Working Paper SES Framework: Initial Changes and Continuing Challenges(2012) McGinnis, Michael D.; Ostrom, Elinor"The Social-Ecological Systems (SES) framework investigated in this special issue enables researchers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds working on different resource sectors in disparate geographic areas, biophysical conditions, and temporal domains to share a common vocabulary for the construction and testing of alternative theories and models that determine which influences on processes and outcomes are especially critical in specific empirical settings. After justifying the need for such a general framework, this article summarizes changes that have already been made to this framework and discusses a few remaining ambiguities in its formulation. We expect that the SES framework will continue to change as more researchers apply it to additional contexts, but the main purpose of this article is to delineate the version that served as the basis for the theoretical innovations and empirical analyses detailed in other contributions to this special issue. The SES framework was originally designed for application to a relatively well-defined domain of common-pool resource management situations in which resource users extract resource units from a resource system, and provide for the maintenance of that system, according to rules and procedures determined within an overarching governance system, and in the context of related ecological systems and broader social-political-economic settings. Processes of resource extraction and infrastructure maintenance were identified as among the most important forms of interactions and outcomes (or action situations) located in the very center of this framework. Since social-ecological systems also generate public goods and ecosystem services, we introduce incremental revisions to the SES framework in order to generalize its applications to complex multiresource systems. We replace the restrictive term 'user' with a more generic category of 'actor' and incorporate complex patterns of interaction among multiple actors and resource systems in the context of overlapping governance systems. We also develop the impact of evaluative criteria and other sources of dynamic change within this framework. Then we discuss potential directions for later development to incorporate complex technical systems, multiple layers of governance institutions, and diverse forms of learning and adaptation. Each of these suggested modifications is developed in more detail in other contributions to this issue. As a whole, these articles demonstrate that the SES framework as currently constituted has already inspired high-quality research, and that it has the potential to further facilitate communication among scholars from a broad array of disciplines working on diverse resources in many different parts of the world."Working Paper Aligning Key Concepts for Global Change Policy: Robustness, Resilience, and Sustainability(2012) Anderies, John M.; Folke, Carl; Ostrom, Elinor; Walker, Brian H."Globalization, the process by which local social-ecological systems (SESs) are becoming linked in a global network, presents policy scientists and practitioners with unique and dicult challenges. Although local SESs can be extremely complex, when they become more tightly linked in the global system, complexity spirals as multi-scale and multi-level processes become more important. Here, we argue that addressing these multi-scale and multilevel challenges requires a collection of theories and models. We suggest that the conceptual domains sustainability, resilience, and robustness provide a suciently rich collection of theories and models but overlapping denitions and confusion about how these conceptual domains articulate with one another reduces their utility. Here we attempt to eliminate this confusion and illustrate how sustainability, resilience and robustness can be used in tandem to address the multi-level and multi-scale challenges associated with global change."Working Paper A Multimethod Approach to Study the Governance of Social-Ecological Systems(2011) Janssen, Marco A.; Bousquet, François; Ostrom, Elinor"In this paper, we discuss the lessons learned from a project that combined different types of methods to study the interaction of ecological dynamics, experience of resource users, and institutional arrangements.We combined theoretical computational models, laboratory experiments with undergraduate students in the USA, field experiments, and role games with villagers in rural Thailand and Colombia. The expectation at the start of the project was that specific experience with resource management would affect the way participants play the game and the rules they would develop. We found that contextual variables, such as trust in other community members and the feeling of being an accepted member of the community, and also the ecological context had significant explanatory power, more than experience. Another conclusion from using these different methods is the fact that the quality of resource management lies more on the possibility of communication rather than on the types of rules crafted or selected."Working Paper Indigenous Communities, Cooperation, and Communication: Taking Experiments to the Field(2011) Ghate, Rucha; Ghate, Suresh; Ostrom, Elinor"Much experimental research has been conducted in laboratory settings on human behavior related to public goods, common-pool resources, and other social dilemmas. These studies have shown that when subjects are anonymous and not allowed to communicate, they tend not to cooperate. However, to the surprise of game theorists, simply allowing subjects to communicate in a laboratory setting enables them to achieve far more cooperative outcomes. The replication of the experiment in laboratory settings in multiple countries as well as in some initial field experiments has only confirmed this important finding. However, while carefully conducted laboratory experiments do have strong internal validity, external validity requires further research beyond the initial field experiments that researchers have begun to conduct. In this paper, we report on a series of common-pool-resource field experiments conducted in eight indigenous communities in India that have very long traditions of shared norms and mutual trust. We used two experimental designs in all eight villages: a 'no-communication' game where no one was allowed verbal or written communication and a 'communication game' in which the same five participants were allowed to communicate with each other at the beginning of each round before making their decisions. The findings from these field experiments are substantially different from the findings of similar experiments conducted in experimental laboratories. Subjects tended to cooperate in the first design even in the absence of communication. Our findings suggest that the shared norms in these indigenous communities are so deeply embedded that communication is not essential to arrive at cooperative decisions. However, communication does homogenize group and individual outcomes so that communities that are overly cooperative tend to reduce cooperation slightly while those showing small deviations in the other direction move toward the optimal solution."