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Journal Article Analyzing Resilience with Communicative Systems Theory an Example from European Fisheries(2013) Wilson, Douglas C.; Jacobsen, Rikke B."The present paper argues that our understanding of the resilience of social-ecological systems can be improved by considering 'communicative resilience' based on Communicative Systems Theory, which focuses on communicative action oriented to achieving mutual understandings. It further argues that it is possible to theorise and analyse resilience within complex social-ecological systems from this communicative perspective in a way that is very different from, but complementary to, agent-based approaches focussed on incentives. The paper presents data from multispecies mixed fisheries in Europe to demonstrate that the implications of institutional rules for SES resilience can be understood and improved upon by examining how institutions help or hinder the development of mutual understandings."Journal Article Access and Resilience: Analyzing the Construction of Social Resilience to the Threat of Water Scarcity(2006) Langridge, Ruth; Christian-Smith, Juliet; Lohse, Kathleen A."Resilience is a vital attribute that characterizes a system's capacity to cope with stress. Researchers have examined the measurement of resilience in ecosystems and in social-ecological systems, and the comparative vulnerability of social groups. Our paper refocuses attention on the processes and relations that create social resilience. Our central proposition is that the creation of social resilience is linked to a community's ability to access critical resources. We explore this proposition through an analysis of how community resilience to the stress of water scarcity is influenced by historically contingent mechanisms to gain, control, and maintain access to water. Access is defined broadly as the ability of a community to actually benefit from a resource, and includes a wider range of relations than those derived from property rights alone. We provide a framework for assessing the construction of social resilience and use it to examine, first, the different processes and relations that enabled four communities in northern California to acquire access to water, and second, how access contributed to their differential levels of resilience to potential water scarcity. Legal water rights are extremely difficult to alter, and given the variety of mechanisms that can generate access, our study suggests that strengthening and diversifying a range of structural and relational mechanisms to access water can enhance a community's resilience to water scarcity."Journal Article Parks, People, and Change: The Importance of Multistakeholder Engagement in Adaptation Planning for Conserved Areas(2014) Knapp, Corinne N.; Kofinas, Gary P.; Fresco, Nancy; Carothers, Courtney; Craver, Amy; Chapin, Stuart F."Climate change challenges the traditional goals and conservation strategies of protected areas, necessitating adaptation to changing conditions. Denali National Park and Preserve (Denali) in south central Alaska, USA, is a vast landscape that is responding to climate change in ways that will impact both ecological resources and local communities. Local observations help to inform understanding of climate change and adaptation planning, but whose knowledge is most important to consider? For this project we interviewed long-term Denali staff, scientists, subsistence community members, bus drivers, and business owners to assess what types of observations each can contribute, how climate change is impacting each, and what they think the National Park Service should do to adapt. The project shows that each type of long-term observer has different types of observations, but that those who depend more directly on natural resources for their livelihoods have more and different observations than those who do not. These findings suggest that engaging multiple groups of stakeholders who interact with the park in distinct ways adds substantially to the information provided by Denali staff and scientists and offers a broader foundation for adaptation planning. It also suggests that traditional protected area paradigms that fail to learn from and foster appropriate engagement of people may be maladaptive in the context of climate change."Journal Article Rethinking the Galapagos Islands as a Complex Social-Ecological System: Implications for Conservation and Management(2008) Gonzalez, Jose A.; Montes, Carlos; Rodriguez, Jose; Tapia, Washington"The Galapagos Islands are among the most renowned natural sites in the world. Unlike other oceanic archipelagos, the ecological and evolutionary processes characteristic of Galapagos have been minimally affected by human activities, and the archipelago still retains most of its original, unique biodiversity. However, several recent reports suggest that the development model has turned unsustainable and that the unique values of the archipelago might be seriously at risk. In response to international concern, UNESCO added Galapagos to the list of World Heritage in Danger in 2007. Our goal was to provide new insights into the origins of the present-day crisis and suggest possible management alternatives. To this end, we re-examined the Galapagos situation from a broad systems perspective, conceptualizing the archipelago as a complex social-ecological system. Past, present, and possible future trends were explored using the resilience theory as a perspective for understanding the dynamics of the system. Four major historical periods were characterized and analyzed using Hollingâ  s adaptive cycle metaphor. The current Galapagos situation was characterized as a prolonged series of crisis events followed by renewal attempts that have not yet been completed. Three plausible future scenarios were identified, with tourism acting as the primary driver of change. The current tourism model reduces the systemâ  s resilience through its effects on the economy, population growth, resource consumption, invasive species arrival, and lifestyle of the island residents. Opportunities to reorganize and maintain a desirable state do exist. However, strong political and management decisions are urgently needed to avoid an irreversible shift to a socially and environmentally undesirable regime. Key measures to achieve a new sustainability paradigm for Galapagos include modifying traditional practices to produce a more adaptive resilience-based co-management model, adopting a more comprehensive approach to territorial planning, strengthening participative approaches and institutional networks, and promoting transdisciplinary research at the frontiers of social and biophysical sciences."Journal Article A Framework for Resilience-based Governance of Social-Ecological Systems(2013) Garmestani, Ahjond S.; Benson, Melinda Harm"Panarchy provides a heuristic to characterize the cross-scale dynamics of social-ecological systems and a framework for how governance institutions should behave to be compatible with the ecosystems they manage. Managing for resilience will likely require reform of law to account for the dynamics of social-ecological systems and achieve a substantive mandate that accommodates the need for adaptation. In this paper, we suggest expansive legal reform by identifying the principles of reflexive law as a possible mechanism for achieving a shift to resilience-based governance and leveraging cross-scale dynamics to provide resilience-based responses to increasingly challenging environmental conditions."Journal Article Studying the Complexity of Change: Toward an Analytical Framework for Understanding Deliberate Social-Ecological Transformations(2014) Moore, Michele-Lee; Tjornbo, Ola; Enfors, Elin; Knapp, Corrie; Hodbod, Jennifer; Baggio, Jacopo A.; Norström, Albert; Olsson, Per"Faced with numerous seemingly intractable social and environmental challenges, many scholars and practitioners are increasingly interested in understanding how to actively engage and transform the existing systems holding such problems in place. Although a variety of analytical models have emerged in recent years, most emphasize either the social or ecological elements of such transformations rather than their coupled nature. To address this, first we have presented a definition of the core elements of a social-ecological system (SES) that could potentially be altered in a transformation. Second, we drew on insights about transformation from three branches of literature focused on radical change, i.e., social movements, socio-technical transitions, and social innovation, and gave consideration to the similarities and differences with the current studies by resilience scholars. Drawing on these findings, we have proposed a framework that outlines the process and phases of transformative change in an SES. Future research will be able to utilize the framework as a tool for analyzing the alteration of social-ecological feedbacks, identifying critical barriers and leverage points and assessing the outcome of social-ecological transformations."Journal Article The Myths of Restoration Ecology(2005) Hilderbrand, Robert H.; Watts, Adam C.; Randle, April M.From introduction: "Based on our experiences as researchers and practitioners in conservation and restoration ecology, we propose five central myths (Table 1) under which many ecological restoration and management projects seem to be conceived and implemented. Myths have value because they help us to organize and understand complex systems and phenomena. Identifying myths can help make the tacit explicit by revealing assumptions that are otherwise hidden. However, they remain simplified and potentially misguided models for understanding and application. The first Myth, the Carbon Copy, addresses the goal-setting process, and as such, it forms the basis of how restorations are evaluated. The Carbon Copy is closely tied to the remaining four myths, which involve the process of restoration and management: the Field of Dreams; Fast Forwarding; the Cookbook; and Command and Control: the Sisyphus Complex. We believe that describing these myths will be useful in understanding how some management or restoration strategies are conceived, designed, and implemented. For example, adherence to different myths may direct actions in divergent directions, as could be the case when choosing between a focus on ecosystem structure (Carbon Copy) or on key processes (Field of Dreams). Examining these myths may also help us better understand why some restoration projects do not meet our expectations. In the pages below, we briefly describe each myth and its assumptions, and give examples where the myth exists. "Our objective is not to abandon what we propose to be prevalent myths in ecological restoration--there are elements of truth in each--but to recognize that there are tacit assumptions associated with each myth. Failure to recognize these assumptions can lead to conflict and disappointing results despite large expenditures of time and effort. Our challenge is to recognize the limitations and not accept sometimes dogmatic beliefs without critical examination. We do not claim that every project is rooted in myth, but suggest that many perceived failures may be traced to over-reliance on one or more of the myths. We do not condemn restoration ecology, but rather provide a means of self-examination so readers can identify from their own experiences what worked and possible reasons for perceived failures."Journal Article Research Plan for the Study of Rapid Change, Resilience and Vulnerability in Social-Ecological Systems of the Arctic(2005) Kofinas, Gary P."How can research best address the challenges of Arctic sustainability in a world of rapid change? What determines the limitations of adaptation when a system is approaching a critical threshold? What are the social-ecological consequences when critical thresholds are crossed and new conditions emerge? How best do we frame the analysis of vulnerabilities? How can we best structure human institutions and social organization to build resilience and facilitate adaptation in conditions of rapid change? And how should Arctic residents engage in this research? These questions reflect a broad set of issues that motivated our group to gather in Vancouver, Canada this past April, 2005, and begin developing an international research plan to explore issues of rapid change and sustainability through an analysis of resilience and vulnerability of Arctic social-ecological systems. We are one of several working groups preparing for the upcoming Second International Conference on Arctic Research Planning (ICARP-2), scheduled to take place in Copenhagen in November 2005. Our draft research plan, modified for this issue of The Digest, is intended to stimulate discussion among the northern researcher community and arctic residents about the key themes worthy of study. "Our definition of the Arctic is aimed at capturing the social, economic, political, and ecological processes that are critical properties for the functioning of the Arctic System. Thus, we do not limit the definition of Arctic to more restrictive definitions, such as that region north of the Arctic Circle or north of tree line, but view it as a region integrated within the Global System."Journal Article Can Resilience be Reconciled with Globalization and the Increasingly Complex Conditions of Resource Degradation in Asian Coastal Regions?(2006) Armitage, Derek; Johnson, Derek"This paper explores the relationship between resilience and globalization. We are concerned, most importantly, with whether resilience is a suitable conceptual framework for natural resource management in the context of the rapid changes and disruptions that globalization causes in social-ecological systems. Although theoretical in scope, we ground this analysis using our experiences in two Asian coastal areas: Junagadh District in Gujarat State, India and Banawa Selatan, in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. We present the histories of resource exploitation in the two areas, and we attempt to combine a resilience perspective with close attention to the impact of globalization. Our efforts serve as a basis from which to examine the conceptual and practical compatibility of resilience with globalization. The first challenge we address is epistemological: given that resilience and globalization have roots in different disciplines, do they share a sufficiently common perception of change and human action to be compatible? Second, we address the issue of how resilience can be a viable management objective in the rapidly changing context of globalization. We identify scale as particularly important in this regard."Journal Article Network Structure and Institutional Complexity in an Ecology of Water Management Games(2014) Lubell, Mark; Robins, Garry; Wang, Peng"Social-ecological systems are governed by a complex of ecology of games featuring multiple actors, policy institutions, and issues, and not just single institutions operating in isolation. We update Long's (1958) ecology of games to analyze the coordinating roles of actors and institutions in the context of the ecology of water management games in San Francisco Bay, California. The ecology of games is operationalized as a bipartite network with actors participating in institutions, and exponential random graph models are used to test hypotheses about the structural features of the network. We found that policy coordination is facilitated mostly by federal and state agencies and collaborative institutions that span geographic boundaries. Network configurations associated with closure show the most significant departures from the predicted model values, consistent with the Berardo and Scholz (2010) 'risk hypothesis' that closure is important for solving cooperation problems."