A social-ecological system consists of 'a bio-geo-physical' unit and its associated social actors and institutions. Social-ecological systems are complex and adaptive and delimited by spatial or functional boundaries surrounding particular ecosystems and their context problems.Glaser, M., Krause, G., Ratter, B., and Welp, M. (2008) Human-Nature-Interaction in the Anthropocene. Potential of Social-Ecological Systems Analysis. [Website], Available from: <https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/oekom/gaia/2008/00000017/00000001/art00018?crawler=true> [Assessed: 28 Feb 2020] The socio-ecological system consists of a bio-geophysical (the built and natural environment) unit and the social actors (the individual people, the organization, the governance) and institituions.
Definitions A social-ecological system (SES) can be defined as:Redman, C., Grove, M. J. and Kuby, L. (2004). Integrating Social Science into the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network: Social Dimensions of Ecological Change and Ecological Dimensions of Social Change. Ecosystems Vol.7(2), pp. 161–171. (p. 163)
A coherent system of biophysical and social factors that regularly interact in a resilient, sustained manner; A system that is defined at several spatial, temporal, and organisational scales, which may be hierarchically linked; A set of critical resources (natural, socio-economic, and cultural) whose flow and use is regulated by a combination of ecological and social systems; and A perpetually dynamic, complex system with continuous adaptation.Machlis, G.E., Force J.E, and. Burch, W.R Jr. (1997) The human ecosystem part I: The human ecosystem as an organizing concept in ecosystem management. Society and Natural Resources, Vol.10, pp.347–367.Gunderson, L. H., and Holling C. S. (2002) Panarchy: understanding transformations in human and natural systems. Island Press, Washington, D.C., US.Berkes, F., Colding, J., and Folke, C. (2003) Navigating social–ecological systems: building resilience for complexity and change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Scholars have used the concept of social-ecological systems to emphasise humans as part of nature and to stress that the delineation between social systems and ecological systems is artificial and arbitrary.Berkes, F., Colding, J., and Folke, C. (2001) Linking Social-Ecological Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. While resilience has somewhat different meaning in social and ecological context,Adger, N. (2000) Social and ecological resilience: are they related? Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 24, pp. 347–364. the SES approach holds that social and ecological systems are linked through feedback mechanisms, and that both display resilience and complexity.
Theoretical foundations Social-ecological systems are based on the concept that humans are a part of—not separate from—nature. This concept, which holds that the delineation between social systems and natural systems is arbitrary and artificial, was first put forth by Berkes and Folke, and its theory was further developed by Berkes et al. More recent research into social-ecological system theory has pointed to social-ecological keystones as critical to the structure and function of these systems, and to biocultural diversity as essential to the resilience of these systems.
Integrative approaches Through to the final decades of the twentieth century, the point of contact between social sciences and natural sciences was very limited in dealing with social-ecological systems. Just as mainstream ecology had tried to exclude humans from the study of ecology, many social science disciplines had ignored the environment altogether and limited their scope to humans. Although some scholars (e.g. Bateson 1979)Bateson, G. (1979) Mind and Nature: A necessary unit. [Website], Available from:<http://www.oikos.org/mind&nature.htm> [Assessed: 12 May 2011]. had tried to bridge the nature-culture divide, the majority of studies focused on investigating processes within the social domain only, treating the ecosystem largely as a "black box" and assuming that if the social system performs adaptively or is well organised institutionally it will also manage the environmental resource base in a sustainable fashion.Folke, C. (2006), Resilience : The emergence of a perspective for social-ecological systems analysis, Global Environmental Change, Vol. 16, pp. 253–267.
This changed through the 1970s and 1980s with the rise of several subfields associated with the social sciences but explicitly including the environment in the framing of the issues. These subfields are:
Environmental ethics, which arose from the need to develop a philosophy of relations between humans and their environment, because conventional ethics only applied to relations among people. Political ecology, which expands ecological concerns to respond to the inclusion of cultural and political activity within an analysis of ecosystems that are significantly but not always entirely socially constructed.Greenberg, J.B and Park, TK. (1994) Political ecology. Journal of Political Ecology, Vol. 1 pp. 1–12. Environmental history which arose from the rich accumulation of material documenting relationships between societies and their environment. Ecological economics which examines the link between ecology and economics by bridging the two disciplines to promote an integrated view of economics within the ecosystem. Common property which examines the linkages between resource management and social organisation, analysing how institutions and property rights systems deal with the dilemma of the "tragedy of the commons".McCay, B.J. and Acheson, J.M. (1987) The Question of the Commons: The Culture and Ecology of Communal Resources. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.Berkes, F. (1989) Common Property Resources: Ecology and Community-Based Sustainable Development. London: Belhaven Press. Traditional ecological knowledge, which refers to ecological understanding built, not by experts, but by people who live and use the resources of a place.Warren, DM., Slikkerveer, LJ., Brokensha, D. (1995) The Cultural Dimension of Development: Indigenous Knowledge System. London: Intermediate Technology Publications.
Each of the six areas summarised is a bridge spanning different combinations of natural science and social science thinking.
Conceptual foundations and origins Elinor Ostrom and her many co-researchers developed a comprehensive "Social-Ecological Systems (SES) framework", which includes much of the theory of common-pool resources and collective self-governance. It draws heavily on systems ecology and complexity theory. The studies of SES include some central societal concerns (e.g. equity and human wellbeing) that have traditionally received little attention in complex adaptive systems theory, and there are areas of complexity theory (e.g. quantum physics) that have little direct relevance for understanding SES.Cumming, G.S. (2011), Spatial Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems, Springer, London.
SES theory incorporates ideas from theories relating to the study of resilience, robustness, sustainability, and vulnerability (e.g. Levin 1999,Levin, S. A. (1999). Fragile dominion: Complexity and the commons. Reading, MA: Perseus Books. Berkes et al. 2003, Gunderson and Holling 2002, Norberg and Cumming 2008Norberg, J., & Cumming, G. S. (2008). Complexity theory for a sustainable future. New York: Columbia University Press.), but it is also concerned with a wider range of SES dynamics and attributes than any one of these terms implies. While SES theory draws on a range of discipline-specific theories, such as island biogeography, optimal foraging theory, and microeconomic theory, it is much broader than any of these individual theories alone.
SES theory emerged from a combination of disciplines and the notion of complexity developed through the work of many scholars, including the Santa Fe Institute (2002). Due to the social context in which SES research was placed, and the possibility of SES research translating into recommendations that may affect real people, SES research was seen as more "self-conscious" and "pluralistic" in its perspectives than complexity theory.
Studying SESs from a complex system perspective attempts to link different disciplines into a body of knowledge that is applicable to serious environmental problems. Management processes in the complex systems can be improved by making them adaptive and flexible, able to deal with uncertainty and surprise, and by building capacity to adapt to change. SESs are both complex and adaptive, meaning that they require continuous testing, learning about, and developing knowledge and understanding in order to cope with change and uncertainty.Carpenter, S. R., and Gunderson, L. H. (2001) Coping with collapse: ecological and social dynamics in ecosystem management. BioScience, Vol.51, pp. 451–457.
A complex system differs from a simple system in that it has a number of attributes that cannot be observed in simple systems, such as nonlinearity, uncertainty, emergence, scale, and self-organisation.
Nonlinearity Nonlinearity is related to fundamental uncertainty. It generates path dependency, which refers to local rules of interaction that change as the system evolves and develops. A consequence of path dependency is the existence of multiple basins of attraction in ecosystem development and the potential for threshold behaviour and qualitative shifts in system dynamics under changing environmental influences.Levin, S. A. (1998) Ecosystems and the biosphere as complex adaptive systems. Ecosystems Vol.1, pp. 431–436. An example for non-linearity in socio-ecological systems is illustrated by the figure on "Conceptual Model of Socioecological Drivers of Change".Aravindakshan, S., Krupnik, T.J., Groot, J.C., Speelman, E.N., Amjath-Babu, T.S. and Tittonell, P., 2020. Multi-level socioecological drivers of agrarian change: Longitudinal evidence from mixed rice-livestock-aquaculture farming systems of Bangladesh. Agricultural Systems, 177, p.102695. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agsy.2019.102695
Emergence Emergence is the appearance of behaviour that could not be anticipated from knowledge of the parts of the system alone.Centre for Complex Systems Science (2011), Complexity in Socio-ecological systems. [Website], Available from: <http://www.csiro.au/science/ComplexSocial-EcologicalSystems.html> [Assessed: 15 May 2011].
Scale Scale is important when dealing with complex systems. In a complex system many subsystems can be distinguished; and since many complex systems are hierarchic, each subsystem is nested in a larger subsystem etc.Allen T.F.H. and Starr T.B. (1982). Hierarchy: Perspectives for Ecological Complexity. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. For example, a small watershed may be considered an ecosystem, but it is a part of a larger watershed that can also be considered an ecosystem and a larger one that encompasses all the smaller watersheds. Phenomena at each level of the scale tend to have their own emergent properties, and different levels may be coupled through feedback relationships. Therefore, complex systems should always be analysed or managed simultaneously at different scales.
Self-organisation