Modelling social-ecological transformation

1. Modelling social-ecological transformation Steven Lade Stockholm Resilience Centre Montpellier, 8 October 2013

2. Social-ecological systems Human behaviour Natural resources

3. Adaptation and Transformation • Adaptation: small changes in an SES that reflect the ability of actors “to learn, combine experience and knowledge, and adjust [their] responses” (Folke 2010) • Transformation: drastic change into a different type of system ?

4. Examples of transformations • Changes in regional tax structures -> farming to suburbanisation (Folke 2010) • Loss of arctic sea ice -> transformation of geopolitical and economic feedbacks among Arctic nations (Folke 2010) • Farming -> Ecotourism in Zimbabwe (Cumming, 1999) • Transformation to ecosystem-based management (Swedish lake, Great Barrier Reef) (Olsson 2004, 2008) • Water system innovations for the development of dryland agro-ecosystems (Enfors, 2012)

5. Resilience “Resilience is the long-term capacity of a system to deal with change and continue to develop” (SRC website) • Persistence: “The ability of a system to withstand shocks.” • Adaptability: “The capacity of actors in a system to influence resilience.” • Transformability: “The capacity to transform the stability landscape itself in order to become a different kind of system, to create a fundamentally new system when ecological, economic, or social structures make the existing system untenable.” (Folke 2010)

6. Outline • How can we model adaptation and transformation? • Traditional dynamical systems approaches not enough • Network theory; adaptive and dynamic networks • SES framework of Ostrom • Power and agency • Tentative framework for modelling social-ecological transformation Biggs et al. (2012) Walker et al. (2004)

7. Descriptive frameworks • Per Olsson’s 3 phases of transformation • Attractors and development trajectories SRC Research Insight #1 Enfors, Global Environmental Change, 2013

8. Research questions • How resilient is a social-ecological system? • What processes/mechanisms/feedbacks contribute to the resilience of a social-ecological system? • How do social-ecological systems transform from one state to another? What factors drive this transformation? • What development trajectories can a social-ecological system follow? Can these trajectories be altered? How? • Initially, not predictive: represent and evaluating knowledge • Later, could create ‘null hypotheses’

9. Structure • Transformations involve reorganisation • New roles, new interactions, new governance structures, new social norms • Difficult to capture in dynamical systems framework: require new processes or even new state variables

10. Networks ? Adaptation Transformation ?

11. Dynamic/adaptive networks • Dynamic networks (social network analysis): statistical tests • Adaptive networks (physics): Mathematical properties and phase transition

12. SES-framework • Developed by the Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom and collaborators • A framework for comparing case studies on with respect to which variables are important for successful SES outcomes • We can identify three important types of nodes • Links will be interactions between them • The SES framework identifies properties of these nodes to which we should pay attention Elinor Ostrom Governance actors User Resource system MajaSchlüter

13. Example: Poverty trap Poverty trap Well-functioning system JamilaHaider Nanda Wijermans - Governance system (low) Policy action (high) Policy action descent into trap? RuleEnforcement - User (Harvester) escape from trap? (low) Income (high) Income Monitoring + + Provisioning Provisioning Extraction Extraction - - (high) Resource level Resource system (low) Resource level + + Reproduction Reproduction

14. Power • A critical aspect of a poverty trap is that the resource users lack the power to change their circumstances • Resilience thinking often criticised for neglecting power, agency, equity • Power can operate in many different ways • Include rewiring rate to represent power: ability of an actor to modify links in which they are participating Gaventa, Institute of development studies, 2006

15. Poverty trap with power - (low) Policy action G rewiring (low) (high) Policy action G rewiring (med) - + RuleEnforcement Extortion descent into trap? Lobbying - - + + U rewiring (low) U rewiring (high) (low) Income (high) Income - - + escape from trap? + Generational forgetting Generational forgetting Monitoring Provisioning Provisioning Extraction Extraction - - (high) Resource level (low) Resource level + Reproduction Reproduction

16. Rules for link change • Links change at random (at actor’s rewiring rate) • Actors make those link changes they expect to be beneficial for them (ending in a kind of Nash equilibrium) • Also need dynamical equations for state variables dIncome/dt = … dResourceLevel/dt = … Rules for node dynamics

17. Descent into a poverty trap (low) Policy action G rewiring (low) (high) Policy action G rewiring (med) - - + RuleEnforcement Extortion Lobbying + U rewiring (high) (high) Income U rewiring (low) (low) Income - - - Generational forgetting + Monitoring Provisioning Extraction (low) Resource level (high) Resource level - + Reproduction

18. Resilience Persistence: Eigenvalues/return time Adaptability: power of an actor Transformability: network-level ability to re-configure system. • Number of link changes required to reach basin of attraction of another network configuration? • Probability of endogenous transformation? (low) Policy action G rewiring (low) - Extortion - + U rewiring (low) (low) Income - + Generational forgetting Provisioning Extraction - (low) Resource level + Reproduction

19. Caveats This modelling framework so far does not incorporate • Diversity of actors • Adaptive management: willingness to experiment • Conceptual/cognitive shifts • Transformation within organisations

20. Next steps • Make appropriate dynamical rules for (an initial subset of) link and node dynamics • Apply to appropriate case or stylised case Other work • Social-ecological regime shifts • In a simple theoretical model of resource and extractors • In the Baltic Sea

21. General resilience • Diversity • Modularity • Openness • Reserves • Feedbacks • Nestedness • Monitoring • Leadership • Trust

22. Conclusions

23. SES-LINK Nanda Wijermans MajaSchlüter JamilaHaider Steven Lade Kirill Orach Exploring the roles of linkages and feedbacks in social-ecological systems using theoretical models and grounded case studies