Level 2 Detail - Bounding the System: Describing the Present
From RAWorkbook
Before beginning any assessment, it is useful to determine, at least approximately, the boundaries of what is being evaluated. Boundaries define what is in a system, and what is outside of the system. Maps, for instance, may outline countries or states (political and economic boundaries), lakes or rivers (ecological boundaries), fishing zones (management rule boundaries), or indigenous lands (cultural boundaries). Just as systems are bounded in space, they are also bounded in time. That is, resource issues are analyzed and actions taken within certain time frames. Planners often refer to time horizons, which is another way of expressing boundaries in time.
The area defined by spatial boundaries can be small or large, fixed or variable, depending upon a given problem or issue. For example, consider someone who is concerned with a lake. The shoreline of the lake is a natural boundary between water and land. The person may own a portion of land and have certain property rights (to build a house, to cut trees, to build a dock, etc.) the person may have access to fish in the lake, but may or may not own any rights to the water in the lake. At larger areas, neighbors may comprise a set of lake users. At even larger scales, the person may be part of a villages or community surrounding the lake, which has a broader spatial boundary. And so on.
There is no perfect way to set the boundaries of a system. Initial assessments may need to be changed as the understanding of the problem changes.
Imagine that one day (or, more likely, gradually over time) the clear lake with good fishing begins to turn green, and fish populations begin to decline. To begin to understand what has happened, one would make some choices to start to bound the problem. Need I look only at my neighbor, the village, or the village and its surrounding uplands? Is it just this lake, or a chain of lakes? Each one of these would have a different area and spatial boundary, and each one would relate to a different assumed cause for why the lake turned green. Similarly, once the cause of the green lake was determined, one might expand or contract the spatial boundary in looking for a solution. Even if there is a chain of lakes in trouble, can a solution be devised for this lake at the village level? If the problem is with land use in the surrounding rural system, what state or federal agencies need to be involved? Frequently, the scale at which the problem is emerging and the scale at which it needs to be solved differ from each other.
Experience indicates that there is no easy way of defining problems in space or time. The best approach is to start out with best guesses of these bounds, then refine or change as needed. You will make your initial assessment of boundaries but you should consider revisiting that assessment in subsequent sections if need be.
Simplifying the Complex: What to include, what not to include
Once one has established the boundaries for thinking about a problem, what within those boundaries does one include? Everything? That would seem hopelessly complex we probably needn't know about what our neighbors had for dinner or when the village fair is to be held in order to understand our problem. On the other hand, one can imagine needing to know about agricultural fertilizer practices (which can lead to green lakes or more technically, lake eutrophication), the chemicals already in the sediments of the lake, the reproductive strategies of the fish in the lakes, the recreational behavior of boaters and fishers, the flows of water between lakes, or between lake and sediments, etc. As you might imagine, the assessment can get complicated very quickly.
Much of the dynamics of complex systems can be traced to a handful of variables
Incorporating too much detail can hamper progress towards understanding the problem and defining a solution. Too little detail, or too narrow a scope of study, however, can lead to incorrect solutions. The manager in charge of stocking a lake, for instance, may only concern herself with the biology of the fish - how many fish should I introduce and of what age if I want so many fish next year? The manager in charge of issuing fishing permits may concern himself more with the economics of the situation - how much revenue can my community generate from permits, what is an efficient way to distribute them, what enforcement mechanisms are required? If the two managers never talk, they risk failure of the lake fishery, because there will be no understanding of how the stocking protocols affect the fishing behavior of the fishermen, and/or no understanding of how fishing strategies affect the age structure and breeding potential of the fish population. When one considers the potential effect of other species of fish on both the biology of the target species and on the behavior of fishermen or that others using the lake for other types of recreation can also influence the lake fishery, the situation becomes even more complicated.
In many analyses of natural resource management examinations of what went right and what went wrong, one dominant pattern emerges. When management fails it is frequently because managers have considered too much detail for a narrow aspect of the system, and too little detail for all the rest. The component of detailed scrutiny usually depends on the training of the manager a biologist will study the biology in great detail, an economist the economics, and so on. The other parts of the system are understood only shallowly, or not at all.
Social-Ecological Systems
One of the early insights of resilience theory, then, was the need to examine coupled social-ecological systems. It's not enough to understand the biology in great detail if one doesn't also understand the dynamics of the markets that drive resource use, or the cultural attachments people may have to certain ways of doing things. A detailed economic analysis will be incorrect if it doesn't contain information on the biological limits to renewing or producing certain resources.
Management fails when managers consider too much detail for one part of the system, and too little detail for the rest
Nor is it enough to have a team of researchers or managers, each of whom understands a particular componentsoil quality, local markets, traditional practices, national environmental regulation in great detail. In the past couple of decades, a new kind of science focused on complex systems has revealed that understanding the component pieces of a system doesn't guarantee understanding the behavior of the system as a whole. We know a lot, for instance, about various parts of the human brain and how it controls emotion, processes sensory information, stores memories. But mastering each of these pieces still doesn't tell us about the complex behaviors of an individual. We need to study the individual as a whole person not as a collection of pieces in order to understand his or her behavior. And even then what we really need to do is understand how that individual is influenced by her family, her peers, her community, and her culture.
Mastering that level of understanding isn't easy, of course. None of us is equipped to be expert in all fields. But effective management of natural resources requires that one reach out well beyond one's area of training or interest to encompass ecological, social (primarily political, cultural and institutional), and economic domains of the system. The ecological components would include all of the non-human living organisms, as well as the physical and chemical features that help determine their habitat or environment, and the interactions of the living and non-living components of that system (such as soils, topography, etc.). The social component includes the political agencies and institutions, cultural traditions, the formal legal systems, and the informal rules governing people's behavior, among other things. It can also include the technology or technological development that can be brought to bear on a problem. The economic component includes the formal (frequently markets and formal property rights) and informal (e.g., barter systems) societies have developed for allocating resources and exchanging goods. We call each of these components a domain. Throughout this working book, therefore, we will concentrate on at least these three domains, recognizing that each of them also includes many components. (You may find it helpful to also introduce other domains in your analysis and should feel free to do so.) When we refer to a social-ecological system, we are referring to a system comprising at least the three domains of social, ecological, and economic (and use social-ecological as a manageable label).
Mastering a more holistic understanding of the system also means respecting the knowledge that those with different training and perspectives bring to the table - including those who may have no formal academic training, and whose capacity to see the system as a whole may be greater as a result. And it is exactly that - seeing the system as a whole - not the sum of parts, but the union of parts, that will provide the vantage point from which solutions may be sought. Thus, throughout the assessments that follow in this working book, we encourage you to consider at least these three domains-ecological, economic, and social as well as their interactions. Focusing only on the ecological, or economic, or social domains will not allow an effective resilience analysis.
Building resilience requires integrating ecological, social, and economic perspectives.
The resilience assessment activities for this section are intended to help define the system, and its key ingredients. We will call this whole agglomeration-the natural resource, the people managing it and using it, the institutions governing access, commercial and non-commercial values, the 'focal system'. We'll be evaluating various aspects of this system in subsequent chapters.
Fundamentals: What is a Social-Ecological System?
A system is a group or set of connected components that comprise a unified object. Systems can be living, such as the human body, which is made up of genes, cells, tissues and organs. Systems can have living and non-living components, such as an ecosystem, which is made up of plant, animal (biotic), water, air, and nutrient (abiotic) constituents. Social-ecological systems have strongly coupled ecological and societal components. For example, in many coastal fishing communities, marine resources are usually tightly integrated with the local economy, culture, and political dynamics. In other social-ecological systems, ecological components may include grasslands, reefs, forests, lakes, wetlands, or other sets of natural resources. The social components may be the individuals, organized groups, and institutional rules used to guide interactions with the ecosystem. These actions and interventions are developed to manipulate ecological systems to receive goods and services for the benefit of humans.
Figure 1: Conceptual diagram of elements of a social-ecological system. Human systems, comprised of individuals, groups, networks and institutions (rules, regulations and procedures) intervene to obtain goods and services from ecosystems. Actions and interventions include the removal or planting of vegetation, harvest of animals, irrigation of landscapes, and construction of systems to control floods. These interventions directly and indirectly modify ecosystem structure and function.
1.1 Bounding the System: Describing the Present
1.2 Expanding the System: Multiple Scales
