A Review of Social Dilemmas and Social‐Ecological Traps in Conservation and Natural Resource Management

Abstract

Successful conservation depends as much on people working together as it does on sound science and good governance. Research on cooperation in businesses, economics, psychology, and natural resource management has identified shared social and social-ecological dynamics, reviewed and categorized in this article that can create unwanted surprises and problems for conservation efforts. Cooperation may fail when: (1) individual and group benefits are in conflict (social dilemmas) or (2) social-ecological systems become caught in problem-causing and problem-enhancing feedbacks (SES traps). Knowing about and recognizing these dynamics can help decision makers to understand and change key elements of problems and learn from the experiences of others. Social dilemmas have winners and losers, and involve give-some or take-some choices; SES traps are lose-lose situations. Solutions to problems of cooperation in conservation contexts involve identifying the conservation objective and context, diagnosing systemic social dilemmas and SES traps, and developing practical solutions that work with group processes and individuals toward shared and positively reinforcing goals, goal structures, and expectations. Research on cooperation in conservation has largely ignored problems of scale, scaling, and group heterogeneity. The field would benefit from a shift from a probabilistic, empirical approach to a stronger theory-driven, mechanistic, and more diagnostic approach.

Can income diversification resolve social-ecological traps in small-scale fisheries and aquaculture in the global south? A case study of response diversity in the Tam Giang lagoon, central Vietnam

“…Thirty years later, it is well accepted that these situations should not be simplified as remorseless tragedies (Hardin 1968), but that complex causality characterizes social-ecological traps (Nunan 2015). Trap dynamics are profound when natural resources are commonly owned and managed (Cumming 2018). This is an important reason why small-scale fisheries and aquaculture in the global south are primary production activities that particularly suffer from persistent poverty in combination with ecological degradation (Kittinger et al 2013).…”

Why fishers end up in social-ecological traps: a case study of Swedish eel fisheries in the Baltic Sea

“…The dependence has grown over time through interactions in opportunities, capacities, and motivations to fish, and these interactions made the trap progressively more difficult to escape. The shrinking potential to change the situation indicates rigidity, which is a common feature of SE traps in general (Scheffer and Westley 2007, Cumming 2018, Haider et al 2018 and of SE traps in the fisheries context (Steneck et al 2011, Laborde et al 2016, Hanh and Boonstra 2018. In what follows, we first elaborate on the possibilities to escape the trap and then suggest a management strategy to avoid this situation in other place-based fisheries.…”

“…These concepts capture how individuals can, collectively and unintentionally, contribute to sustainability problems such as overexploitation and ecosystem degradation. Traps and tragedies feature prominently in academic discussions since the 1970s on how to manage commonly shared natural resources (Hardin 1968, Platt 1973, Ostrom et al 2002, Cumming 2018. The tragedy metaphor, famous since Hardin's article "The tragedy of the commons" (Hardin 1968), is heavily criticized for overlooking the possibility and diversity of common-pool resource management arrangements, and the potential of social learning, human adaptation, and transformation (McCay and Jentoft 1998, McCay 2002.…”

“…Many studies of SE traps describe and explain these interactions in one particular moment in time (Steneck et al 2011, Hänke et al 2017. Insights from these studies can be used to create typologies of traps (see Cumming 2018 for an example) and to develop management strategies of how to escape traps. Previous studies also emphasize the importance of history and argue that traps evolve through the co-occurrence of certain conditions at specific points in time (Boonstra and de Boer 2014).…”

Cooperative conservation: Seven ways to save the world

“…We need environmental policy interventions that harness the full power of human cooperation in order to advance on the broadest possible front. As Cummings has put it: “Deep understandings of cooperation and how it can be achieved are therefore essential for effective conservation practice” (Cumming, ). However, as we show below (Figure ) the extant literature focuses almost exclusively on one type of cooperation—reciprocity—at the expense of all the rest.…”