The Historical Dynamics of Social–Ecological Traps

Boonstra, Wiebren J.; Boer, Florianne W. de

doi:10.1007/s13280-013-0419-1

Cited by 98 publications

(97 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…With more extensive and complex relations the potential of the individual groups to control processes of interaction decreases (Boonstra and De Boer 2014). The equalization of power also leads dominant social groups to pay more attention to the interests of subordinate groups because the former become more dependent for their own wellbeing on the latter (see also Scott 1985).…”

Section: Institutional Failure Creates Powermentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental change and social conflict: the northeast Atlantic mackerel dispute

2017

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A recurrent critique of the proposition of a causal relation between environmental change and social conflict is that it fails to account for the complexities and dynamics of processes of social-ecological change. In this article, we open the black box of contextual factors that influence the causal pathway from environmental change to social conflict. Firstly, we argue for the consideration of three social factors that influence that pathway: (a) institutions, (b) power, and (c) knowledge. Taking a deductive approach, we ascertain their causal importance in the case of the "mackerel dispute," an interstate conflict that unfolded after the abrupt and rapid change in distribution of the northeast Atlantic mackerel stock after 2007. We analyze the historical development of the mackerel dispute through process tracing and demonstrate the importance and causal role of the three factors. Secondly, based on our assessment, we argue to increase the diversity of the scope conditions relevant for the environmental changesocial conflict nexus. We propose to consider a wider variety of conflicts as outcome of environmental change, highincome regions as an arena for those conflicts, and a wider variety of environmental change, such as alterations in abundance in the context of climate change. Lastly, we discuss how future research on this topic can handle the wider scope conditions and greater case variability.

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Section: Institutional Failure Creates Powermentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental change and social conflict: the northeast Atlantic mackerel dispute

2017

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“…The social-ecological literature conceptualizes poverty traps as unsustainable situations that are reinforced through feedbacks between social and ecological processes, and suggests interventions that undo trap dynamics by breaking dominant reinforcing feedbacks that maintain the trap (Haider et al 2018). Boonstra and de Boer (2014) conceptualize social-ecological traps as path-dependent processes and outline how path dependency can be used for the analysis of social-ecological traps. They identify critical junctures to avoid and move out of traps.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Temporal and scale mismatches underlie social dilemmas of collective action, such as the "tragedy of the commons" where exploiting a shared resource at the individually optimal level conflicts with collective benefits and long-term sustainable use (Boonstra and de Boer 2014). Overfishing, commonly explained through Hardin's (1968) classical metaphor where the "tragedy" refers to instances when people fail to solve dilemmas of collective action, is increasingly conceptualized as a linked social-ecological process with critical feedbacks that can drive a system toward less desirable configurations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reimagining large-scale open-water fisheries governance through adaptive comanagement in hilsa shad sanctuaries

Brakel¹,

Nahiduzzaman²,

Haque³

et al. 2018

E&S

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ABSTRACT. Almost a half million fishers in Bangladesh are predominantly reliant on the hilsa shad (Tenualosa ilisha) fishery in the Meghna River and estuarine ecosystem. This paper adopts a broadened concept of social-ecological traps to frame the complex dynamics that emerge from social and ecological interactions in this highly natural resource-dependent social-ecological system (SES). We analyze how endogenous self-reinforcing processes in the system and poor initial conditions, particularly debt and lack of livelihood options outside fisheries, keep fishing households in poverty. We identify a policy decision in favor of incentive-based fisheries management as a critical juncture that influenced a trajectory of recovery in hilsa shad stocks in this complex adaptive system. Normative assessment of stakeholder perceptions indicates that fishers perceive a nominal improvement in well-being as a result of this policy. Compensation in return for compliance with a seasonal fishing ban in sanctuary areas does not, however, disrupt trap dynamics perpetuating the cycle of poverty, social exclusion, and political disempowerment in which fishing households are entrenched. Poverty and lack of alternative livelihood opportunities remain significant reasons for noncompliance with the ban as long as fishers do not have any meaningful representation in resource management and decision making. A secured tenure system through adaptive comanagement involving fishers in monitoring and enforcement of compliance with fishing bans, supported by sustainable finance for livelihood improvements outside of natural resource exploitation and predicated on responsive and accountable institutions for and by people who depend on the fishery, can form the foundation for local stewardship in a unique demonstration of contemporary largescale open-water fisheries governance in this complex SES.

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“…shocks such as population loss due to disease, warfare, or crop failure. Flickering describes increasing directional bias in a system's response rate to such perturbations, such as a society stuck in a socio-ecological trap where strong reinforcing behavior and a lack of innovation prevents adaptation (28)(29)(30). Here, flickering would suggest increasing recovery time from population decline events relative to growth events before major collapse.…”

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confidence: 99%

European Neolithic societies showed early warning signals of population collapse

Downey

Haas

Shennan

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Ecosystems on the verge of major reorganization-regime shiftmay exhibit declining resilience, which can be detected using a collection of generic statistical tests known as early warning signals (EWSs). This study explores whether EWSs anticipated human population collapse during the European Neolithic. It analyzes recent reconstructions of European Neolithic (8-4 kya) population trends that reveal regime shifts from a period of rapid growth following the introduction of agriculture to a period of instability and collapse. We find statistical support for EWSs in advance of population collapse. Seven of nine regional datasets exhibit increasing autocorrelation and variance leading up to collapse, suggesting that these societies began to recover from perturbation more slowly as resilience declined. We derive EWS statistics from a prehistoric population proxy based on summed archaeological radiocarbon date probability densities. We use simulation to validate our methods and show that sampling biases, atmospheric effects, radiocarbon calibration error, and taphonomic processes are unlikely to explain the observed EWS patterns. The implications of these results for understanding the dynamics of Neolithic ecosystems are discussed, and we present a general framework for analyzing societal regime shifts using EWS at large spatial and temporal scales. We suggest that our findings are consistent with an adaptive cycling model that highlights both the vulnerability and resilience of early European populations. We close by discussing the implications of the detection of EWS in human systems for archaeology and sustainability science.archaeology | early warning signs | human paleodemography | Neolithic Europe | resilience A 2012 Special Issue in PNAS debates how analysis of historical collapse in ancient societies can contribute to sustainability science (1). Key themes include accounting for complexity and multicausality in instances of collapse, modeling, and predicting both short-and long-term environmental change and the importance of historical and archaeological case studies. Although significant progress has been made in measuring ecosystem resilience and predicting collapse (2), quantifying the resilience of human societies presents a major challenge for social science research (3, 4). Further, the use of archaeological data and EWS methods to predict known periods of collapse in ancient human societies (i.e., retrodiction) (5) remains largely unexplored. Resilience as we use the concept here is defined as the ability of a system to absorb change and recover from disturbance while maintaining relationships between populations or state variables (6). Recent developments in ecology point to a promising new direction that follows from the observation that ecosystem resilience tends to decrease in advance of regime shifts-major transitions among qualitatively distinct ecosystem states (7). Theoretical and empirical studies of nonhuman systems reveal that decreasing resilience is detectable via time series statistics term...

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The Historical Dynamics of Social–Ecological Traps

Cited by 98 publications

References 39 publications

Environmental change and social conflict: the northeast Atlantic mackerel dispute

Environmental change and social conflict: the northeast Atlantic mackerel dispute

Reimagining large-scale open-water fisheries governance through adaptive comanagement in hilsa shad sanctuaries

European Neolithic societies showed early warning signals of population collapse

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