Building capacity for resilience in social- ecological systems

Abstract This thesis analyzes social-ecological dynamics with the purpose to contribute to the understanding of adaptive capacity in social-ecological systems. It focuses on mechanisms for building social-ecological resilience in a world that is continuously changing. This involves the capacity of actors in such systems to cope with change and uncertainty without reducing the ability of complex ecosystems to generate goods and services essential for societal development. It explores the social aspects of ecosystem management, which includes adjustment of management practices and associated organizational and institutional structures and processes, guided by monitoring of feedback signals of environmental change. The first paper analyzes how people in natural disturbance-prone geographical settings, who rely heavily on their local ecosystems for survival, have developed knowledge and risk-spreading strategies to avoid large-scale social and ecological crisis. The study reveals a range of social and ecological practices that deal with change and uncertainty by evoking small-scale disturbances, inhibiting a full-scale release, and nurturing sources for ecosystem renewal. Social structures and processes, such as property rights and rituals, maintain these practices during stable times. Using case studies from Sweden and Canada, papers II, III and IV investigate the emergence of adaptive co-management of ecosystems. Paper II analyzes the development of a catchment approach to crayfish management by a local fishing association in Western Sweden as a response to environmental change. Local knowledge of ecosystem dynamics, associated management practices, institutions and their cross-scale relations are identified and analyzed. Paper III addresses the role of ecosystem knowledge in adaptive co-management and identifies essential conditions of this process in relation to social-ecological resilience. These include enabling legislation that creates social space for ecosystem management; funds for responding to environmental change and for remedial action; monitoring and responding to environmental feedback; information flow through social networks; combination of various sources of information and knowledge; vision, leadership and trust; sense-making for ecosystem management; and arenas for collaborative learning for ecosystem management. Paper IV analyzes the creation of an adaptive co-management system in a wetland landscape in southern Sweden. The results illustrate that a window of opportunity enabled ecosystem managers to transform a social-ecological system from an undesirable trajectory to a new one that developed into an adaptive co-management system founded on an ecosystem perspective. The results of those analyzes illustrate that multiple-actor groups can self-organize, learn and actively adapt to and shape change. The development of ecosystem management in these cases took place through a sequence of responses to environmental events that created and widened the scope of local management from a particular issue or resource to a broad set of issues related to ecosystems processes across scales and from individual actors, to group of actors to multiple-actor processes. Social networks developed that connected institutions and organizations across levels and scales and facilitated information flows. Knowledge accumulation of ecosystem dynamics is central throughout the process of adaptive co-management development, and it seems to emerge as a collaborative effort to become part of the organizational and institutional structures. Knowledge for ecosystem management is mobilized through social networks and complements and continuously refines local