Social-Ecological Transformation for Ecosystem Management: the Development of Adaptive Co-management of a Wetland Landscape in Southern Sweden

By P. Olsson, Carl Folke, T. Hahn. 2004

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We analyze the emergence of an adaptive co-management system for wetland landscape governance in southern Sweden, a process where unconnected management by several actors in the landscape was mobilized, renewed, and reconfigured into ecosystem management within about a decade. Our analysis highlights the social mechanisms behind the transformation toward ecosystem management. The self-organizing process was triggered by perceived threats among members of various local stewardship associations and local government to the area’s cultural and ecological values. These threats challenged the development of ecosystem services in the area. We show how one individual, a key leader, played an instrumental role in directing change and transforming governance. The transformation involved three phases: 1) preparing the system for change, 2) seizing a window of opportunity, and 3) building social-ecological resilience of the new desired state. This local policy entrepreneur initiated trust-building dialogue, mobilized social networks with actors across scales, and started processes for coordinating people, information flows and ongoing activities, and for compiling and generating knowledge, understanding, and management practices of ecosystem dynamics. Understanding, collaborative learning, and creating public awareness were part of the process. A comprehensive framework was developed with a shared vision and goals that presented conservation as development, turned problems into possibilities, and contributed to a shift in perception among key actors regarding the values of the wetland landscape. A window of opportunity at the political level opened, which made it possible to transform the governance system toward a trajectory of ecosystem management. The transformation involved establishing a new municipal organization, the Ecomuseum Kristianstads Vattenrike (EKV). This flexible organization serves as a bridge between local actors and governmental bodies and is essential to the adaptive governance of the wetland landscape. It is also critical in navigating the larger sociopolitical and economic environment for resilience of the new social-ecological system. We conclude that social transformation is essential to move from a less desired trajectory to one where the capacity to manage ecosystems sustainably for human well-being is strengthened. Adaptability among actors is needed to reinforce and sustain the desired social-ecological state and make it resilient to future change and unpredictable events. INTRODUCTION Social-ecological systems are complex systems, the inherent features of which are change and uncertainty (Gunderson and Holling 2002). To strengthen our capacity to deal with uncertainty and change and to sustain ecosystem services, we must be able to monitor, interpret, and respond to ecosystem feedback (Gadgil et al. 1993, Berkes et al. 2003). Knowledge generation of ecosystem dynamics and the capacity to respond to ecosystem feedback among local resource users and steward associations tend to be integrated with management practices and evolve with the Human well-being and progress toward sustainable development are vitally dependent on improved management of the Earth’s ecosystems. The focus of the international Millennium Ecosystem Assessment is to strengthen our capacity to manage ecosystems sustainably to ensure continued provision of essential services. This process requires an understanding of not only the ecological system but the integrated socialecological system (Berkes and Folke 1998). Center for Transdisciplinary Environmental Research Ecology and Society 9(4): 2. http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss4/art2 institutional and organizational aspects of management in what we refer to as adaptive co-management systems (Olsson et al. 2004). Adaptive comanagement is the combination and operationalization of adaptive management (Holling 1978) and adaptive governance (Dietz et al. 2003). Adaptive co-management focuses on creating functional feedback loops between social and ecological systems. It relies on collaboration among a diverse set of actors operating at different levels, often in networks, from local users to municipalities to regional and national or supranational organizations. Adaptive co-management systems have been defined as flexible community-based systems of resource management tailored to specific places and situations, supported by, and working with, various organizations at different levels (Folke et al. 2003). Sharing management power and responsibility may involve multiple institutional links among user groups or communities, government agencies, and nongovernmental organizations. Hence, adaptive comanagement systems build on open institutions and learning (Shannon and Antypas 1997), drawing on a variety of sources of information and knowledge and avoiding set prescriptions of management superimposed on a particular place, situation, or context. Adaptive comanagement includes experimentation that provides opportunities to track desired and sustainable trajectories (Carpenter and Gunderson 2001). We have recently proposed that adaptive co-management of ecosystems has the potential to build resilience in social-ecological systems (Olsson et al. 2004). Socialecological resilience refers to the capacity of a socialecological system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks (Walker et al., in preparation). The ability to reorganize and renew a desired social-ecological system state following disturbance and change will strongly depend on the influences from states and dynamics at scales above and below. Such cross-scale aspects of resilience are captured in the notion of a panarchy, a set of dynamic systems nested across scales (Gunderson and Holling 2002). Hence, resilience reflects the degree to which a social-ecological system is capable of self-organization (vs. lack of organization, or organization forced by external factors) and the degree to which the system can build and increase the capacity for learning and adaptation (Carpenter et al. 2001). The capacity to adapt to and shape change is an important component of social-ecological system resilience (Berkes et al. 2003). In a social-ecological system with high adaptability, the actors have the capacity to sustain the system in desired states in response to changing conditions and disturbance events. What sustains the adaptive capacity of social-ecological systems in a world that is constantly changing? Following the work of Berkes and Folke (1998), Tengö and Hammer (2003) identify a bundle of management practices in a small-holder Tanzanian agropastoral society as part of adaptive capacity. Colding et al. (2003) summarize practices for coping with environmental variability and disturbance events that seem to confer resilience in social-ecological systems. Trosper (2003) suggests that the potlatch system among Indians on the Northwest Coast of the USA must have been characterized by adaptive capacity as it persisted for two millennia before these tribes had contact with people from the Old World. The characteristics of the system, namely property rights, environmental ethics, rules of earning and holding titles, public accountability, and the reciprocal exchange system, provided all three elements of resilient social-ecological systems as defined above. Folke et al. (2003) identify and expand on four critical factors in complex social-ecological systems that interact across temporal and spatial scales and that seem to be required for dealing with ecosystem dynamics during periods of change and reorganization: learning to live with change and uncertainty, nurturing diversity for reorganization and renewal, combining different types of knowledge for learning, and creating opportunities for self-organization toward social-ecological sustainability. It is the last factor, in particular, that is the focus of this article and it relates to transformability, a concept under development within the Resilience Alliance (Walker et al., in preparation). Transformability is the capacity of a social-ecological system to move to a new configuration defined by new state variables or the old state variables supplemented by new ones. New variables are introduced or allowed to emerge to create untried beginnings from which to evolve a new way of operating when existing ecological, economic, and social structures become untenable (Walker et al., in preparation). Here, we study the emergence of an adaptive comanagement system for wetland landscape management in southern Sweden, a process by which the prevailing management system was moved into a new configuration of ecosystem management within about a decade. Coordinated and collaborative Ecology and Society 9(4): 2. http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss4/art2 ecosystem management at the landscape and catchment level did not exist earlier. Hence, this article focuses on social change processes for establishing ecosystem management (Danter et al. 2000) and, following the work of Berkes and Folke (1998), Berkes et al. (2003), and Gunderson and Holling (2002), on elucidating social mechanisms behind such management or, more specifically, social mechanisms of adaptability and transformability. The starting point for our analysis was the observation of a policy change by the Municipality of Kristianstad in 1989 that adopted a new approach for managing the wetland ecosystems of the lower Helgeå River catchment, in southern Sweden (Fig. 1). The ecosystems in this area and the social structures and processes behind their management are defined as a social-ecological system (SES) (see Berkes and Folke 2002). The policy change was accompanied by an organizational change with the establishment of a new municipal organization, the Ecomuseum Kristianstads Vattenrike (EKV), which plays a key role in the

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

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Citations in the corpus

The influence of social capital on environmental policy instruments (2009, background): “…of natural resources necessitating the cooperation of several entities such as participation of citizens in voluntary recycling and voluntary agreements between farmers and state actors (e.g. Bruckmeier and Teherani-Kronner 1992, Falconer 2000, Adger 2003, Olsson et al. 2004, Lockie 2006).”
How Resource Dependency Can Influence Social Resilience within a Primary Resource Industry. (2007, background): “Other researchers have also found that adaptation processes do not occur unless people use novelty, creativity, experimentation, learning, and planning in approaching change (Folke et al. 2005; Hiedanpaa 2005; Olsson, Folke, and Hahn 2004).”
Social–ecological systems and adaptive governance of the commons (2006, background): “Cooperation among agents may be self-organized into sophisticated governance systems that allow for management of ecosystem services in dynamic landscapes (Ostrom 1990; Olsson et al. 2004).”
Who's in and why? A typology of stakeholder analysis methods for natural resource management. (2009, background): “It has been argued that stakeholder analysis can enable information and perspectives to be sought from a far wider range of sources, providing a more robust knowledge base from which to build development or natural resource management initiatives (Olsson et al., 2004; Berkes, 1999; Woodhill and Röli”
Resilience thinking: integrating resilience, adaptability and transformability (2010, background): “…consist of three phases: being prepared for or even preparing the social–ecological systems for change, navigating the transition by making use of a crisis as a window of opportunity for change, and building resilience of the new social–ecological regime (Olsson et al. 2004, Chapin et al. 2010).”
Environmental governance and its implications for conservation practice (2012, background): “Well-studied efforts to protect and conserve the Kristianstad wetland complex in Sweden provide a clear example of what this looks like on the ground (Olsson et al. 2004).”