Social Movements and Ecosystem Services—the Role of Social Network Structure in Protecting and Managing Urban Green Areas in Stockholm
By H. Ernstson, S. Sörlin, T. Elmqvist. 2008
315 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Exploitation and degradation of urban green areas reduce their capacity to sustain ecosystem services. In protecting and managing these areas, research has increasingly focused on actors in civil society. Here, we analyzed an urban movement of 62 civil-society organizations-from user groups, such as boating clubs and allotment gardens, to culture and nature conservation groups-that have protected the Stockholm National Urban Park. We particularly focused on the social network structure of the movement, i.e., the patterns of interaction between movement organizations. The results reveal a core-periphery structure where core and semi-core organizations have deliberately built political connections to authorities, whereas the periphery gathers all user groups involved in day-to-day activities in the park. We show how the core-periphery structure has facilitated collective action to protect the park, but we also suggest that the same social network structure might simultaneously have constrained collaborative ecosystem management. In particular, user groups with valuable local ecological knowledge have not been included in collaborative arenas. Our case points out the inherent double-nature of all social networks as they facilitate some collective actions, yet constrain others. The paper argues for incorporating social network structure in theories and applications of adaptive governance and co-management.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Plant Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/20f0390c47a976e1acad76462466ab3526f9f382
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In Global and Planetary Change
In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis
In Plant Science
Citations in the corpus
- Ecosystem services as technology of globalization: On articulating values in urban nature (2013, background): “A key factor behind this success, apart from an ef fi cient collaborative organizational network structure (Ernstson, 2011; Ernstson et al., 2008), was the construction of a protective narrative that helped to explain and legiti-mizetheneed…”
- Urgent Biophilia: Human-Nature Interactions and Biological Attractions in Disaster Resilience (2012, result): “Further elaboration and analysis of this scaling up to the community level of the benefits of green space is found in two recent studies of green space in Stockholm (Barthel et al. 2005; Ernstson et al. 2008).”
- The role of social networks in natural resource governance: What relational patterns make a difference? (2009, background): “The uneven distribution of ties in itself leads to asymmetric relations of influence and power (Ernstson et al., 2009; Diani, 2003b) which means that issues of legitimacy and accurate representation of peripheral actors need to be brought into the analysis.”
- Network analysis in conservation biogeography: challenges and opportunities (2010, background): “, 2003), and how collaboration networks among civilsociety organizations can explain the protection and management of urban green areas (Ernstson et al., 2008).”
- Conservation stakeholder network mapping, analysis, and weaving (2011, methodology): “…& Rova 2010); a heterogeneous set of groups within the network as a whole, contributing expertise in a variety of knowledge areas (Bodin et al. 2006; Ernstson et al. 2008; Bodin & Crona 2009; Sandström & Rova 2010); bridging relationships between groups that facilitate the sharing of expert…”
- Food and Green Space in Cities: A Resilience Lens on Gardens and Urban Environmental Movements (2015, background): “This provides a functional division of labour among movement participants in which some become ‘experts of resistance’ while others serve to protect, monitor and develop fine-tuned knowledge of local green areas (Ernstson et al., 2008).”
- Sustainability transformations: a resilience perspective (2014, background): “…issues such as power sharing, decentralization and devolution of management rights, power asymmetries, and injustices that arise from structural inequalities of power (see, e.g., Adger et al. 2005, Galaz 2005, Cowling et al. 2008, Ernstson et al. 2008, Crona and Bodin 2010, Moore and Tjornbo 2012).”