The social structural foundations of adaptation and transformation in social-ecological systems
By Michele L. Barnes, Ö. Bodin, A. Guerrero, R. McALLISTER, S. Alexander, Garry Robins. 2017
178 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Social networks are frequently cited as vital for facilitating successful adaptation and transformation in linked social-ecological systems to overcome pressing resource management challenges. Yet confusion remains over the precise nature of adaptation vs. transformation and the specific social network structures that facilitate these processes. Here, we adopt a network perspective to theorize a continuum of structural capacities in social-ecological systems that set the stage for effective adaptation and transformation. We begin by drawing on the resilience literature and the multilayered action situation to link processes of change in social-ecological systems to decision making across multiple layers of rules underpinning societal organization. We then present a framework that hypothesizes seven specific social-ecological network configurations that lay the structural foundation necessary for facilitating adaptation and transformation, given the type and magnitude of human action required. A key contribution of the framework is explicit consideration of how social networks relate to ecological structures and the particular environmental problem at hand. Of the seven configurations identified, three are linked to capacities conducive to adaptation and three to transformation, and one is hypothesized to be important for facilitating both processes. We discuss how our theoretical framework can be applied in practice by highlighting existing empirical examples from related environmental governance contexts. Further extension of our hypotheses, particularly as more data become available, can ultimately help guide the design of institutional arrangements to be more effective at dealing with change.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/447b83fd2bf78235b58199e987266db71379ccdf
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In Global and Planetary Change
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Transformative social innovation for sustainable rural development: An analytical framework to assist community-based initiatives (2020, background): “Adaptation is de fi ned as the capacity of a SES to learn, combine experiences and knowledge, and adjust its responses to changing ex-ternal and internal pressures and processes, while continuing to develop, thus resulting in overall improvement (Barnes et al., 2017; Berkes et al., 2003).”