The invisible wand: adaptive co-management as an emergent strategy in complex bio-economic system

By J. Ruitenbeek, C. Cartier. 2001

181 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper provides an economic perspective on concepts related to adaptive co-management (ACM). The discussion is cast within a formal generalised complex system (CS) framework. The authors explicitly explore the hypothesis of whether ACM can be regarded as an emergent strategy under specific conditions. The conditions draw a corollary from the well-known work of Adam Smith that describes 'self interest' as a forcing factor (the 'invisible hand) that lead to stability and efficiency in economic systems. The specific hypothesis is meant as an exploratory tool that permits the authors: (i) to develop in greater detail a formal definition of the elements of the system within a CS framework; (ii) to provide economic perspectives on the literature relating to ACM; (iii) to derive some related empirical lessons from that literature; (iv) to demonstrate the limitations of existing economic modelling and analytical constructs for addressing ACM issues; (v) to identify potential policy linkages; and (vi) to elaborate research implications.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7feed34d3e25a5e7370f15bfd72f7b2682400962

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In Management Science and Operations Research

Citations in the corpus

Resilience of past landscapes: Resilience theory, society, and the Longue Durée (2003, background): “In one variant of this approach, the goal is adaptive comanagement in which a long-term management structure permits stakeholders to share management responsibility within a specific system of natural resources and to learn from their actions (Ruitenbeek and Cartier 2001).”
Adaptive Comanagement for Building Resilience in Social–Ecological Systems (2004, background): “Ruitenbeek and Cartier (2001) argue that comanagement is an emergent property of resource management systems, not an arrangement that can be legislated topdown, but one that self-organizes bottom-up.”
Charting the New Territory of Adaptive Co-management: A Delphi Study (2007, background): “…e.g., adaptive nature, learning, communication, sharing of power, shared decision making, by the expert panel resonate strongly with the emerging literature on ACM (e.g., Ruitenbeek and Cartier 2001, Marschke and Nong 2003, Olsson et al. 2004, Folke et al. 2005, Armitage et al., in press).”
Can Resilience be Reconciled with Globalization and the Increasingly Complex Conditions of Resource Degradation in Asian Coastal Regions (2006, background): “However, within the stable domains created by slow-moving variables, fast variables, e.g., insect outbreaks in forest ecosystems or individual preferences in social systems, provide the novelty for experimentation upon which adaptation depends (Ruitenbeek and Cartier 2001).”
A resilience-based framework for evaluating adaptive co-management: Linking ecology, economics and society in a complex world (2007, background): “Systems are selforganizing with properties emerging through nested levels via multiple interactions and feedbackmechanisms as relationships among entities are non-linear (Levin, 1999; Ruitenbeek and Cartier, 2001; Folke et al., 2002; Gunderson and Holling, 2002).”