Navigating the Back Loop: Fostering Social Innovation and Transformation in Ecosystem Management

By Reinette Biggs, Frances Westley, Stephen R. Carpenter. 2010

388 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Addressing the environmental challenges of the 21st century requires substantial changes to the way modern society views and manages ecosystems. In particular, many authors contend that fundamental transformation of the largely sectoral, expert-centered ecosystem-management institutions of modern, Western societies is needed. There is increasing agreement that more adaptive, integrated, collaborative ecosystem-management approaches, interlinked at multiple scales, would improve society's ability to sustainably manage complex social-ecological systems. Therefore, understanding processes of transformation, and factors that may enable transformation in ecosystem management, has become an active research area. We explore ecosystem-management transformations using a social-innovation framework. Based on three local-level case studies of transformation in freshwater management, we provide a pilot assessment of factors that may promote the emergence and adoption of integrated, collaborative ecosystem-management approaches. Our analysis suggests that ongoing environmental degradation, increasing environmental awareness, and shifting societal values are creating fertile ground for the emergence and adoption of new approaches to ecosystem management. Based on the case studies we examined, we suggest that initiatives that foster environmental awareness and attachment to local ecosystems, develop capacity for social entrepreneurship in the environmental arena, promote dialogue between key stakeholders, and provide institutional support to new institutions may facilitate the emergence of integrated, collaborative ecosystem-management approaches.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8437f9ee12b8e44ca1184a905b7b12d564995fce

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In Global and Planetary Change

In Management of Technology and Innovation

Citations in the corpus

Transformative social innovation for sustainable rural development: An analytical framework to assist community-based initiatives (2020, background): “We introduce social innovation, not just as an interesting concept to advance the theory of adaptive governance of SES, but also as a practice that encourages the governance system and regional planning to adapt (Baker and Mehmood, 2015).”
Dancing the Supply Chain: Toward Transformative Supply Chain Management (2021, background): “This view shifts the focus away from attempting to maintain the supply chain in some fixed optimal state to guiding change along desirable trajectories (see Biggs et al., 2010).”
Sustainability transformations: a resilience perspective (2014, background): “Hence, such innovations can be important tools for staying within the just and safe space for humanity (sensu Raworth 2013), but they require critical review (Rockström et al. 2009, Biggs et al. 2010, Westley et al. 2011, Olsson and Galaz 2012, Galaz 2014).”
Social-ecological systems as complex adaptive systems: organizing principles for advancing research methods and approaches (2018, background): “Principle 1: CAS are constituted relationally A distinctive feature of CAS is that they are defined more by the interactions among their constituent components than by the components themselves (Wimsatt 1994, Biggs et al. 2010, Kineman 2011, Nicholson and Dupré 2018).”
Resilience and entrepreneurship: a systematic literature review (2017, background): “Second, cognitive and behavioral entrepreneurial traits and distinct forms of entrepreneurship such as social entrepreneurs are said to foster the ability of firms to adjust to new circumstances and to contribute to long-term sustainability through innovation (Biggs et al., 2010).”