Social networks in natural resource management: what is there to learn from a structural perspective?
By Ö. Bodin, B. Crona, H. Ernstson. 2006
654 citations recorded by the source corpus.
With accelerating urbanization it is crucial to understand how urban ecosystems play a part in generating ecosystem services for urban dwellers, such as clean water, spaces for recreation, stress relief and improved air quality. An equally important question relate to who gets to enjoy these benefits, i.e. the distribution of ecosystem services, and how issues of power and equity influence the management of ecosystems. Through case studies from the urban landscape of Stockholm, this doctoral thesis engages with these perspectives through combining ecological theory with social theory, including social network analysis, actor-network theory and social movement theory. Strategies for how to improve urban ecosystem management are presented along with frameworks for how to analyze issues of power and equity in relation to natural resource management.Paper I shows that ecosystem management can be studied through analyzing the structure of social networks, i.e. the patterns of relations between agencies, stake-holders and user groups. Paper II and Paper III analyze, based on a network survey of 62 civil society organizations and in-depth interviews, a transformational process of how an urban local movement managed to protect a large urban green area from exploitation (The Stockholm National Urban Park). Paper IV discusses, based on several case studies from Stockholm, a conducive network structure for linking managers and user groups (e.g. allotment gardens, cemetery managers, and urban planners) across spatial ecological scales so as to improve urban green area management. Paper V presents a framework to analyze the social-ecological dynamics behind the generation and distribution of ecosystem services in urban landscapes.The thesis points towards the notion of "a social production of ecosystem services" and argues for deeper engagement with urban political ecology and critical geography to inform governance and collective action in relation to urban ecosystems.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9c2fc8ae565881a01bb70581645698725ab3ec6a
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In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Smallholder farmer cropping decisions related to climate variability across multiple regions (2014, background): “Not all social network structures, however, are equally facilitating (Bodin et al., 2006); some networks can impose constraining social norms that reduce adaptive capacities (Newman and Dale, 2005).”
- Network analysis in conservation biogeography: challenges and opportunities (2010, background): “Social network analysis has now been introduced to the interdisciplinary arena as a viable route to explore problems in natural resource management (Bodin et al., 2006a; Bodin & Crona, 2009), including such issues as the generation of social norms and communities of knowledge (through ‘strong…”
- Social Movements and Ecosystem Services—the Role of Social Network Structure in Protecting and Managing Urban Green Areas in Stockholm (2008, background): “…can advance research on social–ecological systems, especially approaches that try to understand the role of social networks and social capital in adaptive forms of governance and co-management (Berkes et al. 2003, Adger et al. 2005, Dale and Onyx 2005, Bodin et al. 2006, Armitage 2007).”
- The role of social networks in natural resource governance: What relational patterns make a difference? (2009, background): “…there is a need to balance several different and often opposing structural characteristics of social networks in order for them to be effective and efficient in the governance of natural resources (cf. Prell et al., in press; Bodin et al., 2006; Janssen et al., 2006; Frank et al., 2007).”