Enhancing the Ostrom social-ecological system framework through formalization
By Jochen Hinkel, Pieter W. G. Bots, Maja Schlüter. 2014
124 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Frameworks play an important role in analyzing social-ecological systems (SESs) because they provide shared concepts and variables that enable comparison between and accumulation of knowledge across multiple cases. One prominent SES framework focusing on local resource use has been developed by Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues. This framework is an extensive multi-tier collection of concepts and variables that have demonstrated relevance for explaining outcomes in a large number of case studies in the context of fishery, water, and forestry common-pool resources. The further development of this framework has raised a number of issues related to the formal relationships between the large number of concepts and variables involved. In particular, issues related to criteria for ordering the concepts into tiers, adding new concepts, defining outcomes metrics, and representing dynamics in the framework have been identified. We address these issues by applying methods from research fields that study formal relationships between concepts such as domain-specific languages, knowledge representation, and software engineering. We find that SES frameworks could include the following seven formal components: variables, concepts, attribution relationships, subsumption relationships, process relationships, aggregation relationships, and evaluation metrics. Applying these components to the Ostrom framework and a case study of recreational fishery, we find that they provide clear criteria for structuring concepts into tiers, defining outcome metrics, and representing dynamics. The components identified are generic, and the insights gained from this exercise may also be beneficial for the development of other SES frameworks.
Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e6be8d3851202b6dc1c19ce65216270e2c7c0674
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In Management Science and Operations Research
Citations in the corpus
- Research, part of a Special Feature on A Framework for Analyzing, Comparing, and Diagnosing Social-Ecological Systems Application of the SES Framework for Model-based Analysis of the Dynamics of Social-Ecological Systems (2014, methodology): “…how the SES framework combined with a structured approach that makes explicit conceptual and process relationships between variables as proposed by Hinkel et al. (2014) can support the process of developing a dynamic model of a SES to study social-ecological interactions and their outcomes over…”
- A review of the social-ecological systems framework: applications, methods, modifications, and challenges (2018, background): “…the meaning of a tiered framework, familiarity with collective action literature, understanding diagnostic methodologies, as well as analyzing nested social and ecological systems in an integrated way, as well as how outcome variables relate to other variables in the framework (Hinkel et al. 2014).”