The concept of SES is based on the notion that ‘the delineation between social and natural systems is artificial and arbitrary’ , emphasising that people and nature are intertwined.
An example of complex adaptive systems
Key Principles
- Relationships are more important than individual components to understand the properties and behavior of the system
- Adaptive capacities (thanks to the many relations and feedback loops) to adjust and adapt to change
- Nonlinear dynamics, where small changes can have large effects
- No clear boundaries
- Context dependent - as the context changes elements may take different roles and functions
- Complex causality and emergence - not clear, linear cause and effect
Cannot be understood or predicted based on individual elements
Mindset: expect and embrace surprise and uncertainty, to be reflexive and acknowledge the limits of what is knowable or controllable
SES Frameworks
- original conceptual framework of linked SES developed by Folke and Berkes (1998) - emphasises the links between social and ecological systems and their multi-scale nature
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- Panarchy framework depicting system resilience as an outcome of connected adaptive cycles at different scales (Gunderson and Holling 2002)
- the diagnostic framework developed by Ostrom (2007, 2009) to analyse common-pool resource systems Ostrom’s SES Framework
- The robustness framework by Anderies and colleagues (2004)
Related:
Sources: Book - The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods for Social-Ecological Systems