Interdependent Social-Ecological Systems and Adaptive Governance 155- A sequence of social responses to environmental events widens the scope of
local management from a particular issue or resource to a broad set of issues
related to ecosystems processes across scales. - Management expands from individual actors, to a group of actors to multiple-
actor processes. - Organizational and institutional structures evolve as a response to deal with
the broader set of environmental issues. - Knowledge of ecosystem dynamics develops as a collaborative effort and
becomes part of the organizational and institutional structures. - Social networks develop that connect institutions and organizations across lev-
els and scales and facilitate information flows, identify knowledge gaps and
create nodes of expertise of significance for ecosystem management. - Knowledge for ecosystem management is mobilized through social networks
and complements and refines local practice for ecosystem management. - In the time series of events the ability to deal with uncertainty and surprise is
improved which increases the adaptive capacity to deal with future change.
The crises that trigger such self-organization may be caused by external markets
and tourism pressure, floods and flood management, shifts in property rights,
threats of acidification, resource failures, rigid paradigms of resource management,
new legislation or governmental policies that do not take into account local con-
texts (Berkes et al, 2003). A social-ecological system with low levels of social capital
and social memory is vulnerable to such changes and may as a consequence shift
into undesired pathways (Gunderson and Holling, 2002).
In contrast, crisis may trigger social capital and social memory to be mobilized
and combined into new forms of governance systems with the ability to manage
dynamic ecosystems and landscapes. This has been referred to as building social
capacity for resilience in social-ecological systems (Folke et al, 2003) and it requires
evoking change in social structures (Westley, 1995). Key individuals with strong
leadership may catalyse opinion shifts (Gladwell, 2000; Scheffer et al, 2003) and
creative teams and actor groups that emerge into a large connected community of
practitioners can prepare a social-ecological system for rapid change (Blann et al,
2003; Guimera et al, 2005) and transform it into a new pathway of develop-
ment.
Transformability means creating and defining a new attractor that directs the
development of the social-ecological system by introducing new components and
ways of making a living, thereby changing the state variables, and often the scales
of key cycles, that define the system (Walker et al, 2004).
Transformations toward alternative forms of governance has been addressed by
Kettl (2000), Kuks and Bressers (2004) and Agrawal (2005). Olsson et al (2004b)
analysed the emergence of a governance system for adaptive co-management of the
wetland landscape of Kristianstad in southern Sweden, a process where uncon-
nected management by several actors in the landscape was mobilized, renewed and
moved into a new configuration of ecosystem management within about a decade.