Interdependent Social-Ecological Systems and Adaptive Governance 141that allow for responding to, adapting to and shaping environmental change. We
highlight some features of such governance systems by focusing on management
practices of human groups involved with ecosystems and social mechanisms behind
such management, including social taboos, social networks, bridging organizations,
leadership and actor groups. Societies face the challenge of dealing with unpredicta-
bility, uncertainty and change and how to build resilience to periods of abrupt change
and allow for transformations into more desirable social-ecological pathways.
The Three Features
Interdependent social-ecological systems
In our view, there are neither natural or pristine systems without people nor social
systems without nature (Folke, 2006b). Social and ecological systems are not just
linked but truly interconnected and co-evolving across spatial and temporal scales
(Berkes and Folke, 1992; Norgaard, 1994). We refer to them as social-ecological
systems (Berkes and Folke, 1998) emphasizing the humans-in-the-environment
perspective (Berkes et al, 2003). It is close to impossible to truly understand eco-
system dynamics and their ability to generate services without accounting for the
human dimension. Focusing on the ecological side only, as a basis for decision
making for sustainability, simplifies reality so much that the result is distortions
and leads to incomplete and narrow conclusions. For example, an observed shift in
a lake from a desired to a degraded state may indicate that the lake has lost resil-
ience, but if there is capacity in the social system to respond to change and restore
the lake, the social-ecological system is still resilient (Carpenter and Brock, 2004;
Bodin and Norberg, 2005).
The same is true for social sustainability. Despite a vast literature on the social
dimension of resource and environmental management, studies have predomi-
nantly focused on investigating processes within the social domain only, treating
the ecosystem largely as a given, an external ‘black box’, assuming that if the social
system performs adaptively or is well organized institutionally, it will also manage
resources and ecosystems in a sustainable fashion. A human society may show great
ability to cope with change and adapt if analysed only through the social dimen-
sion lens (Huitric, 2005). But such an adaptation may be at the expense of changes
in the capacity of ecosystems to sustain the adaptation, and may generate traps and
breakpoints in social-ecological systems (Allison and Hobbs, 2004).
There has been substantial progress in understanding the social dimension of
ecosystem management, including organizational and institutional flexibility for
dealing with uncertainty and change (e.g. Lee, 1993; Grumbine, 1994; Westley,
1995; Berkes and Folke, 1998; Danter et al, 2000; Gunderson and Holling, 2002;
Berkes et al, 2003; Dietz et al, 2003; Anderies et al, 2004; Armitage, 2005; Ostrom,
2005) and social capital and conflict (e.g. Ostrom and Ahn, 2003; Adger, 2003;