Interdependent Social-Ecological Systems and Adaptive Governance 151(Bodin et al, 2006). A national government or an international conservation NGO
may conclude that to conserve biodiversity (the rare species) and ecosystem serv-
ices of the landscapes these forest patches need to be urgently protected from
human use and abuse and transformed into no-take areas through legal protection
or governmental intervention. But a social-ecological inventory would reveal that
they are in fact already protected by a social taboo system of sacred forests (Schultz
et al, in press). As a matter of fact, it is such systems that have sustained the biota
and ecosystems services of the landscape. Implementing top down policies may
disrupt such socially and culturally enforced systems that sustain ecosystem serv-
ices.
Hence, lack of policy recognition of the social and cultural dimension at local
scales of ecosystem management may degrade landscapes further. However, with
the information in mind of the significance of the sacred forests and the social
taboos, the NGO and the national government could help secure such manage-
ment institutions, for example, through what Ostrom and Schlager (1996) refer to
as umbrella organizations or Alcorn and Toledo (1998) as tenural shells. This
becomes increasingly significant in the face of large-scale economic drivers of
change or incorporations into global cultures and value systems.
When people comply with self-enforced norms, economic transaction costs
may be low relative to formal enforcement measures. During such conditions
institutions, like social taboos, may provide for (1) low monitoring costs, (2) low
enforcement costs, and in many cases (3) low sanctioning costs (Colding and
Folke, 2001). Incentives should be created that strengthen social networks of stew-
ard groups for ecosystem management in multi-level governance systems (Folke et
al, 2005). It is time to move conservation beyond confrontation to multi-level col-
laboration (Wondolleck and Yaffe, 2000; Folke, 2006a) and recognize that ecosys-
tem management is to a large extent people’s management (Berkes, 2004).
Social networks, ecosystem management and bridging
organizations
Ecosystem management is an information-intensive endeavour and requires
knowledge of complex social-ecological interactions in order to monitor, interpret,
and respond to ecosystem feedback at multiple scales (Imperial, 1999a, 1999b;
Folke et al, 2003). We have earlier argued that it is difficult if not impossible for
one or a few people to possess the range of knowledge needed for ecosystem man-
agement (Olsson et al, 2004a). Instead, knowledge for dealing with social-ecolog-
ical systems dynamics is dispersed among individuals and organizations in society
and requires social networks that span multiple levels in order to draw on dispersed
sources of information (Olsson et al, 2006).
In this sense, knowledge of ecosystem dynamics resides in networks. A chal-
lenge is to identify mechanisms for organizing relations between relatively autono-
mous, but interdependent actors (Kersbergen and Waarden, 2004) and avoid
fragmented and sectoral approaches to the ecosystem management. Several studies