JANSSEN, Resilience and Adaptation in the Governance of Social-ecological - 0 views
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iheringalcoforado on 04 Sep 13"During the last decade there has been increased attention to the study o social-ecological systems (SESs). Social-ecological systems link social and ecologicalsystems (Berkes and Folke 1998). The inherently transdisciplinary eld o SES-scholars has ocused on resilience o SESs and ways to govern resilience o SESs.Resilience is dened as the ability o a system to withstand perturbations andremain within the same stability regime (Holling 1973). Governance o SESsocuses on enhancing the ability o the system to remain within the desired stabilityregime, or to create opportunities to move toward a desired stability regime. Forexample, suppression o orest res lead to the accumulation o uel (the trees thatare not burned) creating conditions or later res o such intensity that the soiland seed banks are damaged. This may prevent the orest system rom recoveringrom such a re. A more appropriate policy is to use small controlled burn tomaintain the resilience o the orest system.The study o SESs was initiated by ecologists who became interested inthe social dimensions o ecosystem management (Berkes and Folke 1998). Butincreasingly we see social scientists adopting an SES approach, taking into accountmore explicit ecological dynamics o resource systems than earlier social scienceresearch. The work o Ostrom (1990) originally ocused on the dimensions o thesocial system o a common resource. In recent work the study o the commons isapproached rom an SES perspective where natural resources and social systemshave equal representation and equal detailed analysis (Anderies et al. 2004;Ostrom 2007,2009).In this special issue a series o papers has been collected to urther the rontiero the study o the governance o social-ecological systems."