New paper: Lessons on transdisciplinary research from a local science-action partnership

A team of researchers and practitioners working in the eThekwini Municipal Area (Durban, South Africa), recently published a paper on bridging the science-action gap in the journal Ecology and Society. Through presenting empirical insights and lessons learnt from a local collaboration between a university (University of KwaZulu-Natal) and a municipality (eThekwini Municipality), the paper contributes to a growing body of research on the role of transdisciplinary research in bridging the gap between science and society.

Participants in the Durban Research Action Partnership on a field trip to the Giba Gorge Environmental Precinct on the outskirts of the city of Durban, South Africa. 

The paper uses the Durban Research Action Partnership (D’RAP) as a case study to test and operationalise a model of transdisciplinary research proposed by Lang et al. Through its eleven-year journey, the partnership has built a strong foundation for long-term collaboration. The lessons learned through this process have been synthesized into a framework of recommendations for successful implementation of science-action partnerships. The framework consists of four broad enabling actions, each one based on a number of specific factors, as shown in the figure below.

The paper proposes that initiatives and institutions seeking to contribute to solving complex, interlinked social-ecological problems of societal relevance must recognize the importance of explicitly bridging the science-action gap. This means paying particular attention to bridging traditional disciplinary and institutional boundaries and building collaborative capacity of individuals and teams. By documenting and reflecting on such a process, the D’RAP case study provides conceptual and practical guidance on bridging the science-action gap through partnerships.

Through a process of on-going evaluation and reflection on successes and failures, the partnerships is on a successful trajectory based on the following aspects: 1. strong working relationships growing over time; 2. trust and social capital developed; 3. human capacity built; and 4. implementation-driven knowledge generated.

In publishing this paper, the D’RAP partnership is responding to increasing calls in the literature for empirical insights and lessons from scientists and practitioners working together to bridge the gap between science and society, in the hopes to grow understanding of the enablers and barriers to collaborative research endeavours.

Citation and link:

Cockburn, J., M. Rouget, R. Slotow, D. Roberts, R. Boon, E. Douwes, S. O’Donoghue, C. T. Downs, S. Mukherjee, W. Musakwa, O. Mutanga, T. Mwabvu, J. Odindi, A. Odindo, &. Proches, S. Ramdhani, J. Ray-Mukherjee, Sershen, M. Schoeman, A. J. Smit, E. Wale and S. Willows-Munro. 2016. How to build science-action partnerships for local land-use planning and management: lessons from Durban, South Africa. Ecology and Society 21 (1):28. [online] URL:
http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol21/iss1/art28/

Note: The lead authors (Jessica Cockburn and Mathieu Rouget) are affiliated to SAPECS (South African Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society), and this text was also posted on the SAPECS Website.

For further information, please contact the corresponding authors: Jessica Cockburn: jessicacockburn@gmail.com and Mathieu Rouget: rouget@ukzn.ac.za

This research was supported by eThekwini Municipality through the Durban Research-Action Partnership (D’RAP): KwaZulu-Natal Sandstone Sourveld Research Programme.

Invasive narratives

By Simon West

As inter-disciplinary scientists, how do we tell ‘catchy’ narratives about environmental change that stimulate policy action while also opening up for complex understandings?

A new paper in the journal Environmental Humanities, written with colleagues from the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory in Stockholm and the University of Cape Town, South Africa, explores this question in relation to so-called ‘invasive alien species.’

ABSTRACT Environmental narratives have become an increasingly important area of study in the environmental humanities. Rob Nixon has drawn attention to the difficulties of representing the complex processes of environmental change that inflict ‘slow violence’ on vulnerable human (and non-human) populations. Nixon argues that a lack of “arresting stories, images and symbols” reduces the visibility of gradual problems such as biodiversity loss, climate change and chemical pollution in cultural imaginations and on political agendas. We agree with Nixon that addressing this representational imbalance is an important mission for the environmental humanities. However, we argue that another aspect of the same imbalance, or representational bias, suggests the inverse of this is also needed—to unpack the ways that complicated and multifaceted environmental phenomena can be reduced to fast, simple, evocative, invasive narratives that percolate through science, legislation, policy and civic action, and to examine how these narratives can drown out rather than open up possibilities for novel social-ecological engagements. In this article we demonstrate the idea of invasive narratives through a case study of the ‘invasive alien species’ (IAS) narrative in South Africa. We suggest that IAS reduces complex webs of ecological, biological, economic, and cultural relations to a simple ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ battle between easily discernible ‘natural’ and ‘non- natural’ identities. We argue that this narrative obstructs the options available to citizens, land managers and policy-makers and prevents a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics and implications of biodiversity change, in South Africa and beyond.

 

Full paper available here.

New Paper: The power problematic: exploring the uncertain terrains of political ecology and the resilience framework

Authors: Micah Ingalls and Richard Stedman

Our colleagues from the Department of Natural Resources at Cornell University, have just published their paper in Ecology and Society! The paper tackles the gaps between the resilience framework and political ecology with a focus on the power problematic.  Happy reading!

Follow this link to the full paper:

http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol21/iss1/art6/

ABSTRACT. Significant and growing concerns relating to global social and environmental conditions and processes have raised deep questions relating to the ability of traditional governance regimes to manage for the complexities of social-ecological systems. The resilience framework provides a more dynamic approach to system analysis and management, emphasizing nonlinearity, feedbacks, and multiscalar engagement along the social-ecological nexus. In recent years, however, a number of scholars and practitioners have noted various insufficiencies in the formulation of the resilience framework, including its lack of engagement with the dimensions of power within social-ecological systems, which blunt the analytical potential of resilience and run the risk of undermining resilience based management objectives. In this analysis, we engage with this power problematic by drawing on key insights from the scholarly tradition of political ecology, suggesting that a more appreciative, thorough going engagement between resilience scholarship and political ecology may allow not only a deeper treatment of power within the resilience framework but also address several important critiques of political ecology itself. We explore the shared intellectual spaces of these traditions and suggest some ways in which a critical engagement between resilience and political ecology on the subject of power better informs our understanding of socio-political dynamics within complex systems. In closing, we train the critical light backward on political ecology to suggest that an appreciative engagement with the resilience framework may assist by reasserting a more serious treatment of ecology within political ecological analyses and support the formulation of more elegant, politically tractable counter narratives to address global environmental crises.

Key Words: political ecology; power; resilience; social-ecological systems

Measuring and assessing resilience: broadening understanding through multiple disciplinary perspectives

Allyson E Quinlan, Marta Berbés-Blázquez, L. Jamila Haider and Garry D. Peterson

Summary

1. Increased interest in managing resilience has led to efforts to develop standardized tools for assessments and quantitative measures. Resilience, however, as a property of complex adaptive systems, does not lend itself easily to measurement. Whereas assessment approaches tend to focus on deepening understanding of system dynamics, resilience measurement aims to capture and quantify resilience in a rigorous and repeatable way.
2. We discuss the strengths, limitations and trade-offs involved in both assessing and measuring resilience, as well as the relationship between the two. We use a range of disciplinary perspectives to draw lessons on distilling complex concepts into useful metrics.
3. Measuring and monitoring a narrow set of indicators or reducing resilience to a single unit of measurement may block the deeper understanding of system dynamics needed to apply resilience thinking and inform management actions.
4. Synthesis and applications. Resilience assessment and measurement can be complementary. In both cases it is important that: (i) the approach aligns with how resilience is being defined, (ii) the application suits the specific context and (iii) understanding of system dynamics is increased. Ongoing efforts to measure resilience would benefit from the integration of key principles that have been identified for building resilience.

Read the paper here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.12550/abstract

Or Access full pdf through research gate here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283703867_Measuring_and_assessing_resilience_Broadening_understanding_through_multiple_disciplinary_perspectives

Mapping social–ecological systems: Identifying ‘green-loop’ and ‘red-loop’ dynamics based on characteristic bundles of ecosystem service use

PhD student Maike Hamann’s (Stockholm Resilience Centre and CSIR, South Africa) exciting new publication!

Find the full paper here: http://www.sciencedirect.com.ezp.sub.su.se/science/article/pii/S0959378015300157

Abstract: 

We present an approach to identify and map social–ecological systems based on the direct use of ecosystem services by households. This approach builds on the premise that characteristic bundles of ecosystem service use represent integrated expressions of different underlying social–ecological systems.

We test the approach in South Africa using national census data on the direct use of six provisioning services (freshwater from a natural source, firewood for cooking, firewood for heating, natural building materials, animal production, and crop production) at two different scales.

Based on a cluster analysis, we identify three distinct ecosystem service bundles that represent social–ecological systems characterized by low, medium and high levels of direct ecosystem service use among households. We argue that these correspond to ‘green-loop’, ‘transition’ and ‘red-loop’ systems as defined by Cumming et al. (2014).

When mapped, these systems form coherent spatial units that differ from systems identified by additive combinations of separate social and biophysical datasets, the most common method of mapping social–ecological systems to date.

The distribution of the systems we identified is mainly determined by social factors, such as household income, gender of the household head, and land tenure, and only partly determined by the supply of natural resources.

An understanding of the location and characteristic resource use dynamics of different social–ecological systems allows for policies to be better targeted at the particular sustainability challenges faced in different areas.