Are We under Attack?

by Victor, Emily, Per

The title of this post might seem a bit drastic. But think about it for a moment. As the science behind the environmental challenges facing the planet is getting clearer each day - people direct their attention to issues related to management, institutions and governance in search for solutions. And obviously, everybody wants to contribute. Transitions scholars, reflexive governance researchers, the Earth System Governance Project, institutional scholars from the Ostrom school, social constructionists in the UK - just to mention a few.

Our challenges hence lies in finding our niche in this landscape of emerging governance research. And to move the research front in a direction that we find interesting, innovative and relevant for the study of coupled social-ecological systems. So, just to start off the debate, here are 3 topics we see emerging in the frontiers.

a) Innovation and Transformations- We all talk about it, and everybody seem to agree on that they are important, but we actually know little about these processes and practice. Sure, Panarchy theory gives a range of great hints on what to look for, but we are still looking for some solid elaborations and empirical research for social-ecological systems. How do we for example, separate between maladaptations, adaptations and transformations? Other scholars - such as those studying transitions in socio-technical systems - have developed ways of analyzing the multilevel institutional dimensions of these topics. On the other hand, they also miss the action happening at the social-ecological interface.

b) Governance and Cascading Crisis - We know a lot about how communities deal with surprise and change. But we know little about how national and international policy makers deal with social crises induced by ecological change. Multiple and cascading crises that easily move across systems and spatial scales, develop a quite different social, political and mass media dynamic compared to slow environmental change. Just think about the current droughts in Argentina and Uruguay, or attempts to deal with infectious diseases. An institutional analysis here would require combining resilience theory with insights from crisis management (for example Boin et al 2005), and high reliability organizations (Weick and Sutcliffe 2007).

c) Scaling Up - A last point mentioned quite often, is the need to address the national and international level to really get a grip of multilevel governance processes in AG. We all know that a bulk of the resilience literature has a bias towards local and regional governance, and that a lot of interesting topics remain to be explored once we start moving up in levels of political organization. We are getting there - thanks to Per's piece in PNAS, Emily's article, and ongoing work by Lisen, Jacob, Björn, Måns and Victor. The question in the longer term is how to bring all of this together into a framework that speaks not only to the resilience community, but also to insights from other (and quite disparate) fields in the social sciences.

So while it is too drastic to say that we are "under attack", the pressure is on us to prove that AG is a relevant framework to understand, and deal with the governance challenges posed by global change. The question is: what other topics do you see emerging on the frontier? Add your comments, recommended literature and feed-back in the comment field!