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...and knowledge generation for responding adequately to environmental change have been highlighted but not critically assessed. The small, flexible municipal organization, Ecomuseum Kristianstads Vattenrike (EKV) in southern Sweden, has identified win-win situations and gained broad support and legitimacy for ecosystem management among a diversity of actors in the region. Navigating the existing legal-political framework, EKV has built a loose social network of local stewards and key persons from organizations at municipal and higher societal levels. As a 'bridging organization', EKV has created arenas for trust-building, knowledge generation, collaborative learning, preference formation, and conflicts solving among actors in relation to specific environmental issues. Ad hoc projects are developed as issues arise by mobilizing individuals from the social network. Our results suggest that the EKV approach to adaptive comanagement has enhanced the social capacity to respond to unpredictable change and developed a trajectory towards resilience of a desirable social-ecological system.
Key words Social-ecological systems * resilience * adaptive comanagement * collaborative learning * organizational innovation * ecosystem management.
Introduction
Social and economic development relies on the support of dynamic and functioning ecosystems generating valuable goods and services (http://www.maweb.org). Resilience--the capacity to buffer, adapt to and shape change--has emerged as a crucial concept in the search for understanding complex ecosystem dynamics (Holling, 1973). Sustaining and enhancing ecosystem resilience is a function of successful ecosystem management and this in turn rests on the social capacity to understand and respond to environmental feedback over time as well as space (Berkes and Folke, 1998). (1)
We focus on the dynamic interplay of ecological and social systems, which we term social-ecological systems (Berkes et al., 2003; Folke et al., 2002; Gunderson and Holling, 2002). Our concern is resilience in social-ecological systems, which is determined by ecological dynamics as well as the social capacity to respond to and shape ecosystem change in a fashion that sustains and enhances the ecological preconditions for human societies. The question is how to sustain or develop a desired social-ecological trajectory (Carpenter et al., 2001) in the face of change and uncertainty (Folke et al., 2003). This has been referred to as adaptive governance of ecosystems or social-ecological systems (Dietz et al., 2003; Eckerberg and Joas, 2004; Folke et al., 2005; Ostrom, 2005).
Advocating an adaptive ecosystem approach, Boyle et al.(2001) suggest a triad of activities, where governance is the process of resolving tradeoffs and providing a vision and direction for sustainability, management is the operationalization of this vision, and monitoring provides feedback and synthesizes the observations to a narrative of how the situation has emerged and might unfold in the future. In a recent review (Folke et al., 2005) we concluded that successful adaptive approaches for ecosystem management under uncertainty involve (Fig. 1):
1) building knowledge and understanding of resource and ecosystem dynamics; detecting and responding to environmental feedback in ways that enhances resilience requires knowledge of ecosystem processes and functions. Hence, managers need to mobilize all sources of understanding to reduce ecological illiteracy. This involves linking people and steward organizations with different knowledge systems (Gadgil et al., 1993; Olsson and Folke, 2001).
2) feeding ecological knowledge into adaptive management practices; successful management is characterized by continuous testing, monitoring, and adaptive responses acknowledging the inherent uncertainty in complex systems. Management plans are adapted to new understanding of uncertainty rather than striving for optimization based on past records (Berkes et al., 2003). Forming a learning environment that accepts continuous testing and changes requires leadership within management organizations (Danter et al., 2000).
3) supporting flexible institutions and multilevel governance systems; The sharing of management power and responsibility may involve multiple, often polycentric, cross-level institutional and organizational linkages among user-groups or communities, government agencies, and nongovernmental organizations, i.e., neither centralization nor decentralization (Ostrom, 1998). This collaboration and adaptive governance draws on visions and narratives from the social memory of past ecological crises and responses and requires enabling legislation and social incentives for collaboration (Malayang et al., 2005; Pretty, 2003). Social networks are instrumental for mobilizing social memory, generating social capital as well as legal, political, and financial support to ecosystem management initiatives.
4) dealing with external drivers, change and surprise; it is not sufficient for a well-functioning multilevel governance system to be in tune with the dynamics of the ecosystems under management (referred to as the "internal resilience" by Folke et al., 2004, p. 567). It also needs to develop capacity for dealing with changes in climate, disease outbreaks, hurricanes, global market demands, subsidies, and governmental policies (Dietz et al., 2003). The challenge for the social-ecological system is to accept uncertainty, be prepared for change and surprise, and enhance the adaptive capacity to deal with disturbance (Berkes et al., 2003). Nonresilient social-ecological systems are vulnerable to external change while a resilient system may even make use of disturbances as opportunities to transform into more desired states (Walker et al., 2004).
In this paper we focus on the second and the third issue of ecosystem management, i.e., the links between organizations, institutions, and knowledge systems (Fig. 1), which has received relatively little attention (Berkes and Folke, 1998; Berkes et al., 2003; Dale et al., 2000; Imperial, 1999). The case study for our analysis is the ecosystem management system in Kristianstads Vattenrike (KV), which was established in 1989. This case has been chosen because it appears to be an example of successful collaboration for ecosystem and landscape management and illuminates many theoretical concerns of adaptive governance, adaptive comanagement, and resilience in social-ecological system. The social response is a result of self-organization at the local level but it involves interaction between organizations and institutions at municipal, county, national, and international levels.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
The aim of this study is to understand the social processes and strategies that contribute to resilience. We want to assess whether 'adaptive comanagement' is applied at KV. We are particularly interested in the organizational structure of adaptive comanagement, the role of leadership and key persons, how knowledge, meaning, and visions are generated and communicated, how learning and collaboration are carried out at KV, and how local actors have managed to "navigate" among national and international institutions and organizations for legal, political, and financial support.
The first section examines the flexible organizational structure of Ecomuseum Kristianstads Vattenrike (EKV) and its surrounding social networks. In the next section, we examine the horizontal collaboration, i.e., how EKV is coordinating and engaging local actors and local steward associations in the knowledge generation and ecosystem management process. We then examine vertical collaboration in multilayered institutions, how EKV navigates the larger environment by connecting to formal institutions to safeguard achievements from informal collaboration. These sections are both descriptive and analytical. Important findings are analyzed in the subsequent section followed by conclusions.
Methods and Definitions
To understand the institutional and organizational dynamics of the adaptive comanagement process in KV we have chosen two projects from about 20 for closer examination; the Flooded Meadow Project and the Crane Project. Together with the Vrams[epsilon]n Creek Project, analyzed in Schultz et al. (2004), these projects involve a diverse set of collaborators operating at different levels. We have used qualitative methods including semistructured in-depth interviews (Bernard, 1994; Kvale, 1996) with key informants of KV. An extensive review of other information sources was also conducted to complement the interviews.
Our approach is historical rather than structural (McAllister, 2002), analyzing the dynamics underlying the ecosystem management of KV. Variables like trust building, social capital, strategic collaboration in ad hoc projects/networks, knowledge generation, sense-making, identification of win-win situations, preference formation, conflict resolution, etc., were only to a limited extent preconceived from theory and hypotheses. Instead, they largely emerged from the in-depth interviews. We then analyzed the material within the theoretical framework of adaptive comanagement and resilience in social-ecological systems without trying to isolate independent variables and single causes for complex events (Gaddis, 2002).
The study was conducted over a two-year period 2002-2003. The three core staff of EKV were interviewed on several occasions throughout this period, using a tape recorder or taking notes. Telephone interviews were also conducted for supplementation, clarification, or verification of data. The goal was to capture the interviewees' experiences regarding the strategies for ecosystem management in KV, including how they deal with change and uncertainty. Three landowners/farmers at three different sites were interviewed several times using a tape recorder. These key informants, who are involved in one or both of the projects chosen for this study, were identified by other farmers and the EKV staff. They were asked to describe how the projects have evolved and evaluate the collaboration with EKV.
Results from the in-depth interviews have been triangulated with other sources of information such as project proposals, progress reports, municipal protocols, inventories, maps, correspondence, Internet sites, and newspaper clippings. Shorter...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
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