Resilience Ethics and Sustainable Governance

Resilience ethics means a shared ethical responsibility for our actions and environment. Sustainable governance is interested in the complexity of sustainability and the rise of resilience thinking. There are multiple ways to apply the idea of resilience to shared narratives about public problems and environmental concerns for the future. In particular, resilience ethics are related to human interventions in ecosystems and the resultant responsibility to care for them. The integration of resilience and sustainability leads us to study the distribution of wealth and other root causes of social inequality and injustice. The current paper argues that institutional change and collective action are critical elements in society’s resilience. Therefore, three global problems should be addressed as the focus of resilience and sustainability: (1) divided societies and growing inequalities should be considered in terms of income distribution, employment, and education; (2) wealth and power should be redistributed in terms of common-pool resources and affected communities; and (3) intersectional inequality should be reconsidered in different axes of oppression and social injustice. A renewed perspective for democratic and responsible citizenship is required to enhance direct citizen participation in public policies and social change. In this regard, social and administrative scientific advances create opportunities for the resilient future.

Debates about vaccines and climate change on social media networks: a study in contrasts

Vaccines and climate change have much in common. In both cases, a scientific consensus contrasts with a divided public opinion. They also exemplify coupled human–environment systems involving common pool resources. Here we used machine learning algorithms to analyze the sentiment of 87 million tweets on climate change and vaccines in order to characterize Twitter user sentiment and the structure of user and community networks. We found that the vaccine conversation was characterized by much less interaction between individuals with differing sentiment toward vaccines. Community-level interactions followed this pattern, showing less interaction between communities of opposite sentiment toward vaccines. Additionally, vaccine community networks were more fragmented and exhibited numerous isolated communities of neutral sentiment. Finally, pro-vaccine individuals overwhelmingly believed in anthropogenic climate change, but the converse was not true. We propose mechanisms that might explain these results, pertaining to how the spatial scale of an environment system can structure human populations.

Linking Long-Term Changes in Social-Ecological Systems with Development of Property Rights

The chapter examines the links between long-term changes in social-ecological systems and the development of property rights by studying self-governance, common-pool resources (CPRs), and property rights in a Sami context. The main conclusion is that Sami by and large created their own rules for how natural resources should be harvested and consumed, as well as for how resources should be monitored and rules should be enforced. Well-defined property rights were a prerequisite for people to engage in, and gain profits from, land-use regimes. We conclude that user’s access to natural resources, and rights to use them, determined the households’ economic performance and development. Features of two frameworks are introduced. They give a background to our theoretical thinking and provide a means of organizing the inquiry.

Reindeer Pastoralism

The chapter focuses on intensive reindeer husbandry or reindeer pastoralism, which was a tenure system that emerged in the early modern period. Reindeer pastoralism and grazing are deeply interconnected and we therefore illuminate the ecological settings for reindeer grazing. A large part of the debate about governing common-pool resources has dealt with pastoralists and their grazing lands. Important features of reindeer pastoralism are described, including a discussion about how the number of tame reindeer developed in early modern era. The chapter ends with a portrayal of and a discussion about individual households’ rights to use certain areas for grazing, chiefly based on descriptions of contemporary court rulings from the local court in Jokkmokk. We show how a common-property regime evolved.

Adaptation strategies and collective dynamics of extraction in networked commons of bistable resources

When populations share common-pool resources (CPRs), individuals decide how much effort to invest towards resource extraction and how to allocate this effort among available resources. We investigate these dual aspects of individual choice in networked games where resources undergo regime shifts between discrete quality states (viable or depleted) depending on collective extraction levels. We study the patterns of extraction that emerge on various network types when agents are free to vary extraction from each CPR separately to maximize their short-term payoffs. Using these results as a basis for comparison, we then investigate how results are altered if agents fix one aspect of adaptation (magnitude or allocation) while letting the other vary. We consider two constrained adaptation strategies: uniform adaptation, whereby agents adjust their extraction levels from all CPRs by the same amount, and reallocation, whereby agents selectively shift effort from lower- to higher-quality resources. A preference for uniform adaptation increases collective wealth on degree-heterogeneous agent-resource networks. Further, low-degree agents retain preferences for these constrained strategies under reinforcement learning. Empirical studies have indicated that some CPR appropriators ignore—while others emphasize—allocation aspects of adaptation; our results demonstrate that structural patterns of resource access can determine which behavior is more advantageous.

Do social identity and cognitive diversity correlate in environmental stakeholders? A novel approach to measuring cognitive distance within and between groups

Groups with higher cognitive diversity, i.e. variations in how people think and solve problems, are thought to contribute to improved performance in complex problem-solving. However, embracing or even engineering adequate cognitive diversity is not straightforward and may even jeopardize social inclusion. In response, those that want to promote cognitive diversity might make a simplified assumption that there exists a link between identity diversity, i.e. range of social characteristics, and variations in how people perceive and solve problems. If this assumption holds true, incorporating diverse identities may concurrently achieve cognitive diversity to the extent essential for complex problem-solving, while social inclusion is explicitly acknowledged. However, currently there is a lack of empirical evidence to support this hypothesis in the context of complex social-ecological systems—a system wherein human and environmental dimensions are interdependent, where common-pool resources are used or managed by multiple types of stakeholders. Using a fisheries example, we examine the relationship between resource stakeholders’ identities and their cognitive diversity. We used cognitive mapping techniques in conjunction with network analysis to measure cognitive distances within and between stakeholders of various social types (i.e., identities). Our results empirically show that groups with higher identity diversity also demonstrate more cognitive diversity, evidenced by disparate characteristics of their cognitive maps that represent their understanding of fishery dynamics. These findings have important implications for sustainable management of common-pool resources, where the inclusion of diverse stakeholders is routine, while our study shows it may also achieve higher cognitive coverage that can potentially lead to more complete, accurate, and innovative understanding of complex resource dynamics.

The institutional foundations of surf break governance in Atlantic Europe

The sport of surfing is best enjoyed with one rider on one wave, but crowding makes that optimal assignment increasingly hard to attain. This study examines the phenomenon of surf localism, whereby competitors are excluded from waves by intimidation and the threat of violence. An alternative way to accommodate crowds is contained in the surfer’s code, which sets informal rules and self-enforced regulations to avoid conflict in the water. Both regimes establish property rights over common pool resources with no state intervention, creating a setting wherein users face the question of cooperation or conflict. The disposition to cooperate and follow norms has been shown to vary substantially across different cultures, though. Employing data from over seven hundred surf spots on the European Atlantic coast, this study reports evidence that certain informal cultural norms significantly reduce the probability of violent exclusion, while formal state institutions mostly are irrelevant. The results also indicate that informal norms become more important with greater resource quality and, possibly, with increasing scarcity.