Socio-ecological system

A socio-ecological system consists of 'a bio-geo-physical' unit and its associated social actors and institutions. Socio-ecological systems are complex and adaptive and delimited by spatial or functional boundaries surrounding particular ecosystems and their problem context.

A socio-ecological system can be defined as:(p. 163)

Scholars have used the concept of socio-ecological systems to emphasise the integrated concept of humans in nature and to stress that the delineation between social systems and ecological systems is artificial and arbitrary. Whilst resilience has somewhat different meaning in social and ecological context, the SES approach holds that social and ecological systems are linked through feedback mechanisms, and that both display resilience and complexity.

Until the past few decades, the point of contact between social sciences and natural sciences was very limited in dealing with socio-ecological systems. Just as mainstream ecology had tried to exclude humans from the study of ecology, many social science disciplines had ignored environment altogether and limited their scope to humans. Although some scholars (e.g. Bateson 1979) had tried to bridge the nature-culture divide, the majority of studies focused on investigating processes within the social domain only, treating the ecosystem largely as a "black box" and assuming that if the social system performs adaptively or is well organised institutionally it will also manage the environmental resource base in a sustainable fashion.

This changed through the 1970s and 1980s with the rise of several subfields associated with the social sciences but explicitly including the environment in the framing of the issues. These subfields are:

Each of the six areas summarised is a ‘bridge’ spanning different combinations of natural science and social science thinking.

Elinor Ostrom and her many co-researchers have developed a comprehensive "Social-Ecological Systems (SES) framework", within which much of the still-evolving theory of common-pool resources and collective self-governance is now located. It also draws heavily on systems ecology and complexity theory. The studies of SES include some central societal concerns (e.g. equity and human wellbeing) that have traditionally received little attention in complex adaptive systems theory, and there are areas of complexity theory (e.g. quantum physics) that have little direct relevance for understanding SES.

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