Panaceas and diversification of environmental policy

Using applied social science disciplines to implement creative outdoor cat management solutions and avoid the trap of one-size-fits-all policies

In the United States, policy conflicts have prevented successful population-level management of outdoor cats for decades. Wildlife conservation professionals have sought widespread use of humane dispatch (i.e., lethal culling applied humanely), whereas cat welfare professionals have promoted trap-neuter-return (TNR) (cats are trapped, neutered, and returned to the outdoors). These conflicts represent a policy panacea trap, which we argue drives many conservation conflicts. In these situations, the focus on defending a one-size-fits-all policy fails to account for the value differences that shape the different understandings of the problem and desired outcomes associated with each policy, as well as complexities in the social-ecological system. Over the past 5 years, a group of wildlife conservation and cat welfare professionals codeveloped a set of products that have started to be used to help organizations break out of the policy panacea trap. We used a case study to illustrate how efforts grounded in applied social science disciplines, such as science communication, social-ecological systems, and conservation marketing, can help identify a more robust set of policy options tailored to local management and cultural contexts for successful implementation. Shifting the focus to embrace a shared understanding of the broader system helped us identify areas for collaboration, broaden the policy toolbox, and allow space for policy tools originally framed as opposing panaceas. This work helped prepare all parties to have difficult but productive discussions and address shared policy needs. We suggest that many value-based conservation conflicts would benefit from similar efforts that use applied social science to transform how conflict is addressed, moving beyond policy panaceas that end in stalemate to develop shared understandings of context-specific policies, and to identify opportunities for creative cooperation that yield real conservation progress.

Regulation and resilience: Panarchy analysis in forest socio-ecosystem of Northeast National Forest Region, China

This paper examines the socio-ecological resilience within China's Northeast National Forest Region (NNFR), focusing on the implications of climate change for forest management and carbon sequestration. It offers a critical assessment of the Natural Forest Protection Program (NFPP) and the associated logging ban policy, recognizing their pivotal contributions to forest conservation but also identifying the shortcomings of a one-size-fits-all approach. Integrating panarchy theory, the study proposes sustainable management practices that align ecological dynamics with societal needs, emphasizing nature-based solutions. The overarching aim is to bolster the long-term resilience and enhance the carbon sequestration potential of the NNFR's forests. It aims to inform global environmental strategy with lessons from the NNFR, advocating for integrated approaches that ensure both ecological sustainability and community prosperity. This approach seeks to provide a comprehensive and effective strategy for addressing environmental challenges, ensuring both ecological integrity and community well-being.

Understanding Residents’ Perceptions of the Ecosystem to Improve Park–People Relationships in Wuyishan National Park, China

A healthy park–people relationship depends essentially on the fair and sustainable maintenance of rural livelihood. When a protected area is designated, rural people may face restrictions on access to land and resource use. In Wuyishan of China, we analyzed the role of traditional tea cultivation during consistent protected area management to find ways to maintain the stability of this social-ecological system in the new national park era. Based on the social-ecological system meaning perception, we used an intensive social survey to investigate residents’ perception of the ecosystem in terms of tea cultivation and its interaction with conservation policies. Results showed that tea cultivation brought major household income and was associated with multiple cultural services. Protected area management affected land use, and conservation outcomes were more obvious to farmers than economic and social ones. We argue that the multi-functionality of the forest-tea system has the potential to benefit both the local people and the public through conservation-compatible activities at three levels: to regulate biophysical elements in the land plot, to link production and market at the mountain level, and to secure tenure and encourage community participation at the landscape level. This knowledge co-production approach revealed that to avoid a negative park–people relationship, traditional knowledge and people’s right to benefit must be respected.

Allowing variance may enlarge the safe operating space for exploited ecosystems

Variable flows of food, water, or other ecosystem services complicate planning. Management strategies that decrease variability and increase predictability may therefore be preferred. However, actions to decrease variance over short timescales (2-4 y), when applied continuously, may lead to long-term ecosystem changes with adverse consequences. We investigated the effects of managing short-term variance in three well-understood models of ecosystem services: lake eutrophication, harvest of a wild population, and yield of domestic herbivores on a rangeland. In all cases, actions to decrease variance can increase the risk of crossing critical ecosystem thresholds, resulting in less desirable ecosystem states. Managing to decrease short-term variance creates ecosystem fragility by changing the boundaries of safe operating spaces, suppressing information needed for adaptive management, cancelling signals of declining resilience, and removing pressures that may build tolerance of stress. Thus, the management of variance interacts strongly and inseparably with the management of resilience. By allowing for variation, learning, and flexibility while observing change, managers can detect opportunities and problems as they develop while sustaining the capacity to deal with them.

Drivers influencing adaptive management: a retrospective evaluation of water quality decisions in South East Queensland (Australia)

This article analyzes interviews with natural resource managers in South East Queensland (SEQ), Australia. The objectives of the research are (i) to apply and test deductive/inductive text analysis methods for constructing a conceptual model of water quality decision-making in SEQ, (ii) to understand the role of information in the decision-making process, and (iii) to understand how to improve adaptive management in SEQ. Our methodology provided the means to quickly and objectively explore interview data and also reduce potential subjective bias normally associated with deductive text analysis methods. At a more practical level, our methodology indicates potential intervention points if one is to influence the decision-making process in the region. Results indicate that relevant information is often ignored in SEQ, with significant consequences for adaptive management. Contextual factors (political, social, and environmental) together with effective communication or lobbying strategies often prevent evidence-based decisions. We propose that in addition to generating information to support decisions, adaptive management also requires an appraisal of the true character of the decision-making process, which includes how stakeholders interact, what information is relevant and salient to management, and how the available information should be communicated to stakeholders and decision-making bodies.

Cultural evolutionary tipping points in the storage and transmission of information

Human culture has evolved through a series of major tipping points in information storage and communication. The first was the appearance of language, which enabled communication between brains and allowed humans to specialize in what they do and to participate in complex mating games. The second was information storage outside the brain, most obviously expressed in the "Upper Paleolithic Revolution" - the sudden proliferation of cave art, personal adornment, and ritual in Europe some 35,000-45,000 years ago. More recently, this storage has taken the form of writing, mass media, and now the Internet, which is arguably overwhelming humans' ability to discern relevant information. The third tipping point was the appearance of technology capable of accumulating and manipulating vast amounts of information outside humans, thus removing them as bottlenecks to a seemingly self-perpetuating process of knowledge explosion. Important components of any discussion of cultural evolutionary tipping points are tempo and mode, given that the rate of change, as well as the kind of change, in information storage and transmission has not been constant over the previous million years.

Analytical solutions to trade-offs between size of protected areas and land-use intensity

Land-use change is affecting Earth's capacity to support both wild species and a growing human population. The question is how best to manage landscapes for both species conservation and economic output. If large areas are protected to conserve species richness, then the unprotected areas must be used more intensively. Likewise, low-intensity use leaves less area protected but may allow wild species to persist in areas that are used for market purposes. This dilemma is present in policy debates on agriculture, housing, and forestry. Our goal was to develop a theoretical model to evaluate which land-use strategy maximizes economic output while maintaining species richness. Our theoretical model extends previous analytical models by allowing land-use intensity on unprotected land to influence species richness in protected areas. We devised general models in which species richness (with modified species-area curves) and economic output (a Cobb-Douglas production function) are a function of land-use intensity and the proportion of land protected. Economic output increased as land-use intensity and extent increased, and species richness responded to increased intensity either negatively or following the intermediate disturbance hypothesis. We solved the model analytically to identify the combination of land-use intensity and protected area that provided the maximum amount of economic output, given a target level of species richness. The land-use strategy that maximized economic output while maintaining species richness depended jointly on the response of species richness to land-use intensity and protection and the effect of land use outside protected areas on species richness within protected areas. Regardless of the land-use strategy, species richness tended to respond to changing land-use intensity and extent in a highly nonlinear fashion.

Expectation-driven migration promotes cooperation by group interactions

"Voting with feet" describes the prominent social phenomenon that people tend to move away from deteriorating neighborhoods and search for and join prosperous groups. To quantify the role this kind of expectation-driven migration plays in the evolution of cooperation, here we study a simple yet effective model of cooperation based on spatial public goods games. The population structure is characterized by a square lattice with some nodes being left empty. Individuals have expectations toward their current habitats. Dissatisfied players, whose expectation is not met after interacting with all directly connected neighbors, tend to abstain from the groups of low quality by moving away and explore the physical niches of avail. How fast interaction happens relatively to selection is regulated by the time-scale ratio of game interaction to natural selection. Under strong selection, simulation results show that cooperation is greatly improved for either low, moderate, or high expectations compared to whenever the expectation-driven migration is absent. Further explorations reveal that neither too high nor too low but rather a combination of moderate expectations and rapid interaction establishes cooperation for a moderate public goods enhancement factor. There exists an optimal interval of expectation level most favoring the evolution of cooperation as the required time-scale ratio is minimized.

Moving away from nasty encounters enhances cooperation in ecological prisoner's dilemma game

We study the role of migration in the evolution of cooperation. Individuals spatially located on a square lattice play the prisoner's dilemma game. Dissatisfied players, who have been exploited by defectors, tend to terminate interaction with selfish partners by leaving the current habitats, and explore unknown physical niches available surrounding them. The time scale ratio of game interaction to natural selection governs how many game rounds occur before individuals experience strategy updating. Under local migration and strong selection, simulation results demonstrate that cooperation can be stabilized for a wide range of model parameters, and the slower the natural selection, the more favorable for the emergence of cooperation. Besides, how the selection intensity affects cooperators' evolutionary fate is also investigated. We find that increasing it weakens cooperators' viability at different speeds for different time scale ratios. However, cooperation is greatly improved provided that individuals are offered with enough chance to agglomerate, while cooperation can always establish under weak selection but vanishes under very strong selection whenever individuals have less odds to migrate. Whenever the migration range restriction is removed, the parameter area responsible for the emergence of cooperation is, albeit somewhat compressed, still remarkable, validating the effectiveness of collectively migrating in promoting cooperation.

Social-ecological interactions, management panaceas, and the future of wild fish populations

We explored the social and ecological outcomes associated with emergence of a management panacea designed to govern a stochastic renewable natural resource. To that end, we constructed a model of a coupled social-ecological system of recreational fisheries in which a manager supports naturally fluctuating stocks by stocking fish in response to harvest-driven satisfaction of resource users. The realistic assumption of users remembering past harvest experiences when exploiting a stochastically fluctuating fish population facilitates the emergence of a stocking-based management panacea over time. The social benefits of panacea formation involve dampening natural population fluctuations and generating stability of user satisfaction. It also maintains the resource but promotes the eventual replacement of wild fish by hatchery-descended fish. Our analyses show this outcome is particularly likely when hatchery-descended fish are reasonably fit (e.g., characterized by similar survival relative to wild fish) and/or when natural recruitment of the wild population is low (e.g., attributable to habitat deterioration), which leaves the wild population with little buffer against competition by stocked fish. The potential for release-based panacea formation is particularly likely under user-based management regimes and should be common in a range of social-ecological systems (e.g., fisheries, forestry), whenever user groups are entitled to engage in release or replanting strategies. The net result will be the preservation of a renewable resource through user-based incentives, but the once natural populations are likely to be altered and to host nonnative genotypes. This risks other ecosystem services and the future of wild populations.

Embracing panarchy, building resilience and integrating adaptive management through a rebirth of the National Environmental Policy Act

Environmental law plays a key role in shaping policy for sustainability of social-ecological systems. In particular, the types of legal instruments, institutions, and the response of law to the inherent variability in social-ecological systems are critical. Sustainability likely must occur via the institutions we have in place, combined with alterations in policy and regulation within the context of these institutions. This ecosystem management arrangement can be characterized as a panarchy, with research on sustainability specific to the scale of interest. In this manuscript we examine an opportunity for integrating these concepts through a regulatory rebirth of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). NEPA currently requires federal agencies to take a "hard look" at the environmental consequences of proposed action. The original intent of NEPA, however, was more substantive and its provisions, while currently equilibrium based, may be reconfigured to embrace new understanding of the dynamics of social-ecological systems.

Managing ecological thresholds in coupled environmental-human systems

Many ecosystems appear subject to regime shifts--abrupt changes from one state to another after crossing a threshold or tipping point. Thresholds and their associated stability landscapes are determined within a coupled socioeconomic-ecological system (SES) where human choices, including those of managers, are feedback responses. Prior work has made one of two assumptions about managers: that they face no institutional constraints, in which case the SES may be managed to be fairly robust to shocks and tipping points are of little importance, or that managers are rigidly constrained with no flexibility to adapt, in which case the inferred thresholds may poorly reflect actual managerial flexibility. We model a multidimensional SES to investigate how alternative institutions affect SES stability landscapes and alter tipping points. With institutionally dependent human feedbacks, the stability landscape depends on institutional arrangements. Strong institutions that account for feedback responses create the possibility for desirable states of the world and can cause undesirable states to cease to exist. Intermediate institutions interact with ecological relationships to determine the existence and nature of tipping points. Finally, weak institutions can eliminate tipping points so that only undesirable states of the world remain.

Natural resource management at four social scales: psychological type matters

Understanding organisation at different social scales is crucial to learning how social processes play a role in sustainable natural resource management. Research has neglected the potential role that individual personality plays in decision making in natural resource management. In the past two decades natural resource management across rural Australia has increasingly come under the direct influence of voluntary participatory groups, such as Catchment Management Authorities. The greater complexity of relationships among all stakeholders is a serious management challenge when attempting to align their differing aspirations and values at four social institutional scales-local, regional, state and national. This is an exploratory study on the psychological composition of groups of stakeholders at the four social scales in natural resource management in Australia. This article uses the theory of temperaments and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to investigate the distribution of personality types. The distribution of personality types in decision-making roles in natural resource management was markedly different from the Australian Archive sample. Trends in personality were found across social scales with Stabilizer temperament more common at the local scale and Theorist temperament more common at the national scale. Greater similarity was found at the state and national scales. Two temperaments comprised between 76 and 90% of participants at the local and regional scales, the common temperament type was Stabilizer. The dissimilarity was Improviser (40%) at the local scale and Theorist (29%) at the regional scale. Implications for increasing participation and bridging the gap between community and government are discussed.

A general framework for analyzing sustainability of social-ecological systems

A major problem worldwide is the potential loss of fisheries, forests, and water resources. Understanding of the processes that lead to improvements in or deterioration of natural resources is limited, because scientific disciplines use different concepts and languages to describe and explain complex social-ecological systems (SESs). Without a common framework to organize findings, isolated knowledge does not cumulate. Until recently, accepted theory has assumed that resource users will never self-organize to maintain their resources and that governments must impose solutions. Research in multiple disciplines, however, has found that some government policies accelerate resource destruction, whereas some resource users have invested their time and energy to achieve sustainability. A general framework is used to identify 10 subsystem variables that affect the likelihood of self-organization in efforts to achieve a sustainable SES.

A diagnostic approach for going beyond panaceas

The articles in this special feature challenge the presumption that scholars can make simple, predictive models of social-ecological systems (SESs) and deduce universal solutions, panaceas, to problems of overuse or destruction of resources. Moving beyond panaceas to develop cumulative capacities to diagnose the problems and potentialities of linked SESs requires serious study of complex, multivariable, nonlinear, cross-scale, and changing systems. Many variables have been identified by researchers as affecting the patterns of interactions and outcomes observed in empirical studies of SESs. A step toward developing a diagnostic method is taken by organizing these variables in a nested, multitier framework. The framework enables scholars to organize analyses of how attributes of (i) a resource system (e.g., fishery, lake, grazing area), (ii) the resource units generated by that system (e.g., fish, water, fodder), (iii) the users of that system, and (iv) the governance system jointly affect and are indirectly affected by interactions and resulting outcomes achieved at a particular time and place. The framework also enables us to organize how these attributes may affect and be affected by larger socioeconomic, political, and ecological settings in which they are embedded, as well as smaller ones. The framework is intended to be a step toward building a strong interdisciplinary science of complex, multilevel systems that will enable future diagnosticians to match governance arrangements to specific problems embedded in a social-ecological context.

Going beyond panaceas

In the context of governance of human-environment interactions, a panacea refers to a blueprint for a single type of governance system (e.g., government ownership, privatization, community property) that is applied to all environmental problems. The aim of this special feature is to provide theoretical analysis and empirical evidence to caution against the tendency, when confronted with pervasive uncertainty, to believe that scholars can generate simple models of linked social-ecological systems and deduce general solutions to the overuse of resources. Practitioners and scholars who fall into panacea traps falsely assume that all problems of resource governance can be represented by a small set of simple models, because they falsely perceive that the preferences and perceptions of most resource users are the same. Readers of this special feature will become acquainted with many cases in which panaceas fail. The articles provide an excellent overview of why they fail. Furthermore, the articles in this special feature address how scholars and public officials can increase the prospects for future sustainable resource use by facilitating a diagnostic approach in selecting appropriate starting points for governance and monitoring, as well as by learning from the outcomes of new policies and adapting in light of effective feedback.

Panaceas, uncertainty, and the robust control framework in sustainability science

A critical challenge faced by sustainability science is to develop strategies to cope with highly uncertain social and ecological dynamics. This article explores the use of the robust control framework toward this end. After briefly outlining the robust control framework, we apply it to the traditional Gordon-Schaefer fishery model to explore fundamental performance-robustness and robustness-vulnerability trade-offs in natural resource management. We find that the classic optimal control policy can be very sensitive to parametric uncertainty. By exploring a large class of alternative strategies, we show that there are no panaceas: even mild robustness properties are difficult to achieve, and increasing robustness to some parameters (e.g., biological parameters) results in decreased robustness with respect to others (e.g., economic parameters). On the basis of this example, we extract some broader themes for better management of resources under uncertainty and for sustainability science in general. Specifically, we focus attention on the importance of a continual learning process and the use of robust control to inform this process.

Drivers of reforestation in human-dominated forests

Tropical forest habitat continues to decline globally, with serious negative consequences for environmental sustainability. The small mountain country of Nepal provides an excellent context in which to examine trajectories of forest-cover change. Despite having experienced large-scale forest clearing in the past, significant reforestation has taken place in recent years. The range of biophysical and ecological environments and diversity of tenure arrangements provide us with a context with sufficient variation to be able to derive insight into the impact of a range of hypothesized drivers of forest change. This article draws on a dataset of 55 forests from the middle hills and Terai plains of Nepal to examine the factors associated with forest clearing or regeneration. Results affirm the central importance of tenure regimes and local monitoring for forest regrowth. In addition, user group size per unit of forest area is an important, independent explanator of forest change. These variables also can be associated with specific practices that further influence forest change such as the management of social conflict, adoption of new technologies to reduce pressure on the forest, and involvement of users in forest maintenance activities. Such large-N, comparative studies are essential if we are to derive more complex, nuanced, yet actionable frameworks that help us to plan better policies for the management of natural resources.

A diagnostic approach for going beyond panaceas

The articles in this special feature challenge the presumption that scholars can make simple, predictive models of social-ecological systems (SESs) and deduce universal solutions, panaceas, to problems of overuse or destruction of resources. Moving beyond panaceas to develop cumulative capacities to diagnose the problems and potentialities of linked SESs requires serious study of complex, multivariable, nonlinear, cross-scale, and changing systems. Many variables have been identified by researchers as affecting the patterns of interactions and outcomes observed in empirical studies of SESs. A step toward developing a diagnostic method is taken by organizing these variables in a nested, multitier framework. The framework enables scholars to organize analyses of how attributes of (i) a resource system (e.g., fishery, lake, grazing area), (ii) the resource units generated by that system (e.g., fish, water, fodder), (iii) the users of that system, and (iv) the governance system jointly affect and are indirectly affected by interactions and resulting outcomes achieved at a particular time and place. The framework also enables us to organize how these attributes may affect and be affected by larger socioeconomic, political, and ecological settings in which they are embedded, as well as smaller ones. The framework is intended to be a step toward building a strong interdisciplinary science of complex, multilevel systems that will enable future diagnosticians to match governance arrangements to specific problems embedded in a social-ecological context.