Citation:

Bodin, O., S. Alexander, J. Baggio, M. Barnes, R. Berardo, G. Cumming, L. Dee, A. Fischer, M. Fischer, M. Mancilla-Garcia, A. Guerrero, J. Hileman, K. Ingold, P. Matous, T. Morrison, D. Nohrstedt, J. Pittman, G. Robins, AND J. Sayles. Improving network approaches to the study of complex social-ecological interdependencies. Nature Sustainability. Nature Publishing Group, New York, NY, 2(7):551-559, (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0308-0

Impact/Purpose:

Environmental problems such as water pollution, habitat destruction, or fisheries overharvesting, to name but a few, occur over large places and involve many people. Solutions require understanding how different people interact with the environment, so scientist often use networks to study how different things are linked together. Networks come in many shapes and sizes. Some are highly connected, others are sparse. Some have middle-men linking people and places together, others are directly connected. Understanding how different kinds of networks cause environmental problems and solutions is important so that we can advise managers and resource users about how to organize. We need multiple examples of cause and effect to do so, however, something that has been difficult to establish because not all network studies are directly comparable. To make sense of these studies, we organize them considering what problems they address and how, allowing us to draw conclusions based on common problems or common approaches. Unfortunately, we did not find enough studies that truly identified what causes environmental problems and solutions and therefore are unable to offer general recommendations at this time. Our approach, however, identifies what research is needed and provides a tool to coordinate and synthesize it.

Description:

Achieving effective, sustainable environmental governance requires a better understanding of the causes and consequences of the complex patterns of interdependencies connecting people and ecosystems within and across scales. Here, three key advances we argue are needed for this purpose are presented: (i) a typology of causal assumptions explicating the causal aims of any given study of social-ecological interdependencies; (ii) approaches to develop insights that reach beyond the idiosyncrasies of single case studies; and (iii) a clearer appreciation that many environmental problems draw from a set of core challenges that re-occur across multiple contexts and scales. Building on an emerging network-centric research approach with demonstrated theoretical and methodological utility, we develop a framework that addresses these key advances. We use the framework to investigate some previous studies, and propose that the framework facilitates leveraging case-specific findings of complex social-ecological interdependencies to generalizable, yet context-sensitive, theories based on explicit assumptions of causal relationships.

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