Hi Tobias.

Do you know the Cabo Pulmo experience? This is a fisherman community which began to be aware about the beauty and relevance of the coral reef in front of their lands at Baja California. They made of the management to establish a natural protected area and changed their way of life, to do ecotourism. This process has taken around 20 years with a lot of outcomes in the social and ecological systems, as an increasing income to local and regional families because of the tourism and the recovery in around 200% of the fish biomass for fisheries in the region. A lot of mega-projects have been rejected with the civil society action. There is a new configuration of the local governance, joining market of tourism + a federal natural protected area + local people / organization. It is interesting and the results are systematized not only in the biophysical aspects but in the social ones, too.

Hi Tobias, check our paper on bioenergy in Brandenburg, Germany. It may not be the case you need, but we argue that system boundaries need to be extended to incorporate feedback and learning at higher levels. In our case the system is at risk in getting stuck in a poverty trap, but this could be different, if our analysis extended system boundaries. There are also indications of technological learning within our system boundaries. Maybe there are also new case studies by Claudia Pahl-Wostl.

Article Responses of agricultural bioenergy sectors in Brandenburg (...

Hi Tobias,

I don't think this answers your question directly, but you might find the attached paper by Sendzimir et al interesting (e.g., fig 10).

Your question attracted my attention because it's something we are quite interested in at the Mountain Research Initiative here in Bern. We currently have four major "efforts" we are trying to encourage the mountain research community to focus on, one on assessing sustainable mountain development and the other on developing a more systematic and synthetic approach to understanding the structure, function and evolution of agency and governance in mountain regions. Your question is quite relevant to both! If you get some more helpful answers, please share!

I see you're in the MRI database- great! Will you be attending the Mountains of Our Future Earth conference in October? It would be great to have some more perspectives from the social sciences in particular.

Cheers,

Erin

(MRI Regional Networks Development and Communications)

Article Rebuilding Resilience in the Sahel: Regreening in the Maradi...

Dear Tobias,

Concerning your specific requirements it seems there are a few papers on that. The one below seems to fullfil your requirements.

Armitage, D., Béné, C., Charles, A. T., Johnson, D., & Allison, E. H. (2012). The interplay of well-being and resilience in applying a social-ecological perspective. Ecology and Society, 17(4), 15.

Good luck for your search.

Best regards,

Jorge

Thank you Melf-Hinrich. Interesting case study you describe in the paper. I think it may be of help for our cause.

Jorge, thank you as well. The paper you propose is relevant for our cause though more conceptual. Ideally we would need a concrete case study as an empirical illustration.

Erin, thanks a lot - this seems like the case we are looking for.

October - not sure since there is a parallel conference in STHLM in transformations.

But it would be great to chat since there may be some overlays in our work, e.g. http://www.arctic-alpine-resilience.net or  http://www.sustainablemountaintourism.org/, and some thoughts on Future Earth...

The Flagstaff Watershed Protection Project.  http://www.flagstaffwatershedprotection.org/

Residents recognized the threat potential high severity wildfire posed to their community in terms of post-fire flooding and erosion.  74% of voters passed a bond issue to garner $10M to support forest thinning. 

Here is a paper about how social values of the Flagstaff community affect decision-making and the willingness to pay for ecosystem services:

http://forestry.oxfordjournals.org/content/87/2/327.short

Hello Tobias, your question is very interesting. I don’t know, if it is happening in the historical centers of some European cities, which have been previously attacked by regenerative planning and gentrification, (but now the idea is to allow the eldest members of the commune to share lifes moments with the youngest through art, and together to stop the Tagged evictions , it has been considered a social-ecological system, but I understand that they are getting to stop him.

I´m sorry my English.

Thank you Maria, I think this is indeed an important aspect how to connect different forms of human capital to increase social capital e.g. in urban areas. 

Of course -- most traditional communties in the world are actively involved in this process -- see our paper "Local SOlutions for Environmental Justice" available on this platform for more details.  This is quite important in the whole discussion beinput forward by Via Campesina and elsewhere.  In Mexico the Zapatistas have been showing that this is the way to create a path to improving human well being and environmental balance

Hi Tobias.

Do you know the Cabo Pulmo experience? This is a fisherman community which began to be aware about the beauty and relevance of the coral reef in front of their lands at Baja California. They made of the management to establish a natural protected area and changed their way of life, to do ecotourism. This process has taken around 20 years with a lot of outcomes in the social and ecological systems, as an increasing income to local and regional families because of the tourism and the recovery in around 200% of the fish biomass for fisheries in the region. A lot of mega-projects have been rejected with the civil society action. There is a new configuration of the local governance, joining market of tourism + a federal natural protected area + local people / organization. It is interesting and the results are systematized not only in the biophysical aspects but in the social ones, too.

This french project for wild rivers is quite interesting: http://www.rivieres-sauvages.fr

Best regards,

Pascal

Tobias –

You may find the case of the evolution of the Conservation Authorities of Ontario relevant to your research.  One of the interesting things about the CA’s is their very tightly delineated SES – focused as they are on the communities within a natural watershed or group of watersheds. 

See:

Shrubsole, Dan. "Ontario conservation authorities: principles, practice and challenges 50 years later." Applied Geography 16.4 (1996): 319-335. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0143622896000173

http://www.conservation-ontario.on.ca/about-us/conservation-authorities/history www.hurricanehazel.ca/ssi/evolution_flood_control.shtml

From a broader institutional perspective, the evolving concept of “green para-diplomacy” which sees sub-national agents collaborating internationally to enhance environmental governance might also be relevant to your research.   

See Annie Chaloux’s and Stéphane Paquin’s work on this topic: Green paradiplomacy and water resource management in North America: the case of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/11926422.2013.845582)

David Gordon’s work on city networks is also interesting in this regard.  Gordon makes the argument that, in the absence of substantive progress on fighting climate change by higher levels of government, major cities are increasingly taking it upon themselves to strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity.

See:  David J. Gordon,  Between local innovation and global impact: cities, networks, and the governance of climate change, Canadian Foreign Policy Journal ,  Vol. 19, Iss. 3, 2013 (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/11926422.2013.844186)

I'd suggest Gordon and Chaloux are of particular relevance to your topic because they demonstrate adaptation in terms of both resilience and governance - demonstrating a willingness to engage in what Claudia Pahl-Wostl has described as 'triple-loop learning' in the development of adaptive capacity (Pahl-Wostl, Claudia. ‘A Conceptual Framework for Analysing Adaptive Capacity and Multi-Level Learning Processes in Resource Governance Regimes’. Global Environmental Change 19, no. 3 (1 August 2009): 354–65.)

Hope these ramblings are of some use...

The Klamath River has been controversial for decades regarding competing uses for scarce water, dams on the river, tribal and agricultural rights, etc. They have recently achieved a settlement inclusive of  the many stakeholders which includes 4 dam removals, efforts to restore the salmon fishery, as well as provide a reliable supply of agricultural water.  The agreements now need congressional approval, but this was a long process that will result in more ecological resiliency in the river and resiliency in the water supply operations for the towns, farms, etc. If you want more contacts for this, you can email me. 

 Hello Tobias, I am also studying resilience but from a different perspective, but I have found this information that may be useful for you, the title is "An urban geography of dignity". I hope it helps.

Check the works of Urs Scheideegger (Professor at the ETH Zürich). He's been doing projects in latin amercia and africa to improve their local croppings.

Thank you so much David, Adriana, Pascal, John, Patricia, Yvette, Lea - I see there are so many more great examples out there and will further explore your recommended literature. I guess an idea for a new paper could arise from this, comparing empirical cases of SES resilience increments by governance transformation....

This is a very good question, with very interesting answers... I would like to know all the experiences mentioned above!!!  It sounds good and with a lot of hope for a better ecosystem management and well-being for people. Thanks to everyone!!

I have to agree with Adriana and Tobias, I was going to contribute thoughts about Elinor Ostrom's work on common pool resource management but started reading the replies and have learned so much!  I am also working on city networks that have emerged in the void created by international stalemate. I have found the newly published  (2014) "Transnational Climate Change Governance" book written by 10 authors known in this field very useful.  Not so much from the point of empirical examples but more from the vantage of aggregating the data of 60 TCCG initiatives, finding trends, and explaining behavior. Again, wonderful posting!

Dear colleagues: currently we are ending an experiencie that involves te resilience about community: increasing the empowerment to afront changes in the use of soil an d land. The sense of appropiation (or atachment) and the psychosocial valoration of their territory (from conception of natural resources to natural patrimony; the same  with cultural patrimony and iden tity) increases selfsteem and let to assume ideas, actirudes  and actions about the territory. Besides that, impulse the growing of organizations not only productives and adult poblaction, but teens and agroechological too. The sense of community and the sense of their endogenuos forces, permits that "community resiience". That is a cultual level in our intervention.  Cordially... Henry

Thanks for all the input. We now selected three cases and published them as illustrations in this new paper on mental models of resilience building in social-ecological systems:

Article Introducing adaptive waves as a concept to inform mental mod...

Thanks for all the input. We now selected three cases and published them as illustrations in this new paper on mental models of resilience building in social-ecological systems:

Article Introducing adaptive waves as a concept to inform mental mod...

Thanks for all the input. We now selected three cases and published them as illustrations in this new paper on mental models of resilience building in social-ecological systems:

Article Introducing adaptive waves as a concept to inform mental mod...

Successful cities, island states and land-locked municipalities offer interesting cases of socio -ecological resilience and may even yield a 'survivorship model' that is generalizable if we are able to unravel the underlying dynamics of their phenomenology.These cases tend to benefit from turbulence and uncertainty because they function as safe heavens. The adaptive learning resulting in an emergent governance system that is essentially a set of rules everyone agrees to abide by is crucial to survival and resilience. The case of of Seoul transforming its  highways into rivers (river covered by elevated highway) that offers an alternative form of city accessibility/permeability is interesting to consider. Perhaps as a way to accept that slow is better than fast- an acceptance that is no small feat of adaptive learning.