Sustainable natural resource managementa complex systems approach

Resumen

The present dissertation explores new frontiers of the Integrated Assessment framework based in participatory and holistic approaches in natural resource management. The underpinning hypothesis behind this work rest in the idea that to deal with the inherent properties of complex socio-ecological systems, natural resource management should shift toward deliberative approaches that are capable of integrating the best scientific knowledge coming from different discipline with the diversity of standpoints in society. More concretely, the dissertation is structured to respond to the following objectives: I) Explore alternative approaches for carrying out integrated sustainability assessment. II) Assess the influence of adopting alternative sustainability paradigms when considering non-equivalent representations of complex socio-ecological systems. III) Analyze the potential of integrated assessment for the sustainable management of natural resources and the resolution of socio-ecological conflicts, emphasizing its deliberative component. IV) Assess the scope of such integrated participatory approaches to enhance social learning processes in the search of sustainability pathways. V) Develop 'quality control' mechanisms to enhance the robustness of the assessment in the light of confronted social priorities. Chapter II presents a multi-dimensional sustainability assessment of the Basque trawl fisheries operating in the North East Atlantic. Since the management of fisheries encompasses a multi dimensional human endeavour that has socio-economic, technological, ethical and institutional implications (McGoodwin, 1990; Charles, 1994; Hanna, 1999; Garcia and Staples, 2000; Garcia and Charles, 2007), I explore the potential of applying the multi-criteria evaluation technique for the integration of multiple perspectives in natural resource management. With this aim, I use the Rapfish methodology, which is based on a nonparametric multi-disciplinary appraisal (Pitcher and Preikshot, 2001). Through the integration of ecological, technological and socio-economic dimensions of this case study I demonstrate the usefulness of applying integrated appraisal tools, such MCE, to reflect the potential tradeoffs between the multiple dimensions of complex socio-ecological systems and better guide natural resource management. Chapter III analyses the suitability of the weak and strong sustainability criteria for guiding natural resource management in the context of integrated management of fisheries. This topic central in ecological economics (for a recent review see Neumayer, 2010), is rather unexplored in fisheries, even though fisheries have been the focus of many pioneering studies related to natural resource management. The revision of the weak vs. strong sustainability paradigm and the empirical application to the Basque fleet, demonstrates the implication of assuming compensability between natural and human made capital in the context of integrated assessment. I also argue that the inclusion of multiple dimensions of a given socio-ecological problem within and integrated assessment is not enough in itself for the appropriate formulation natural resource management policies. The way in which different types of capital are measured and compensability among criteria considered, conditions the output of the assessment and ought to be explicitly addressed. According to this study It is the strong sustainability criterion together with the identification of critical thresholds that provides the adequate toolkit for improved management and policy formulation in natural resource management. Ones I argue that natural resource management requires integrated approaches and that the multiple dimensions of sustainability can not be aggregated at any level, in Chapter IV I show how these approaches can be combined with diverse forms of public participation to respond to the normative requirements of integrated assessment. A collaborative research process among an interdisciplinary group of researchers and diverse group of stakeholders, in the Urdaibai Biosphere Reserve has been adopted as a case study. This study shows that improving the integration of diverse expertise and values in a social setting can lead to (a) mutual learning processes; (b) the definition of relevant policy options and (c) sound decisions in the face of great complexities, value conflict and unavoidable uncertainty. Motivated by the social learning processes that are usually attached to integrated assessments, in Chapter V, I focus in the study of such learning processes from the theoretical and empirical perspective. Integrated assessment approaches intend to support social learning processes among those actors involved in decision-making processes. However, despite high expectations, such learning processes are poorly conceptualized and empirically understudied. To overcome such deficit, in this Chapter I briefly review theories of social learning, develop a conceptual framework for the analysis and present an empirical application in three energy and natural resource management case studies in Europe: (1) sustainable energy systems in Austria; (2) energy transition in Southeast England; and (3) sustainable management of the Urdaibai Biosphere Reserve. After reviewing relevant parts of the literature I argued that social learning for sustainability is best understood as a three-dimensional approach that has to do with changes in: the behavioural mode, participants' systems perception and the scale in which this process is framed. With this study I show that social learning does happen in participatory workshops, but to a lesser extent than expected. The depth and breadth of such learning depends in multiple factors such as the workshop design, time given to the process or the type of participants. In Chapter VI I focus on the issue of weights, i.e. prioritization of criteria, in integrated assessments. In the public policy domain where decision processes include many stakeholders the inclusion of confronted priorities turns complicate. This has to do with numerous compression' phases of complexity and insuring the robustness of the results requires the development of quality check mechanisms in all these phases (see Giampietro, Mayumi and Munda, 2006). In this chapter, I propose a process in which the explicit elicitation of weights serves as a quality assurance mechanism. Moreover, I argue that this proposal can provide an explicit social sensitivity' analysis, in the light of incommensurability of values, and enhance a social learning process without forcing consensus. Finally, in Chapter VII, I conclude the dissertation recapitulating the main findings and policy implications for the sustainable management of complex socio-ecological systems. In this chapter I also point at areas for further research.