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Analyzing social-ecological systems

In this lesson, students analyze a select real-world social-ecological system by looking at factors of the resource(s) and ecosystem, resource user behaviors, and governance, to develop recommendations for improving the sustainable management of the resource.

In this lesson, students analyze a real-world social-ecological system in order to derive solutions for the sustainable management of the system. The lesson can be scaffolded in numerous ways depending on available time and learning goals. For example, students can be given a number of resources to use for their analysis, or students can search for information in various media sources.

The teacher might use the lesson Three Mexican Fisheries as a model for this lesson, especially regarding the kinds of resources and information that students might have available or need to search for in order to analyze the social-ecological system.

The lesson can also be used as an overarching project for a whole unit or school year, possibly spanning various subjects. Over time, the different factors can be analyzed and information added in as the unit/school year progresses and students get to know new concepts and methods.

Link to teaching material

Teaching material type Causal map, Full lesson plan, Payoff Matrix, Project, Worksheet

Subject Areas Biology, Civics, Economics, ESD, Ethics, Geography, Interdisciplinary, Politics, Social Studies

Learning Goals Community Science Competency, Design Thinking, Evaluation Competency, Intercultural Competence, Interdisciplinary Thinking, Nature of Science, Systems Thinking

Suitable Grade Levels 9-12

Content Anchors Common-Pool Resource management, Sustainable Development Goals

Author: Susan Hanisch

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike [CC BY-NC-SA]

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Three Mexican fisheries

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Related Literature

A diagnostic procedure for applying the social-ecological systems framework in diverse cases

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Hinkel, J., Cox, M. E., Schlüter, M., & Binder, C. R. (2018). A diagnostic procedure for applying the social-ecological systems framework in diverse cases. Ecology and Society, 20(1), 32. http://doi.org/10.5751/ES-07023-200132

The framework for analyzing sustainability of social-ecological systems (SES) framework of Elinor Ostrom is a multitier collection of concepts and variables that have proven to be relevant for understanding outcomes in diverse SES. The first tier of this framework includes the concepts resource system (RS) and resource units (RU), which are then further characterized through lower tier variables such as clarity of system boundaries and mobility. The long-term goal of framework development is to derive conclusions about which combinations of variables explain outcomes across diverse types of SES. This will only be possible if the concepts and variables of the framework can be made operational unambiguously for the different types of SES, which, however, remains a challenge. Reasons for this are that case studies examine other types of RS than those for which the framework has been developed or consider RS for which different actors obtain different kinds of RU. We explore these difficulties and relate them to antecedent work on common-pool resources and public goods. We propose a diagnostic procedure which resolves some of these difficulties by establishing a sequence of questions that facilitate the step-wise and unambiguous application of the SES framework to a given case. The questions relate to the actors benefiting from the SES, the collective goods involved in the generation of those benefits, and the action situations in which the collective goods are provided and appropriated. We illustrate the diagnostic procedure for four case studies in the context of irrigated agriculture in New Mexico, common property meadows in the Swiss Alps, recreational fishery in Germany, and energy regions in Austria. We conclude that the current SES framework has limitations when applied to complex, multiuse SES, because it does not sufficiently capture the actor interdependencies introduced through RS and RU characteristics and dynamics.

A General Framework for Analyzing Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems

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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.

OpenEvo is an educational innovation project from the Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

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