Dataset Information

Sixteen years of social and ecological dynamics reveal challenges and opportunities for adaptive management in sustaining the commons.

ABSTRACT: Efforts to confront the challenges of environmental change and uncertainty include attempts to adaptively manage social-ecological systems. However, critical questions remain about whether adaptive management can lead to sustainable outcomes for both ecosystems and society. Here, we make a contribution to these efforts by presenting a 16-y analysis of ecological outcomes and perceived livelihood impacts from adaptive coral reef management in Papua New Guinea. The adaptive management system we studied was a customary rotational fisheries closure system (akin to fallow agriculture), which helped to increase the biomass of reef fish and make fish less wary (more catchable) relative to openly fished areas. However, over time the amount of fish in openly fished reefs slowly declined. We found that, overall, resource users tended to have positive perceptions about this system, but there were negative perceptions when fishing was being prohibited. We also highlight some of the key traits of this adaptive management system, including 1) strong social cohesion, whereby leaders played a critical role in knowledge exchange; 2) high levels of compliance, which was facilitated via a "carrot-and-stick" approach that publicly rewarded good behavior and punished deviant behavior; and 3) high levels of participation by community actors.

SUBMITTER: Cinner JE

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6936519 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Sixteen years of social and ecological dynamics reveal challenges and opportunities for adaptive management in sustaining the commons.

Cinner J E JE Lau J D JD Bauman A G AG Feary D A DA Januchowski-Hartley F A FA Rojas C A CA Barnes M L ML Bergseth B J BJ Shum E E Lahari R R Ben J J Graham N A J NAJ

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20191216 52

Efforts to confront the challenges of environmental change and uncertainty include attempts to adaptively manage social-ecological systems. However, critical questions remain about whether adaptive management can lead to sustainable outcomes for both ecosystems and society. Here, we make a contribution to these efforts by presenting a 16-y analysis of ecological outcomes and perceived livelihood impacts from adaptive coral reef management in Papua New Guinea. The adaptive management system we st ...[more]

PMID: 31843883

Similar Datasets

Project description:Human societies and natural ecosystems are under threat by growing populations, overexploitation of natural resources and climate change. This calls for more sustainable utilization of resources based on past experiences and insights from many different disciplines. Interdisciplinary approaches to studies of historical commons have potential to identify drivers of change and keys to success in the past, and offer advice about the management and use of shared resources in contemporary and future systems. We address these issues by applying an ecological perspective to historical data on social-ecological systems. We perform comparisons and time series analyses for nine successful Dutch commons for which high-resolution data on the regulatory activities and use of shared resources is available for on average 380 years (range 236 to 568) during the period 1300 to 1972. Within commons, institutional developments were oscillating, with periods of intense regulatory activity being separated by periods of low activity, and with the dynamics of regulations being largely independent across commons. Ecological theory posits that species that occupy similar niches should show correlated responses to environmental challenges; however, commons using more similar resources did not have more parallel or similar institutional developments. One notable exception was that sanctioning was more frequent in commons that directed more regulatory activities towards non-renewable subsoil resources, whereas there was no association between sanctioning and the use of renewable resources. This might indicate that commoners were aware of potential resource depletion and attempted to influence freeriding by actively trying to solve the underlying social dilemmas. Sanctioning regulations were more frequent during the first than during the second part of a common's life, indicating that while sanctioning might have been important for the establishment of commons it was not key to the long-term persistence of historical commons.

Dataset Information

Sixteen years of social and ecological dynamics reveal challenges and opportunities for adaptive management in sustaining the commons.

Publications

Sixteen years of social and ecological dynamics reveal challenges and opportunities for adaptive management in sustaining the commons.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets