‘Managed grazing’ is gaining attention for its potential to contribute to climate change mitigation by reducing bare ground and promoting perennialization, thereby enhancing soil carbon sequestration ...(SCS). Understanding why ranchers adopt managed grazing is key to developing the right incentives. In this paper, we explore principles and practices associated with the larger enterprise of ‘regenerative ranching’ (RR), which includes managed grazing but infuses the practice with holistic decision-making. We argue that this broader approach is appealing due to a suite of ecological, economic and social benefits, making climate change mitigation an afterthought, or ‘co-benefit’. RR is challenging, however, because it requires a deep understanding of ecological processes along with a set of skills related to monitoring and moving livestock and feeding the soil microbiome. We review the literature regarding links between RR and SCS, then present results of qualitative research focused on motivators, enablers and constraints associated with RR, drawing on interviews with 52 practitioners in New South Wales, Australia and the western United States. Our analysis is guided by a conceptual model of the social–ecological system associated with RR that identifies determinants of regenerative potential. We discuss implications for rancher engagement and conclude with a consideration of leverage points for global scalability.
Large-scale, high-severity wildfires are a major challenge to the future social-ecological sustainability of fire-adapted forest ecosystems in the American West. Managing forests to mitigate this ...risk is a collective action problem requiring landowners and stakeholders within multi-ownership landscapes to plan and implement coordinated restoration treatments. Our research question is: how can we promote collective action to reduce wildfire risk and restore fire-resilient forests in the American West? To address this question we draw on collective action theory to produce an environmental public good (fire-resilient forests), and empirical examples of collective action from six projects that are part of the US Forest Service-Natural Resources Conservation Service Joint Chiefs' Landscape Restoration Partnership. Our findings are based on qualitative, semi-structured interviews conducted with 104 individuals who were purposively selected to represent the diverse stakeholders involved in these projects. Fostering collective action to restore fire-resilient forests entails getting as many landowners (especially large landowners) to participate in wildfire risk reduction as possible to increase its areal extent; and landowner coordination in planning and implementing strategically-designed restoration treatments to optimize their effectiveness. We identify factors that enabled and constrained landowner participation and coordination in the Joint Chiefs' projects. Based on our findings and theory about when collective action will emerge, we specify a suite of practices to promote collective action for wildfire risk reduction across property boundaries, emphasizing incentives and enabling conditions. These include proactive education and outreach targeting landowners; multi-stakeholder processes with broad landowner representation to develop coordinated management approaches; financial and technical assistance to support fuels treatments on all ownerships within similar time frames; strong partnerships; and using common forestry professionals to plan and implement treatments on different ownerships (especially private lands). Our findings can inform cross-boundary management for landscape-scale conservation and restoration in other contexts.
In Africa, forest tenure reform to decentralize forest management from central governments to local communities has been occurring since the 1990s to promote forest conservation, poverty alleviation, ...and sustainable forest-based livelihoods. African governments and donor organizations continue to invest in community forestry, raising the question of what contributes to "success." The present study examines social, economic, and biophysical factors that contribute to success, or lack thereof, in community forestry in southeastern Tanzania. There, community forest enterprises produce commercial timber from natural stands in community forests certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. We compare success across 14 certified community forests using local criteria, emphasizing total revenue earned because half of this revenue is invested in creating community benefits, which incentivize sustainable forest management. Our methods include financial analysis, analysis of potential linkages between success outcomes and attributes of villages and community forests, key informant interviews, and a survey of forest managers. We found that for community forestry with community forest enterprises that produce commercial timber to be most successful, success factors for both community forestry and small-scale, forest-based enterprises must be present and co-occur. In particular, we highlight the importance of having large community forests with a high natural endowment of merchantable timber species for success. A favorable national policy environment, good governance and support at the community and district government levels, secure tenure, tangible benefits, and long-term technical and financial support from a local organization were also important. In addition, we examine the role of forest certification in contributing to success, finding it does so by reinforcing many other success factors. We draw insights from the Tanzanian case that may be relevant for community forestry elsewhere in Africa where community forest enterprises producing commercial timber operate or are desired.
Engage key social concepts for sustainability Hicks, Christina C.; Levine, Arielle; Agrawal, Arun ...
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
04/2016, Volume:
352, Issue:
6281
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Social indicators, both mature and emerging, are underused
With humans altering climate processes, biogeochemical cycles, and ecosystem functions (
1
), governments and societies confront the ...challenge of shaping a sustainable future for people and nature. Policies and practices to address these challenges must draw on social sciences, along with natural sciences and engineering (
2
). Although various social science approaches can enable and assess progress toward sustainability, debate about such concrete engagement is outpacing actual use. To catalyze uptake, we identify seven key social concepts that are largely absent from many efforts to pursue sustainability goals. We present existing and emerging well-tested indicators and propose priority areas for conceptual and methodological development.
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Community forestry refers to forest management that has ecological sustainability and local community benefits as central goals, with some degree of responsibility and authority for forest management ...formally vested in the community. This review provides an overview of where the field of community forestry is today. We describe four case examples from the Americas: Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Bolivia. We also identify five hypotheses embedded in the concept of community forestry and examine the evidence supporting them. We conclude that community forestry holds promise as a viable approach to forest conservation and community development. Major gaps remain, however, between community forestry in theory and in practice. For example, devolution of forest management authority from states to communities has been partial and disappointing, and local control over forest management appears to have more ecological than socioeconomic benefits. We suggest ways that anthropologists can contribute to the field.
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•Livelihood investments were effective incentives for community forestry during the project period despite mixed outcomes.•Intrinsic incentives associated with forest ecosystem services and NGO ...support were also important for success.•Post-project, community forest uses evolved to better meet community interests and needs while balancing conservation.•There is a need to develop diverse livelihood investments that effectively deliver and sustain their purported benefits.•Livelihood projects may be appropriate incentives when community forestry is protection-oriented and land tenure secure.
This study examines community incentives to participate in donor-sponsored community forestry initiatives using the case of a multi-year biodiversity conservation and sustainable livelihood project in West Africa sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development. In this project, communities established community forests and prohibited most extractive uses to promote forest biodiversity conservation, receiving livelihood and water infrastructure investments in return. I assess whether livelihood investments are an effective incentive-based conservation strategy for community forestry initiatives, and in what context; and, once external project support ends, whether community forestry based on this incentive strategy persists. I examined community forestry in 27 communities across three study areas in Guinea and Sierra Leone between 2012 and 2015, when the project ended, and conducted a follow-up assessment in 2018 to see whether community forestry persisted post-project. I found that, despite mixed benefits from livelihood activities, livelihood investments were effective incentives for community forestry during the project’s lifetime. Most successful were Village Savings and Loan Associations and tree nurseries and plantations (coffee, cacao, oil palm, rubber), both of which provided tangible economic benefits to participating households. Intrinsic incentives associated with the ecosystem services community forests provide were also important. All but one community forest persisted 2.5 years post-project, though management byelaws had informally changed in many community forests to allow more extractive uses. These changes were least evident in the study area where benefits from livelihood investments were greatest and endured. This study demonstrates that livelihood investments can be effective in-kind incentives for community forestry in Africa, whether as central or ancillary incentives, but more effort is needed to design livelihood investments that deliver their expected benefits. Context also matters; there is a need to better understand the relationship between incentive types, community forestry model, and the social-ecological conditions in which community forestry occurs.
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•We present a detailed framework of human wellbeing for ecosystem-based management.•Connections, capabilities, and conditions may be assessed using indicators.•Cross-cutting analyses ...can assess equity, security, resilience, and sustainability.•The framework and focal attributes should be modified to serve diverse contexts.•2300 existing social indicators are compiled from which to select measures.
There is growing interest in assessing the effects of changing environmental conditions and management actions on human wellbeing. A challenge is to translate social science expertise regarding these relationships into terms usable by environmental scientists, policymakers, and managers. Here, we present a comprehensive, structured, and transparent conceptual framework of human wellbeing designed to guide the development of indicators and a complementary social science research agenda for ecosystem-based management. Our framework grew out of an effort to develop social indicators for an integrated ecosystem assessment (IEA) of the California Current large marine ecosystem. Drawing from scholarship in international development, anthropology, geography, and political science, we define human wellbeing as a state of being with others and the environment, which arises when human needs are met, when individuals and communities can act meaningfully to pursue their goals, and when individuals and communities enjoy a satisfactory quality of life. We propose four major social science-based constituents of wellbeing: connections, capabilities, conditions, and cross-cutting domains. The latter includes the domains of equity and justice, security, resilience, and sustainability, which may be assessed through cross-cutting analyses of other constituents. We outline a process for identifying policy-relevant attributes of wellbeing that can guide ecosystem assessments. To operationalize the framework, we provide a detailed table of attributes and a large database of available indicators, which may be used to develop measures suited to a variety of management needs and social goals. Finally, we discuss four guidelines for operationalizing human wellbeing measures in ecosystem assessments, including considerations for context, feasibility, indicators and research, and social difference. Developed for the U.S. west coast, the framework may be adapted for other regions, management needs, and scales with appropriate modifications.
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We examine the influence of wildfire institutions on management and forest resilience over time, drawing on research from a multiownership, frequent-fire, coupled human and natural system (CHANS) in ...the eastern Cascades of Oregon, USA. We constructed social-ecological histories of the study area’s three main landowner groups (national forest, private corporate, and tribal) using a historical framework (1905–2010). Our findings highlight two infrequently recognized linkages of multiownership, frequentfire CHANS: (1) informal institutions (e.g., cultural norms, knowledge system and fire paradigm) and institutional history often influence wildfire management adaptation (changes in forest fuel treatment, harvest fuel treatment, and wildfire incident response) through interactions with formal institutions (e.g., policy, law) and consequent effects on managers’ decision-making flexibility; (2) institutional interactions over time can influence forest resilience, thereby contributing to forest structural variation in multiownership landscapes. Consequently, the factors that contribute to maladaptive wildfire management are heterogeneously distributed across ownerships and the landscape. The timing of institutional dynamics also matters: manager flexibility to respond adaptively to wildfire hazard change seems to depend on synchronicity in evolution between informal and formal institutions, whereas asynchronous evolution (e.g., policy change, coupled with delayed shift in cultural norms or fire paradigms) may generate a time lag between unanticipated ecological feedbacks and management response. Thus, interventions that promote informal institutional evolution in tandem with developments in policy and law may shorten time lags, accelerating adaptation. A historical perspective can facilitate broad-scale, adaptive responses to wildfire-related ecological feedbacks in several ways: by providing insight into how informal institutions and institutional history interact with formal institutions to influence wildfire management behavior; by providing a historical baseline and system stages that contextualize current management behavior, ecological conditions, and policy options; and by illuminating historical sources of variation among ownerships and how they might be addressed.
Fire-prone landscapes present many challenges for both managers and policy makers in developing adaptive behaviors and institutions. We used a coupled human and natural systems framework and an ...agent-based landscape model to examine how alternative management scenarios affect fire and ecosystem services metrics in a fire-prone multiownership landscape in the eastern Cascades of Oregon. Our model incorporated existing models of vegetation succession and fire spread and information from original empirical studies of landowner decision making. Our findings indicate that alternative management strategies can have variable effects on landscape outcomes over 50 years for fire, socioeconomic, and ecosystem services metrics. For example, scenarios with federal restoration treatments had slightly less high-severity fire than a scenario without treatment; exposure of homes in the wildland-urban interface to fire was also slightly less with restoration treatments compared to no management. Treatments appeared to be more effective at reducing high-severity fire in years with more fire than in years with less fire. Under the current management scenario, timber production could be maintained for at least 50 years on federal lands. Under an accelerated restoration scenario, timber production fell because of a shortage of areas meeting current stand structure treatment targets. Trade-offs between restoration outcomes (e.g., open forests with large fire-resistant trees) and habitat for species that require dense older forests were evident. For example, the proportional area of nesting habitat for northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis) was somewhat less after 50 years under the restoration scenarios than under no management. However, the amount of resilient older forest structure and habitat for white-headed woodpecker (Leuconotopicus albolarvatus) was higher after 50 years under active management. More carbon was stored on this landscape without management than with management, despite the occurrence of high-severity wildfire. Our results and further applications of the model could be used in collaborative settings to facilitate discussion and development of policies and practices for fire-prone landscapes.
•We analyzed the social network structure for ecoregion-scale planning.•Despite shared concern about wildfire, organizations comprised distinct networks.•Organizations with different goals and ...geographic foci comprised distinct networks.•Social network ties among organizations were stronger at the sub-ecoregion scale.•Network analysis can quantify social capacity for landscape planning.
Management of ecological conditions and processes in multiownership landscapes requires cooperation by diverse stakeholder groups. The structure of organizational networks – the extent to which networks allow for interaction among organizations within and across ideological and geographic boundaries – can indicate potential opportunities for cooperation on landscape-scale problems. In the arid landscapes of the western United States, where increasingly large wildfires burn irrespective of property boundaries and land designations, organizations involved in the restoration of forests and the protection of property from wildfire could benefit from working together to share information and coordinate strategies. We investigated patterns of interaction among organizations concerned with increasingly uncharacteristic wildfire risk in the Eastern Cascades Ecoregion of Oregon for evidence of structural conditions that create opportunity for cooperation. Through social network analysis of interview data, we found that despite sharing concern about wildfire risk in an area with a common set of ecological conditions, organizations with forest restoration and fire protection goals comprised distinct networks, as did organizations that focused on different geographic areas of the ecoregion. When interpreted through the lens of social capital and organizational theory these findings raise questions about the extent to which the structure of the organizational network reflects capacity to address wildfire risk in fire-prone forests on the ecoregion-scale. This study provides insights on the utility of a structural approach for investigating social capacity for landscape-scale planning.
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