Managing complex adaptive systems — A co-evolutionary perspective on natural resource management

Abstract

The overexploitation of natural resources and the increasing number of social conflicts following from their unsustainable use point to a wide gap between the objectives of sustainability and current resource management practices. One of the reasons for the difficulties to close this gap is that for evolving complex systems like natural and socio-economic systems, sustainability cannot be a static objective. Instead sustainable development is an open evolutionary process of improving the management of social–ecological systems, through better understanding and knowledge. Therefore, natural resource management systems need to be able to deal with different temporal, spatial and social scales, nested hierarchies, irreducible uncertainty, multidimensional interactions and emergent properties. The co-evolutionary perspective outlined in this paper serves as heuristic device to map the interactions settled in the networks between the resource base, social institutions and the behaviour of individual actors. For this purpose we draw on ideas from complex adaptive systems theory, evolutionary theory and evolutionary economics. Finally, we outline a research agenda for a co-evolutionary approach for natural resource management systems.

Introduction

Natural resource management systems are core to sustainable development. Characterised by a high level of complexity, and shaped by unpredictable external and internal changes, these management systems aim to address sustainability conflicts, which we face from global to local scales. These conflicts reflect the urgent need to change our current modes of production, consumption patterns and technological choices to balance human well being with ecological and social resilience. Overexploitation of natural resources, devastation of environmental services and an increasing number of social conflicts following the unsustainable use of natural resources demonstrate the wide gap between the objectives of sustainability and current resource management practices.

On the one hand, this gap results from the shortfalls of static approaches based on standard economic models like the maximum sustainable yield (Carpenter et al., 2002), short-term optimisation (Becker and Ostrom, 1995) and the related limitations of mono-disciplinarity (Berkes et al., 2003). In particular, neo-classical resource economics extends this gap as it deals with ecological and environmental systems by analysing the threats arising from scarcity constraints by reference to a “mechanical corset” based on closed systems, reductive science, reversibility and an a-historic worldview (Nicolis and Prigogine, 1977, Ramos-Martin, 2003, Rammel and van den Bergh, 2003). Driven by neo-classical equilibrium models that are characterised by their theoretical “elegance and aesthetics” (Nelson, 1995) rather than by their potential to understand the complexity of evolving systems, conventional resource management systems often focus exclusively on myopic optimisation and gains of efficiency rather than on the capacity to foster social–ecological resilience in the long-run.

On the other hand, sustainable management of complex evolving systems (Allen, 1990, Allen, 2001, Giampietro, 2004) is challenged by different temporal, spatial and social scales, nested hierarchies, inevitable uncertainty, multidimensional interactions and emergent properties (Berkes et al., 2003, Gunderson and Holling, 2002, Mayumi and Giampietro, 2006). Consequently, sustainable resource management must be an integrated and interdisciplinary process aiming at the interdependencies between institutions, environmental dynamics, economic processes, applied technologies and dominant cultures in managing and administrating natural resources. But how to understand and how to model the complexity of natural resource management systems?

Sustainability is “not a fixed ideal, but an evolutionary process of improving the management of systems, through improved understanding and knowledge” (Cary, 1998:12). A growing body of literature points to the potential of evolutionary thinking in economics in general and in resource management in particular (Hodgson, 1993, Nelson, 1995, Heino et al., 2000, Allen and McGlade, 1987, Jeffrey and McIntosh, 2002, MacGlade, 2002, Rammel and van den Bergh, 2003, Henrich, 2004). Ramos-Martin (2003: 390) points out, that ecological economics is “an evolutionary science” and as such “deals with complex adaptive systems” (Holland, 1995, Levin, 1999). In the following we argue that a co-evolutionary approach is necessary to understand natural resource management systems and to enhance sustainability in the long run. In this paper, we aim to develop an interdisciplinary framework for mapping the co-evolutionary interactions settled in natural resource management systems, which we perceive as complex adaptive systems. For this purpose we focus on the interactions between the natural resource base, social institutions and the behaviour of individual actors and draw on co-evolutionary theories from different disciplines that are relevant for natural resource management systems.

The structure of this paper is as follows: Section 2 briefly introduces complex adaptive system (CAS) theory as theoretical basis for analysing the dynamics of social–ecological systems. Section 3 presents an overview about the use of the concept of co-evolution in different disciplines. In search for theories to underpin natural resource management, special attention is given to the understanding of co-evolutionary dynamics in biology, technology studies and economics. Section 4 presents a co-evolutionary framework of natural resource management systems. Section 5 gives an outlook of a future research agenda on co-evolution and natural resource management systems. We conclude in Section 6.