| 1. |
- Currie, Thomas E., et al.
(författare)
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Integrating evolutionary theory and social–ecological systems research to address the sustainability challenges of the Anthropocene
- 2024
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Ingår i: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Biological Sciences. - 0962-8436 .- 1471-2970. ; 379:1893
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- The rapid, human-induced changes in the Earth system during the Anthropocene present humanity with critical sustainability challenges. Social–ecological systems (SES) research provides multiple approaches for understanding the complex interactions between humans, social systems, and environments and how we might direct them towards healthier and more resilient futures. However, general theories of SES change have yet to be fully developed. Formal evolutionary theory has been applied as a dynamic theory of change of complex phenomena in biology and the social sciences, but rarely in SES research. In this paper, we explore the connections between both fields, hoping to foster collaboration. After sketching out the distinct intellectual traditions of SES research and evolutionary theory, we map some of their terminological and theoretical connections. We then provide examples of how evolutionary theory might be incorporated into SES research through the use of systems mapping to identify evolutionary processes in SES, the application of concepts from evolutionary developmental biology to understand the connections between systems changes and evolutionary changes, and how evolutionary thinking may help design interventions for beneficial change. Integrating evolutionary theory and SES research can lead to a better understanding of SES changes and positive interventions for a more sustainable Anthropocene.
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| 2. |
- Haider, L. Jamila, 1987-, et al.
(författare)
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Capacities for resilience : persisting, adapting and transforming through bricolage
- 2023
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Ingår i: Ecosystems and People. - 2639-5908 .- 2639-5916. ; 19:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Resilience has become increasingly popular in sustainability research and practice as a way to describe change. Within this discourse, the notion of resilience as the capacity of people, practices and processes, to persist, adapt or transform is particularly salient. The ability to bounce back from shock (persistence) or to take adaptive measures to cope with change are most commonly attributed to resilience, but at the same time, there is a strong push for a transformation agenda from various social and environmental movements. How capacities for resilience are enacted and performed through social practices remains relatively underexplored and there is potential for more dialogue and learning across disciplinary traditions. In this article, we outline the ‘Resilience Capacities Framework’ as a way to a) explicitly address questions of agency in how resilience capacities are enacted and b) account for the dynamic interactions between pathways of persistence, adaptation and transformation. Our starting point is to conceptualise future pathways as co-evolved, whereby social and ecological relationships are shaped through processes of selection, variation and retention, enacted in everyday practices. Drawing on theories of bricolage and structuration, we elaborate on the role of actors as bricoleurs, consciously and non-consciously shaping socio-ecological relationships and pathways of change. Informed by cases of rural change from mountain areas, we explore the extent to which an approach focusing on agency and bricolage can illuminate how the enactment of resilience capacities shapes intersecting pathways of change.
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| 3. |
- Haider, L. Jamila, 1987-
(författare)
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Development and Resilience : Re-thinking poverty and intervention in biocultural landscapes
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The practices related to the growing, harvesting, preparation, and celebration of food over millennia have given rise to diverse biocultural landscapes the world over. These landscapes – rich in biological and cultural diversity – are often characterised by persistent poverty, and, as such, are often the target of development interventions. Yet a lack of understanding of the interdependencies between human well-being, nature, and culture in these landscapes means that such interventions are often unsuccessful - and can even have adverse effects, exacerbating the poverty they were designed to address. This thesis investigates different conceptualisations of persistent poverty in rural biocultural landscapes, the consequences of these conceptualisations, and the ways in which development interventions can benefit from, rather than erode, biocultural diversity.The thesis first reviews conceptualisations of persistent poverty and specifically, the notion of a poverty trap (Paper I), and examines the consequences of different conceptualisations of traps for efforts to alleviate poverty (Paper II). Paper I argues that the trap concept can be usefully broadened beyond a dominant development economics perspective to incorporate critical interdependencies between humans and nature. Paper II uses multi-dimensional dynamical systems models to show how nature and culture can be impacted by different development interventions, and, in turn, how the degradation of both can undermine the effectiveness of conventional poverty alleviation strategies in certain contexts.In the second section, the thesis focuses on the effects of, and responses to, trap-like situations and development interventions in a specific context of high biocultural diversity: the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan. Paper III advances a typology of responses to traps based around the mismatch of desires, abilities and opportunities. Observing daily practice provides a way to study social-ecological relationships as a dynamic process, as practices can embody traditional and tacit knowledge in a holistic way. Paper IV examines the diverse effects of a development intervention on the coevolution of biocultural landscapes and the ways in which everyday practice – particularly around food – can be a source of both innovation and resilience.Papers I-IV together combine insights from diverse disciplines and methodologies, from systematic review to dynamic systems thinking and participant observation. Paper V provides a critical analysis of the opportunities and challenges involved in pursuing such an approach in sustainability science, underscoring the need to balance methodological groundedness with epistemological agility.Overall, the thesis contributes to understanding resilience and development, highlighting the value of viewing their interrelation as a dynamic, coevolving process. From this perspective, development should not be regarded as a normative endpoint to be achieved, but rather as a coevolving process between constantly changing ecological and social contexts. The thesis proposes that resilience can be interpreted as the active and passive filtering of practices via the constant discarding and retention of old and new, social and ecological, and endogenous and exogenous factors. This interpretation deepens understanding of resilience as the capacity to persist, adapt and transform, and ultimately shape new development pathways. The thesis also illustrates how daily practices, such as the growing, harvesting, and preparation of food, offer a powerful heuristic device for understanding this filtering process, and therefore the on-going impact of development interventions in rural landscapes across the world.
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| 4. |
- Haider, L. Jamila, 1987-, et al.
(författare)
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The effects of development interventions on coevolved practices in biocultural landscapes
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Baht, a festive porridge prepared for the Persian New Year in the Pamir Mountains is made from a sweet variety of red wheat, Rashtak, which grows only in the high reaches of its most remote valley. The relationship between ecology and culture in landscapes like the Pamirs runs deep, with everyday practices and rituals having co-evolved with the harsh environment over millennia. Such tightly intertwined biocultural landscapes are, however, often among the world’s poorest and thus are particularly subject to external development interventions. This paper investigates the effects of a particular development intervention, the introduction of an improved wheat seed, on everyday traditional practices and the rituals that maintain them. The intervention contributed towards the near extinction of Rashtak, along with many other traditional seed varieties. Using Norgaard’s coevolutionary framework we analyse the changes in relations between ecology and society resulting from diverse community responses to the intervention. We observe that rituals, which emerge from successful everyday practices, can provide a valuable entry point to understanding co-evolutionary processes in biocultural landscapes. Through participatory observation in two villages, specifically around the practices of food preparation, we examine contrasting responses to the introduced seed in the context of larger-scale development in the region. Our findings show how in one village, Rashtak has been lost but the ritual of baht remains, though the daily practices and social-ecological relationships linked to the ritual have been strongly altered. In the other community, the new ‘improved’ seed was only cultivated on small areas of land in a process of trial and error and farmers maintained their traditional varieties alongside the new seed. Thereby, the rituals around baht remain deeply rooted in social-ecological relationships that have been maintained over the years. The paper describes innovative individual responses to development interventions in everyday life in both communities and finds that some can be important sources of resilience. For example, in the community that lost Rashtak, along with many other local seeds, the knowledge around how to cultivate the land is maintained in a ‘harvest dance’ choreographed and taught be a local school teacher. Rituals, as a repository of social memory, can play an important role in development processes whilst maintaining important social-ecological relationships for future resilience. A deeper understanding of coevolutionary processes in a landscape may help develop approaches for identifying and harnessing endogenous responses to local, regional and global change and help empower more appropriate and effective development pathways.
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| 5. |
- Haider, L. Jamila, 1987-, et al.
(författare)
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The undisciplinary journey : early-career perspectives in sustainability science
- 2018
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Ingår i: Sustainability Science. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1862-4065 .- 1862-4057. ; 13:1, s. 191-204
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The establishment of interdisciplinary Master’s and PhD programs in sustainability science is opening up an exciting arena filled with opportunities for early-career scholars to address pressing sustainability challenges. However, embarking upon an interdisciplinary endeavor as an early-career scholar poses a unique set of challenges: to develop an individual scientific identity and a strong and specific methodological skill-set, while at the same time gaining the ability to understand and communicate between different epistemologies. Here, we explore the challenges and opportunities that emerge from a new kind of interdisciplinary journey, which we describe as ‘undisciplinary.’ Undisciplinary describes (1) the space or condition of early-career researchers with early interdisciplinary backgrounds, (2) the process of the journey, and (3) the orientation which aids scholars to address the complex nature of today’s sustainability challenges. The undisciplinary journey is an iterative and reflexive process of balancing methodological groundedness and epistemological agility to engage in rigorous sustainability science. The paper draws upon insights from a collective journey of broad discussion, reflection, and learning, including a survey on educational backgrounds of different generations of sustainability scholars, participatory forum theater, and a panel discussion at the Resilience 2014 conference (Montpellier, France). Based on the results from this diversity of methods, we suggest that there is now a new and distinct generation of sustainability scholars that start their careers with interdisciplinary training, as opposed to only engaging in interdisciplinary research once strong disciplinary foundations have been built. We further identify methodological groundedness and epistemological agility as guiding competencies to become capable sustainability scientists and discuss the implications of an undisciplinary journey in the current institutional context of universities and research centers. In this paper, we propose a simple framework to help early-career sustainability scholars and well-established scientists successfully navigate what can sometimes be an uncomfortable space in education and research, with the ultimate aim of producing and engaging in rigorous and impactful sustainability science.
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| 6. |
- Haider, L. Jamila, 1987-, et al.
(författare)
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Traps and Sustainable Development in Rural Areas : A Review
- 2018
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Ingår i: World Development. - : Elsevier BV. - 0305-750X .- 1873-5991. ; 101, s. 311-321
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- The concept of a poverty trap—commonly understood as a self-reinforcing situation beneath an asset threshold—has been very influential in describing the persistence of poverty and the relationship between poverty and sustainability. Although traps, and the dynamics that lead to traps, are defined and used differently in different disciplines, the concept of a poverty trap has been most powerfully shaped by work in development economics. This perspective is often constraining because, as many studies show, poverty arises from complex interactions between social and environmental factors that are rarely considered in development economics. A more integrated understanding of poverty traps can help to understand the interrelations between persistent poverty and key social and ecological factors, facilitating more effective development interventions. The aim of this paper is to provide a critical appraisal of existing trap conceptualizations in different disciplines, and to assess the characteristics and mechanisms that are used to explain poverty traps in rural contexts, thereby broadening the traps concept to better account for social-ecological interactions. Complementarities and tensions among different disciplinary perspectives on traps are identified, and our results demonstrate that different definitions of traps share a set of common characteristics: persistence, undesirability, and self-reinforcement. Yet these minimum conditions are not sufficient to understand how trap dynamics arise from complex social-ecological interactions. To broaden the utility of the concept we propose a more social-ecologically integrated definition of traps that includes four additional considerations: cross-scale interactions, path dependencies, the role of external drivers, and social-ecological diversity. Including these wider dimensions of trap dynamics would help to better account for the diverse social-ecological feedbacks that produce and maintain poverty traps, and could strengthen strategies to alleviate poverty in a more integrated way.
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| 7. |
- Haider, L. Jamila, 1987-
(författare)
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Understanding poverty traps in biocultural landscapes
- 2015
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Over one and a half billion people live in poverty, with some 795 million suffering from chronic malnourishment. For many of these people this perilous situation has persisted for decades or more, in what is popularly characterized as a poverty ‘trap’. Some of the poorest areas in the world, commonly held up as examples of poverty traps, also boast exceptionally high levels of agricultural and cultural diversity. This same diversity (which we call biocultural diversity) underpins both the present and future social-ecological resilience of the communities that reside in such landscapes. The way that poverty traps are conceptualized, however, as part of the design and implementation process of conventional development interventions, can mean that these interventions may inadvertently result in the reduction of the very diversity that may be so vital to future development pathways and the long-term prosperity of the people in rural landscapes. The specific question addressed in this licentiate thesis is: How are poverty traps conceptualized in rural development? The aim is to contribute to a more nuanced conceptualization of poverty alleviation that explicitly takes biological and cultural diversity into consideration, thereby maintaining future potential sources of resilience. In doing so the licentiate thesis seeks to provide a more powerful heuristic basis for identifying and assessing the drivers and mechanisms of persistent poverty. Paper I offers an example of a specific case (Central Romania) representing the problem of persistent poverty in a biocultural context and addresses barriers to rural development using ‘traps’ as a conceptual framing. The findings of the paper demonstrate that multiple barriers to rural development are often interacting and mutually reinforcing, and therefore need to be tackled simultaneously, and with an additional focus on the interactions themselves, as well as each of the barriers. Paper I highlighted some of the current shortfalls of the concept of traps, namely a somewhat inconsistent literature which motivates the need for a synthesis of traps in development economics and sustainability science. Paper II provides an overview of trap conceptualisations in the broader literature (across all disciplines that address ‘trap’ dilemmas) and specifically the interplay between trap conceptualizations and causal mechanisms of traps in rural development contexts. The paper concludes that in the transition out of rural poverty, development practice may benefit substantially from a broader, more nuanced and holistic conceptualization of trap dynamics in resource dependent contexts. This argument is based on appreciation of four propositions from social-ecological thinking: (i) scale-mismatch, (ii) a more explicit recognition of the external drivers of traps, (iii) historical path-dependency, and (iv) biological and cultural diversity. In summary, the licentiate thesis contends that the way development scholars have conceptualised poverty traps may influence the way poverty is alleviated (or not). Overcoming poverty is more complicated than even multidimensional wellbeing thresholds due to unintended consequences on biological and cultural diversity, for example. Through maintaining a limited poverty traps conceptualization, we may be obscuring the ability to see the interactions that could lead to alternative, more resilient, development trajectories.
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| 8. |
- Lazurko, Anita, et al.
(författare)
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Operationalizing ambiguity in sustainability science : embracing the elephant in the room
- 2024
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Ingår i: Sustainability Science. - 1862-4065 .- 1862-4057. ; 19:2, s. 595-614
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Ambiguity is often recognized as an intrinsic aspect of addressing complex sustainability challenges. Nevertheless, in the practice of transdisciplinary sustainability research, ambiguity is often an ‘elephant in the room’ to be either side-stepped or reduced rather than explicitly mobilized in pursuit of solutions. These responses threaten the salience and legitimacy of sustainability science by masking the pluralism of real-world sustainability challenges and how research renders certain frames visible and invisible. Critical systems thinking (CST) emerged from the efforts of operational researchers to address theoretical and practical aspects of ambiguity. By adapting key concepts, frameworks, and lessons from CST literature and case studies, this paper aims to establish (1) an expansive conceptualization of ambiguity and (2) recommendations for operationalizing ambiguity as a valuable means of addressing sustainability challenges. We conceptualize ambiguity as an emergent feature of the simultaneous and interacting boundary processes associated with being, knowing, and intervening in complex systems, and propose Reflexive Boundary Critique (RBC) as a novel framework to help navigate these boundary processes. Our characterization of ambiguity acknowledges the boundary of a researcher’s subjective orientation and its influence on how ambiguity is exposed and mediated in research (being), characterizes knowledge as produced through the process of making boundary judgments, generating a partial, contextual, and provisional frame (knowing), and situates a researcher as part of the complexity they seek to understand, rendering any boundary process as a form of intervention that reinforces or marginalizes certain frames and, in turn, influences action (intervening). Our recommendations for sustainability scientists to operationalize ambiguity include (1) nurturing the reflexive capacities of transdisciplinary researchers to navigate persistent ambiguity (e.g., using our proposed framework of RBC), and (2) grappling with the potential for and consequences of theoretical incommensurability and discordant pluralism. Our findings can help sustainability scientists give shape to and embrace ambiguity as a fundamental part of rigorous sustainability science.
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| 9. |
- Reyers, Belinda, et al.
(författare)
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The contributions of resilience to reshaping sustainable development
- 2022
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Ingår i: Nature Sustainability. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2398-9629. ; 5:8, s. 657-664
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- We review the past decade’s widespread application of resilience science in sustainable development practice and examine whether and how resilience is reshaping this practice to better engage in complex contexts. We analyse six shifts in practice: from capitals to capacities, from objects to relations, from outcomes to processes, from closed to open systems, from generic interventions to context sensitivity, and from linear to complex causality. Innovative complexity-oriented practices have emerged, but dominant applications diverge substantially from the science, including its theoretical and methodological orientations. We highlight aspects of the six shifts that are proving challenging in practice and what is required from sustainability science.
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