Assessing the resilience of a real-world social-ecological system: lessons from a multidisciplinary evaluation of a South African pastoral system

Abstract

. Assessing the resilience of a real-world social-ecological system: lessons from a multidisciplinary evaluation of a South African pastoral system. Ecology and Society 21(3):35. http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-08737-210335 SynthesisAssessing the resilience of a real-world social-ecological system: lessons from a multidisciplinary evaluation of a South African pastoral system ABSTRACT. In the past decades, social-ecological systems (SESs) worldwide have undergone dramatic transformations with often detrimental consequences for livelihoods. Although resilience thinking offers promising conceptual frameworks to understand SES transformations, empirical resilience assessments of real-world SESs are still rare because SES complexity requires integrating knowledge, theories, and approaches from different disciplines. Taking up this challenge, we empirically assess the resilience of a South African pastoral SES to drought using various methods from natural and social sciences. In the ecological subsystem, we analyze rangelands' ability to buffer drought effects on forage provision, using soil and vegetation indicators. In the social subsystem, we assess households' and communities' capacities to mitigate drought effects, applying agronomic and institutional indicators and benchmarking against practices and institutions in traditional pastoral SESs. Our results indicate that a decoupling of livelihoods from livestockgenerated income was initiated by government interventions in the 1930s. In the post-apartheid phase, minimum-input strategies of herd management were adopted, leading to a recovery of rangeland vegetation due to unintentionally reduced stocking densities. Because current livelihood security is mainly based on external monetary resources (pensions, child grants, and disability grants), household resilience to drought is higher than in historical phases. Our study is one of the first to use a truly multidisciplinary resilience assessment. Conflicting results from partial assessments underline that measuring narrow indicator sets may impede a deeper understanding of SES transformations. The results also imply that the resilience of contemporary, open SESs cannot be explained by an inward-looking approach because essential connections and drivers at other scales have become relevant in the globalized world. Our study thus has helped to identify pitfalls in empirical resilience assessment and to improve the conceptualization of SES dynamics.

Operationalization and Measurement of Social-Ecological Resilience: A Systematic Review

“…Supplementary Materials: The following are available online at http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/21/6073/s1, Table S1: Characteristics of the selected studies [70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82][83].…”

Advancing the Understanding of Adaptive Capacity of Social‐Ecological Systems to Absorb Climate Extremes

“…Third, impacts of climate extremes can be amplified due to changes in land use and land management as seen in pastoral systems (see Linstädter et al, 2016). Resilience of such SES could be stabilized via changes in management based on an improved knowledge base, institutional changes, and improved practices for sustainable development (Anderies et al, 2004;Reynolds et al, 2007).…”

Development and validation of risk profiles of West African rural communities facing multiple natural hazards

“…Studies such as Linstädter et al . [22] assess the resilience of pastoral SES to droughts in South Africa whilst Martin et al . [23] assessed livelihood loss to drought using a model based approach.…”

“…[23] assessed livelihood loss to drought using a model based approach. Although these recent studies introduce new and interesting dimensions to resilience assessment in the context of droughts; using multidisciplinary approaches [22] and scenario comparison [23], they do not integrate multiple hazards occurrence, and limit their assessment to pastoral systems. For West Africa, Asare-Kyei et al .…”