Understanding how governance emerges in social-ecological systems: insights from archetype analysis

Abstract

This paper is motivated by the question: how does governance emerge within social-ecological systems (SESs)? Addressing this question is critical for fostering sustainable transformations because it directs attention to the context specific and process intensive nature of governance as arising from the internal dynamics (i.e., interplay of feedbacks and interdependencies between the components) of SESs. This contrasts with the commonly held view of governance as an external intervention applied to a system. To systematically examine the recurrent patterns in how the internal dynamics promote/detract from the emergence of different types of governance, we applied archetype analysis to 60 selected cases of irrigation systems from Asia. Drawing inspiration from grid-group typology of cultural theory, we developed four specific archetypes: egalitarian, individualist, hierarchical, and fatalist. To build these archetypes, we applied a robustness framework and several other theories/perspectives to identify the different social-ecological and infrastructural attributes of irrigation SESs, and their interdependencies and feedback structures. We then used these attributes, identified through our theoretical review, to deductively code our selected cases and classify them into the different archetypes. The results show the different configurations of attributes that co-occur in each archetype, and how together these attributes and their inter-relationships lead to specific types of governance. Our archetype analysis also provides several interesting examples of fine-tuning between different SES attributes and how this fine-tuning is being threatened by various social and environmental changes. Through a systematic exploration of recurrent patterns using archetype analysis, our work builds on past efforts to apply ideas from complexity theory-specifically emergence-to unpack the complexities of SESs and offer practical guidance for fostering sustainability.

Review of Urbanization-Associated Farmland Research in China: A Sustainability Perspective

“…Looking into the future, it is urgently necessary to conduct more conceptual and theoretical studies that explicitly frame UAFL and other complex landscape syndromes as emergent properties of dynamic social-environmental landscapes/systems. Particularly, governance, the largely missing piece in the existing literature, needs to be explicitly incorporated into the framing of social-environmental systems [103][104][105][106]. Future studies can go one step further than Tan, Beckmann, van den Berg, and Qu [77] (Figure 3) to examine the common governance structures of social-environmental systems and those peculiar governance architectures causing specific challenges to sustainability, like UAFL.…”

Archetypes of community-based pond aquaculture in Indonesia: applying the social-ecological systems framework to examine sustainability tradeoffs

“…Despite some progress in countries where aquaculture plays a large role in shaping economic development and food security, there is still a need for policy strategies to find a middle pathway of generalizability that balances coherence with adaptability. One strategy is to pursue methods that can identify similar case studies so that policy programs can more effectively target management and capacity investments into systems with similar conditions and needs while avoiding inefficient generalizations or the burden of always needing to contextualize [8]. Researchers can help by exploring new methodological tools and combining existing ones to analyze diverse social-ecological systems (SES) data.…”