Which infrastructures for which forest function? Analyzing multifunctionality through the social-ecological system framework

Abstract

Landscapes are subject to ecological and socioeconomic forces of change that interact in complex ways. To cope with these changes, landscape planning of natural resource management integrates sociocultural, ecological, and economic considerations in an analytic and systemic way. In this regard, social-ecological system (SES) frameworks have been developed to help analyze key factors that drive the dynamics of such complex adaptive systems. For forests, multifunctional management, which also highlights the ecological and socioeconomic roles of forests for society, has become a central objective for several European countries (e.g., France, Italy, and Germany). However, further development of methods, tools, and conceptual approaches is needed to facilitate our understanding of the arrangements behind management practices that include complex human-environment interactions. This study adopts Ostrom's SES framework and Anderies' robustness framework to highlight how forestry institutions affect forest ecosystems, forest functions, and social arrangements. As an illustration, we apply both frameworks to the Quatre-Montagnes forest, located in the south-east of France, in which multifunctionality is a major objective of forest governance. We first apply the SES framework to construct an analysis of the Quatre-Montagnes forest, specifying the first-tier and second-tier variables. From this, we describe the importance of infrastructure-related variables in shaping the interactions between components of the SES. We then apply the robustness framework, developed by Anderies, because we believe this framework enables a better analysis of ecosystem functions for infrastructure governance than the SES framework, which provides a better descriptive capacity for the variables. We discuss insights, based on our infrastructure analysis, which can be used when establishing designs for efficient forest management with heavy infrastructure dependencies.

An Infrastructure Perspective for Enhancing Multi‐functionality of Forests: A Conceptual Modeling Approach

“…To address the problem of forest multi-functionality, we have mathematically operationalized the robustness framework conceptualization of forest multi-functionality based on Houballah et al (2020) work. Here we consider a particular relation between forest functions and governance highlighted through their ability to provision infrastructures.…”

“…(2015) attributed the regrowth of forests in the tropics to the presence of robust community institutions and co‐management between communities and national government. Nonetheless, the capacity of societies to address forest sustainability hinges on their ability to deal with several social dilemmas associated with integrating their activity and cooperating concerning multiple uses of the forest as well as provisioning shared human‐made infrastructure (Houballah et al., 2020; Muneepeerakul & Anderies, 2017). Anderies et al.…”

“…In this context, Houballah et al. (2020) considered a new approach that combines the SES (Ostrom, 2009) and robustness frameworks to present a novel perceptive for understanding interactions in multifunctional forest management through an infrastructural point of view (see Figure 1a).…”

“…To fully integrate the role of shared infrastructures and their governance into ecosystem science, we propose a generic conceptual modeling approach, based on Houballah et al. (2020) study that links human and biophysical drivers, patterns, processes, and effects. Our main contributions are as follows: (1) development of a stylized—but informed by a real case study—mathematical model that operationalizes the modified robustness conceptual framework of Figure 1a to analyze the interactions in multifunctional forest management; (2) the study of the multifunctional forest management through analyzing the multifunctionality of road infrastructure.…”

“…The model construction is inspired by a real case study (Houballah et al., 2020). The Quatre‐Montagne has about 17,000 ha of forest cover.…”