resilience 2014 session 56 tips or traps

Session 56

“Tips or Traps? Advancing understanding to steer clear of impoverishment traps

and tipping points”

Keith Tidball Dept. of Natural Resources Cornell University USA

Niki Frantzeskaki DRIFT, Erasmus University Rotterdam The Netherlands

Wednesday 05-05-2014 10:20-11:20

Programme page 26

Thomas Elmqvist Stockholm Resilience Center Stockholm University, Sweden

• History of the Karklö Group

• Revisit the conceptualization of poverty and rigidity traps (Carpenter and Brock 2008) by considering how representations of stability landscapes can affect spatial and temporal micro- and macro-dynamics which shape the very landscapes that contain these traps.

• Institutional traps are basically inefficient yet stable norms of behavior… supported by

mechanisms of coordination, learning, linkage and cultural inertia (Polterovich 2008).

• In SES resilience and transition studies, motivated by the possibility of breaking out of traps, understanding these traps from the stand-point of systems modeling, especially through visualizations such as the now almost ubiquitous ball and cup diagrams and stability landscapes, has become common.

Liao, K. 2012 Scheffer et al. 1993, Walker et al. 2004 Scheffer et al. 2001

• These visualizations have contributed in important ways to our collective understanding of SES and to better illustrating not only traps, but also possibilities for escaping or avoiding them.

• We do not intend here to diminish the value of these important initial contributions -- our hope is to creatively and somewhat critically approach them for the purposes of expanding their explanatory utility, to acknowledge both limits to as well new frontiers in that explanatory utility.

• We take a constructive critical approach via novel conceptual and empirical observations on traps, motivated by the existence of contested interpretations of traps and the landscapes within which they are described.

• Can we surface new types of traps? Are all traps describing ‘shades’ of the two archetypical traps already well known in the literature? (rigidity and poverty)

• With this in mind, in this session we approach traps in new and novel ways, from diverse perspectives while remaining critical to the concept itself: examining the subjectivity of traps, issues of scale and related unintended consequences.

Critical analysis of social-ecological systems, their stability landscapes and traps

- Richard Stedman – Reification trap - Jamila Haider – Perverse resilience

- Timon McPhearson – Avoiding urban SES traps by ecosystem services and disservices

- Jakub Kronenberg – From poverty trap to ecosystem service curse

- Keith Tidball – Anthropocentric discursive traps

- Niki Frantzeskaki – Scale traps of transformative innovations

Subjectivity Lens

Spatial Scale Lens

Subjectivity Lens

Spatial & Time Scale Lenses

Richard C. Stedman Director, Human Dimensions Research Unit Department of Natural Resources Cornell University rcs6@cornell.edu The Reification Trap, or “Following the Data Around”: Resilience and the Sustainability Hangover?

• Proposition 1: “The Subjectivity of Tips” Key regime shifts in social-ecological systems are “in the eye of the beholder”; (subjectively) experienced, perceived, interpreted and acted on. This makes language such as “desirable states” potentially problematic.

• Proposition 2: “The Data Trap” Systematic analyses of subjectivity at multiple levels, multiple forms, have not been well-integrated into social-ecological systems’ work, especially around regime shifts. There is a need to understand variation in this subjectivity and its sources; quantitative research is especially good for this.

Has this landscape tipped?

State X State Y State X State Y

Is the system actually in a trap?

According to Whom?

Are we here? Or here?

Stockholm Resilience Centre, jamila.haider@su.se

Perverse resilience: A systematic review of traps in social-ecological systems

Jamila Haider

• Proposition 1: The emphasis on overcoming ONE single threshold in trap situations leads to inappropriate interventions in social ecological systems.

• Proposition 2: Different types of traps exist and can reinforce each other across spatial, organisational and temporal scales.

Trap defined as being under ONE material productivity threshold: 80% of studies reviewed Big push of material input: 50% of studies reviewed

Temporal

Gov

erna

nce

Leve

l

Soviet Era à 1992 1992 – 2005 2005 – Present

Cent

ralis

ed

Dece

ntra

lised

Centralised Afforestation

Anarchy/elite capture Deforestation

Decentralisation Reforestation

No case studies reviewed identify cross scale interacting traps

“Avoiding social-ecological system traps by accounting for both ecosystem services and disservices in cities” Timon McPhearson Assistant Professor of Urban Ecology Tishman Environment and Design Center, The New School, New York email: mcphearp@newschool.edu twitter: @timonmcphearson

Proposition 1: Social-ecological governance of ecosystems can tip systems toward sustainability Ecosystems provide important benefits to urban residents and can increase adaptive capacity of social-ecological systems at multiple scales. However, because ecosystem services are generated by social-ecological systems, they require social-ecological governance and planning in order to increase adaptive capacity and to tip urban system transitions towards sustainability.

Proposition 2: Ecosystem disservices can lead to social-ecological system traps Ecosystems do not only provide services, they also provide disservices. Ecosystem disservices have been poorly studied and largely overlooked. Policy, planning and management for ecosystem services may inadvertently lock in the accumulation of disservices, leading to social-ecological traps that decrease the adaptive capacity of the system.

State X State Y State X State Y

Ecosystem disservices reinforce traps

Time tz Time tz+1

Ecosystems provide critical services that can tip social-ecological systems towards sustainability, but may also generate disservices that create system lock-in and trap the system in an undesirable state

From poverty trap to ecosystem service curse: A review of the payments for ecosystem services literature Jakub Kronenberg University of Lodz, Poland kronenbe@uni.lodz.pl Klaus Hubacek University of Maryland, USA hubacek@umd.edu

• Proposition 1: When institutions are not able to prevent rent seeking, the exploitation of unequal bargaining power and payment volatility, traps translate into a regime shift.

• Proposition 2: Socio-economic conditions change once payment for ecosystem services is introduced. In some circumstances, they damage strangely enough to create a new socio-economic setting within which the poor get even poorer (this is in contrast with the frequently assumed side objective of payment for ES: poverty alleviation)

ES buyers ES providers

ecosystem service

payment

Powerful stakeholders rent

seeking

VOLATILITY

Unequal bargaining power

State X State Y State X State Y

Payment of ecosystem services creates

unintended side effects and reinforces traps

Time tz Time tz+1

Keith G. Tidball Cornell University KGTidball@Cornell.edu A gilded trap of our own making: anthropocentric discursive traps as barriers to transformation

• Proposition 1: Discursive traps exist, and they are a unique type of either rigidity or poverty traps

• Proposition 2: Anthropocentric discursive traps act as barriers to transformation and must therefore be understood in order to be able to mitigate, dismantle, adapt to or ameliorate.

What we say and think about our selves within Social-Ecological Systems matters …

Discourse Reflects Ecological Identity

Anthropocentric discursive traps

Humans are exempt from the “laws of nature”

Humans are exceptional, not like any other creature on Earth

Humans should “Save” nature

Humans are a blight upon nature

Intervention that temporarily alters the landscape allows for slower variables to take action e.g. altering ecological identity

State X

Time tz+2

Time tz+1

Temporary system state

Time tz

How does discourse contribute?

How does discourse contribute?

Niki Frantzeskaki Dutch Research Institute For Transitions Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands Wil Thissen Policy Analysis Section Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands The transitions perspective on the institutional mechanisms behind traps in social-ecological systems

• Proposition 1: Transformative innovations are neglected from institutions due to mismatch between scale of problem and scale of solution.

• Proposition 2: Transformations of the landscape and of the basins of attraction can alleviate some traps and at the same time create new ones.

Mham & Frantzeskaki – In Review Tamala’s Urban Water Transition (Ghana)

WASH sector network

State Y

State X State Y

Innovations transform the landscape and have the potential to steer away from traps

Time tz

Time tz+1

State X

State X State Y

So what?