Björn Nykvist

A safe operating space for humanity

Identifying and quantifying planetary boundaries that must not be transgressed could help prevent human activities from causing unacceptable environmental change, argue Johan Rockstrom and colleagues.

Why is integrating policy assessment so hard? A comparative analysis of the institutional capacities and constraints

Widely advocated as a means to make policy making more integrated, policy assessment remains weakly integrated in practice. But explanations for this shortfall, such as lack of staff training and resources, ignore more fundamental institutional factors. This paper identifies institutional capacities supporting and constraining attempts to make policy assessment more integrated. A comparative empirical analysis of functionally equivalent assessment systems in four European jurisdictions finds that there are wide-ranging institutional constraints upon integration. These include international policy commitments, the perception that assessment should support rather than determine policy, organisational traditions, and the sectorisation of policy making. This paper concludes by exploring the potential for altering these institutions to make policy assessment more integrated.

Anticipatory governance for social-ecological resilience.

AbstractAnticipation is increasingly central to urgent contemporary debates, from climate change to the global economic crisis. Anticipatory practices are coming to the forefront of political, organizational, and citizens’ society. Research into anticipation, however, has not kept pace with public demand for insights into anticipatory practices, their risks and uses. Where research exists, it is deeply fragmented. This paper seeks to identify how anticipation is defined and understood in the literature and to explore the role of anticipatory practice to address individual, social, and global challenges. We use a resilience lens to examine these questions. We illustrate how varying forms of anticipatory governance are enhanced by multi-scale regional networks and technologies and by the agency of individuals, drawing from an empirical case study on regional water governance of Mälaren, Sweden. Finally, we discuss how an anticipatory approach can inform adaptive institutions, decision making, strategy formation, and societal resilience.

A social–ecological analysis of ecosystem services in two different farming systems

In this exploratory study we use existing in situ qualitative and quantitative data on biophysical and social indicators to compare two contrasting Swedish farming systems (low intensity and high intensity) with regard to ecosystem service supply and demand of a broad suite of services. We show that the value (demand) placed on a service is not necessarily connected to the quantity (supply) of the service, most clearly shown for the services recreation, biodiversity, esthetic experience, identity, and cultural heritage. To better capture this complexity we argue for the need to develop portfolios of indicators for different ecosystem services and to further investigate the different aspects of supply and demand. The study indicates that available data are often ill-suited to answer questions about local delivery of services. If ecosystem services are to be included in policy, planning, and management, census data need to be formatted and scaled appropriately.

Does Social Learning Lead to Better Natural Resource Management? A Case Study of the Modern Farming Community of Practice in Sweden

This study investigates whether social learning among large-scale farmers in central Sweden leads to better natural resource management in the agricultural landscape. Three different frames of social learning are first identified: social learning as a fundamental social phenomenon, social learning as collaborative learning, and social learning as deeper learning. This article investigates the role of social learning and other factors through semistructured in-depth interviews. Results show that learning among farmers is inherently social, but that this learning does not necessarily improve natural resource management or lead to better environmental governance. The article discusses when social learning can be expected to influence natural resources management, and finds that without the presence of policy, individual leadership, or facilitation, it is not an important factor. Furthermore, the call for social learning based on results from successful instrumental application risks obscuring findings indicating that both social learning and better natural resource management are conditioned on the same external factors.

Why Ecologists Should Care about Financial Markets

Financial actors such as international banks and investors play an important role in the global economy. This role is shifting due to financial innovations, increased sustainability ambitions from large financial actors, and changes in international commodity markets. These changes are creating new global connections that potentially make financial markets, actors, and instruments important aspects of global environmental change. Despite this, the way financial markets and actors affect ecosystem change in different parts of the world has seldom been elaborated in the literature. We summarize these financial trends, explore how they connect to ecosystems and ecological change in both direct and indirect ways, and elaborate on crucial research gaps.

Social-ecological memory as a source of general and specified resilience

We explored why social-ecological memory (SEM) is a source of inertia and path dependence, as well as a source of renewal and reorganization in social-ecological systems (SESs). We have presented two case studies: the historical case of the Norse settlement on Greenland and an empirical case from contemporary southern Madagascar. The cases illustrate how SEM is linked to specific pathways of development and a particular set of natural resource management practices. We have shown that in each case, a broader diversity of SEM is present in the SESs, but not drawn upon. Instead, SEMs are part of what explains community coherence and the barriers to adoption of more diverse practices. We have elaborated on how specific SEMs are linked to specified resilience, and we have shown that this fits existing notions of resilience, robustness, inertia, and path dependence. We have proposed that to change the dynamics of development pathways that do not produce desired results, it is necessary for managers to shift from specific to general SEM, which would also mirror the shift from specified to general resilience. The challenge lies in the interplay between the specified and the general. In this critical work, it is important to recognize that the valued diversity of SEM necessary for general resilience might actually reside in a different community.

Interacting effects of change in climate, human population, land use, and water use on biodiversity and ecosystem services

Human population growth and resource use, mediated by changes in climate, land use, and water use, increasingly impact biodiversity and ecosystem services provision. However, impacts of these drivers on biodiversity and ecosystem services are rarely analyzed simultaneously and remain largely unknown. An emerging question is how science can improve the understanding of change in biodiversity and ecosystem service delivery and of potential feedback mechanisms of adaptive governance. We analyzed past and future change in drivers in south-central Sweden. We used the analysis to identify main research challenges and outline important research tasks. Since the 19th century, our study area has experienced substantial and interlinked changes; a 1.6°C temperature increase, rapid population growth, urbanization, and massive changes in land use and water use. Considerable future changes are also projected until the mid-21st century. However, little is known about the impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services so far, and this in turn hampers future projections of such effects. Therefore, we urge scientists to explore interdisciplinary approaches designed to investigate change in multiple drivers, underlying mechanisms, and interactions over time, including assessment and analysis of matching-scale data from several disciplines. Such a perspective is needed for science to contribute to adaptive governance by constantly improving the understanding of linked change complexities and their impacts.

Assessing the adaptive capacity of multi-level water governance: ecosystem services under climate change in Mälardalen region, Sweden

Adaptive and multi-level governance is often called for in order to improve the management of complex issues such as the provision of natural resources and ecosystem services. In this case study, we analyse the contemporary multi-level governance system that manages water resources and its ecosystem services in a fresh water lake in Sweden. We assess the relative importance and barriers of three commonly highlighted components of adaptive governance: “feeding ecological knowledge into the governance system”, “use of ecological knowledge to continuously adapt the governance system”, and “self-organisation by flexible institutions acting across multiple levels”. Findings reveal that the trickiest aspect of adaptive governance capacity to institutionalise is the iterative nature of feedbacks and learning over time, and that barriers to the spread of knowledge on social-ecological complexity through the governance systems are partly political, partly complexity itself, and partly a more easily resolved lack of coordination. We call for caution in trusting crisis management to build more long-lasting adaptive capacity, and we conclude that a process of institutionalising adaptive capacity is inherently contingent on political process putting issues on the agenda.