Clara Therville

Resilience of Sweet Chestnut and Truffle Holm-Oak Rural Forests in Languedoc-Roussillon, France: Roles of Social-Ecological Legacies, Domestication, and Innovations

The Cevennes sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa Mill.) forest-orchards and the holm-oak (Quercus ilex L.) black truffle (Tuber melanosporum Vittad.) associations of the garrigue in Languedoc-Roussillon have suffered a century of decline because of great reductions of rural populations and lack of understanding of the ecological and social dimensions of these rural forests by sectorial public agencies. Levels of tree and forest domestication alternated during historical periods in parallel with statuses of disorganization and reorganization of local social groups. Social-ecological legacies intrinsically linked to trees, forests, and landscape domestication, as well as knowledge, social, and technical practices have been mobilized and provided a basis for knowledge innovations, new domestications, uses, and new institutional networks related to changes in social set- ups. Collective actions emerging from local needs to revive territories in a modern context, cross-scale and reciprocal exchanges of rural and scientific knowledge, as well as institutional changes are interrelated variables that have enabled innovations and have increased resilience of these rural forests. This paper opens new avenues for future research on the interplay between the effects of social-ecological legacies and innovations on the resilience of social-ecological systems. We explore how knowledge and practices of present day local farmers, relying on rural forests that have survived a long period of crisis verging on collapse, have enabled renewal processes. We aim in particular at understanding the interplay between local social-ecological legacies attached to biocultural elements such as domesticated trees, forests, landscapes, and present empirical practices and exchanges with extra-local and scientific knowledge. We compare renewal processes of two rural forests: the sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa Mill.) forest-orchards of the Cevennes and the black truffle (Tuber melanosporum Vittad.) holm-oak (Quercus ilex L.) association of the scrubland open forest (garrigue) in the region of Languedoc-Roussillon (hereafter LR). We compare ongoing movements to relaunch production of these rural or domestic forests that started in the 1950s in the context of changing economics and policies. Rural or domestic forests (RFs) are managed by farmers and are an element of agroecosystems, as opposed to forests as defined by conventional forestry. They carry patrimonial values, are embedded in local territories, and have specific socio-political histories (Michon et al. 2007, Genin et al. 2010). METHODS Our research methods mainly draw from ethnoecological and ecological studies conducted between 2007 and the present. We collected data on remnants of past knowledge and practices through conducting a series of open interviews with the oldest inhabitants of these communities (70 to 80 years old; hereafter elders). Their knowledge refers to their individual practices and transmissions of the value of these RFs by their parents and grandparents, born in the 1870 to 1880s. The latter had witnessed the virtual collapse of these RFs. The vision and knowledge of these inhabitants have been shaped not only by their individual practices, but also by collective memories and practices linked to shared and transmitted learning processes attached to trees, forests, and landscapes, a process termed as social-ecological memories by Barthel et al. (2010). Because they lived in a period of crisis, their understanding forms the basis upon which the regions current inhabitants, i.e., their

FARmeRS' peRSpeCTIveS ABOUT AgROFOReSTS CONveRSION TO plANTATIONS IN SUmATRA. leSSONS leARNT FROm BUNgO DISTRICT (JAmBI, INDONeSIA)

ABSTRACT Located on the fringe of the last tropical rainforests of Sumatra, rubber agroforests are known to conserve the main ecological functions of the primary forest, including a large part of its biodiversity. Nowadays these smallholder plantations are under threat. The regular rise of natural rubber and crude palm oil prices has been a major incentive for farmers to convert their agroforests into clonal rubber and oil-palm plantations. However, some areas seem to resist conversion. A multidisciplinary approach combining perception surveys and satellite-image analysis was designed to find out the reasons for these differences. In 12 villages grouped in 3 categories according to their agroforest conversion rate between 1993 and 2005, farmers were queried about the pros and the cons of the major cropping systems, their attitude towards conservation, and how they envisaged the future of their landscape. This method enabled us to elaborate the most likely scenarios of landscape evolution for the coming years.

Bringing together social-ecological system and territoire concepts to explore nature-society dynamics

We examine two academic traditions that address the nature-society interface. These traditions are organized around two main concepts: social-ecological system and territoire. These traditions have grown independently and are rooted respectively in ecology and social geography. We show that they have much in common: Both come with a systemic view of the nature-society interface and have the intention of understanding better the relations between nature and society and improving their sustainability. However, they differ in how they deal with space and society. We foresee that the combination of both traditions could improve the understanding of these systems, their definition, and their evolution, and hence, the capacity to assess and manage their resilience.

Navigating protected areas as social-ecological systems: integration pathways of French nature reserves

On a global scale, protected areas (PAs) are one of the main tools used for biodiversity conservation. However, accelerated biodiversity loss and lack of social acceptance of PAs call into question their ability to reach long-term biodiversity conservation objectives. To address this, conservation scientists and practitioners have moved from segregative to integrative models of PAs. When the segregative model sees PAs as human exclusion zones, the integrative model considers conservation and development projects and multiple partnerships with local stakeholders within and outside PAs. Given this paradigmatic evolution, a PA and its surrounding landscape are increasingly regarded as a single social-ecological system (SES). This development brings new challenges for conservationists: How should these complex and dynamic systems be managed, and how can their pathways be described and piloted? Using French nature reserves (NRs) as case studies, we propose a framework for analyzing the integration pathways of PAs within their social-ecological context. We identified the pathways of 10 NRs according to their degree of integration in the surrounding landscape (spatial), their management objectives (sectoral), and their governance systems (institutional). We analyzed these pathways using three metaphors associated with resilience thinking (adaptive cycle, adaptation, and transformation). We discussed how these 10 NRs have changed over time, revealing how practitioners anticipate future pathways and avoid undesirable states. Through an exploration of the totality of an SES’s spatial, sectoral, and institutional pathways, the framework we propose is a potential tool for identifying opportunities and constraints for long-term conservation actions.

Beyond segregative or integrative models for protected areas: a case study of French nature reserves

Initially conceived as human-exclusion zones (the segregative model), protected areas are more and more often established within a management framework that integrates conservation and development projects with multiple partnerships and encourages engagement with local stakeholders (the integrative model). In this study, we investigated the conservation attitudes and practices of management staff in the network of nature reserves (NRs) in France. We found that conservation practices, such as law enforcement, habitat management, environmental education and partnerships, and the socio–cultural and psychological profiles of their managers show a wide distribution along a segregative to integrative gradient. Our results indicate that while the policy of these protected areas is still structured by a segregative cliche, in practice, many managers implement a more integrated approach. This coexistence of the two approaches reflects a general pattern of evolution of nature protection thought and the institutionalization of NRs, as well as demonstrating the adaptation of NRs to their local contexts and how they function, within the surrounding landscape, as a single but complex social–ecological system.

Challenges for local adaptation when governance scales overlap. Evidence from Languedoc, France

In coastal areas around the world, actors are responding to multiple global changes by implementing adaptation plans, often confined within a single-focal perspective with few explanations of targeted changes and cross-scale interactions. To better anticipate the raising coordination issues and the potential feedbacks generated by adaptation in these complex social-ecological systems where governance scales overlap, we used the robustness framework (Anderies et al. 2004; Anderies 2015). We analyzed a case study along the Languedoc coastline in southern France, where governance is organized in multiple jurisdictions which we considered as interlinked adaptation situations. We identified three interacting changes impacting adaptation: demographic growth, climate change, and large-scale political changes, such as decentralization. We used the examples of land-use planning and coastal management to illustrate the major coordination challenges facing the implementation of adaptation plans in coastal areas by various intertwined communities. In the example of land-use planning, adaptation is impacted by miscoordination between multiple sectors that all rely on a shared resource, land, thus putting more pressure on the decision-makers to make explicit trade-offs between multiple issues. Coastal management illustrated how emerging adaptation strategies created new interdependencies in the system and how these were hardly considered due to confusion in the devolution of responsibility between multiple jurisdictions. In both examples, using coupled and evolving robustness diagrams was helpful in revealing renewed fragilities, foreseeing consequences of adaptation in inter-related decisional contexts, and promoting collective action to redefine the boundaries of adaptation situations and their coordination to cope with converging changes along coastlines.