Jacopo A. Baggio

Multiplex social ecological network analysis reveals how social changes affect community robustness more than resource depletion

Significance Social capital ties are ubiquitous in modern life. For societies with people and landscapes tightly connected, in variable or marginal ecosystems, and with unreliable market sectors, social relations are critical. Each relation is a potential source of food, information, cash, labor, or expertise. Here, we present an analysis of multiplex, directed, and weighted networks representing actual flows of subsistence-related goods and services among households in three remote indigenous Alaska communities exposed to both extreme climate change and industrial development. We find that the principal challenge to the robustness of such communities is the loss of key households and the erosion of cultural ties linked to sharing and cooperative social relations rather than resource depletion. Network analysis provides a powerful tool to analyze complex influences of social and ecological structures on community and household dynamics. Most network studies of social–ecological systems use simple, undirected, unweighted networks. We analyze multiplex, directed, and weighted networks of subsistence food flows collected in three small indigenous communities in Arctic Alaska potentially facing substantial economic and ecological changes. Our analysis of plausible future scenarios suggests that changes to social relations and key households have greater effects on community robustness than changes to specific wild food resources.

The emergence of an environmental governance network: the case of the Arizona borderlands

Across the country, government agencies increasingly collaborate with non-governmental actors on environmental dilemmas to gain access to resources, expertise, and local knowledge; to mitigate conflict; and to share risks in a changing environmental context. Collectively, these often overlapping collaborations form a complex and dynamic governance network (GNet). This paper examines the establishment and growth of an environmental GNet over a period of 15xa0years in conflict-ridden southeastern Arizona, USA. Using social network analysis, we detect the emergence of several influential organizations acting as political entrepreneurs and observe an overall change in network composition. We describe three phases: (1) a newly emerged network, (2) a network dominated by national non-governmental organizations, and finally (3) a shift toward local non-governmental organization involvement. Using institutional analysis, we explore how conflict over natural resource use, decreasing public and private monies for management, and increasing tensions over border security, leads to the establishment of new collaborations and new network participants. While this research focuses on environmental governance in southeastern Arizona, this methodological approach—and insights into the key role of organizations acting as political entrepreneurs—provides a useful starting place for analyzing networks of collaborative governance in other geographic and political contexts. Organizations’ perceptions of risk and trust are keys to understanding the dynamics of collaboration within a GNet.

Success biased imitation increases the probability of effectively dealing with ecological disturbances

Ecological disturbances (i.e. pests, invasive species, floods, fires etc.) are a fundamental challenge in managing connected social-ecological systems. Even if treatment for such disturbances is available, often managers do not act quickly enough or not at all. In this paper we build an agent based model that examines: a) under what circumstances are managers locked into non-action that favors ecological disturbances? b) what learning strategies are most effective in avoiding management lock-in? The model we develop relates adoption of treatment strategies to eradicate ecological disturbances with the type of learning preferred by individuals (success bias, conformist and individual). We further model treatment strategy adoption as a function of treatment cost, ability of the ecological system to recover once treated and the disturbance effect on the social system. Our model shows the importance of success-bias imitation and system size in affecting the odds of eradicating ecological disturbances on connected landscapes.

Investigating environmental migration and other rural drought adaptation strategies in Baja California Sur, Mexico

This paper explores the relationship between specific household traits (region of residence, head of household occupation, financial diversity, female level of education, land and animal ownership, social capital, and climate perception) and choice of specific adaptation strategies used by households in two sites in Baja California Sur, Mexico, during a severe drought from 2006 to 2012 using survey data and key informant interviews. We analyzed the co-occurrence of household traits adopting different drought adaptation strategies, then applied Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to examine the relationship between traits and strategies and integrated interview data to understand how rancheros perceive associations. We found evidence of diversity among households within the larger cultural group, both in the types of resources they have available and in the adaptation strategies they select. However, the most robust finding across the analyses appeared to be urban access; that is, the more a household was able to access urban services including piped water, the less likely they were to have used one of the drought adaptation strategies under study. These findings suggest that social structure and public investments are stronger predictors of smallholder adaptation rather than individual household traits. We also found that rancheros seem to rely less on traditional environmental migration to adapt to drought and rather settle in key watershed zones. We call for targeted policies to address inequities to access fresh water, including urban water, during drought times for the benefit of overall watershed health and the sustainability of rural ranchero livelihoods as they evolve to respond to climatological and economic change.

The U.S. food–energy–water system: A blueprint to fill the mesoscale gap for science and decision-making

Food, energy, and water (FEW) are interdependent and must be examined as a coupled natural–human system. This perspective essay defines FEW systems and outlines key findings about them as a blueprint for future models to satisfy six key objectives. The first three focus on linking the FEW production and consumption to impacts on Earth cycles in a spatially specific manner in order to diagnose problems and identify potential solutions. The second three focus on describing the evolution of FEW systems to identify risks, thus empowering the FEW actors to better achieve the goals of resilience and sustainability. Four key findings about the FEW systems that guide future model development are (1) that they engage ecological, carbon, water, and nutrient cycles most powerfully among all human systems; (2) that they operate primarily at a mesoscale best captured by counties, districts, and cities; (3) that cities are hubs within the FEW system; and (4) that the FEW system forms a complex network.

Supplementary Material for Challenges and opportunities in coding the Commons: problems procedures, and potential solutions in large-N comparative case studies

On-going efforts to understand the dynamics of coupled socialecological systems and common pool resources have led to the generation of numerous datasets based on a large number of case studies. This data has facilitated the identification of important factors and fundamental principles thereby increasing our understanding of such complex systems. However, the data at our disposal are often not easily comparable, have limited scope and scale, and are based on disparate underlying frameworks which inhibit synthesis, metaanalysis, and the validation of findings. Research efforts are further hampered when case inclusion criteria, variable definitions, coding schema, and intercoder reliability testing are not made explicit in the presentation of research and shared among the research community. This paper first outlines challenges experienced by researchers engaged in a large-scale coding project; highlights valuable lessons learned; and finally discusses opportunities for future comparative case study analyses of social-ecological systems and common pool resources.