Raul P. Lejano

Enhancing the Resilience of Human–Environment Systems: a Social Ecological Perspective

Resilience studies build on the notion that phenomena in the real world should be understood as dynamic social- ecological systems. However, the scholarly community may not be fully aware that social ecology, as a conceptual framework, has a long intellectual history, nor fully cognizant of its foundational theory. In this article, we trace the intellectual roots and core principles of social ecology and demonstrate how these principles enable a broader conceptualization of resilience than may be found in much of the literature. We then illustrate how the resulting notion of resilience as transactional process and multi-capital formation affords new perspectives on diverse phenomena such as global financial crises and adaptation to environmental stresses to communities and ecosystems. A social-ecological analysis of resilience enables the study of people- environment transactions across varying dimensions, time periods, and scales. Furthermore, in its openness to experiential knowledge and action research, the social ecology framework coheres well with participative-collaborative modes of inquiry, which traverse institutional, epistemological, and scale-related boundaries.

Tales From the Crypt: The Rise and Fall (and Rebirth?) of Policy Design

Policy design is an area of study in the field of public policy with a curious intellectual history. It engendered a large literature in the 1980s and 1990s oriented to understanding design as both a process and an outcome with prominent figures in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia such as Lester Salamon, Patricia Ingraham, Malcolm Goggin, John Dryzek, Hans Bressers, Helen Ingram and Anne Schneider, G. B. Doern, Stephen Linder and B. Guy Peters, Renate Mayntz, Christopher Hood, Eugene Bardach, Evert Vedung, Peter May, Frans van Nispen, and Michael Trebilock writing extensively on policy formulation, policy instrument choice, and the idea of designing policy outcomes. After the early 1990s, however, this literature tailed off, and although some writings on policy design have continued to flourish in specific fields such as economics and environmental studies, in the fields of public administration and public policy, the idea of “design” was largely replaced by the study of institutional forms and decentralized governance arrangements. This article traces this decline to two related hypotheses about the changing nature of society and policy responses—the “government to governance” and “globalization” narratives—which it is argued crowded out more nuanced analyses of state options in the policy-making process in favor of decentralized market and “third” or “fourth” sector collaborative network mechanisms. Importantly, these latter designs are often seen as inevitable and “natural,” obviating the need for reflective studies of design and metadesign processes and outcomes. We argue that the denouement of design research has, in fact, hurt the scholarship on governance and institutions and call for a renewal of the notion of policy design.

Cost Allocation of Multiagency Water Resource Projects: Game Theoretic Approaches and Case Study

Water resource projects are often jointly carried out by a number of communities and agencies. Participation in a joint project depends on how costs are allocated among the participants and how cost shares compare with the cost of independent projects. Cooperative N-person game theory offers approaches which yield cost allocations that satisfy rationality conditions favoring participation. A new solution concept, the normalized nucleolus, is discussed and applied to a water reuse project in southern California. Results obtained with the normalized nucleolus are compared with those derived with more traditional solution concepts, namely, the nucleolus and the Shapley value.

Narrating Resilience: Transforming Urban Systems Through Collaborative Storytelling

How can communities enhance social-ecological resilience within complex urban systems? Drawing on a new urbanist proposal in Orange County, California, it is suggested that planning that ignores diverse ways of knowing undermines the experience and shared meaning of those living in a city. The paper then describes how narratives lay at the core of efforts to reintegrate the Los Angeles River into the life of the city and the US Fire Learning Network’s efforts to address the nation’s wildfire crisis. In both cases, participants develop partially shared stories about alternative futures that foster critical learning and facilitate co-ordination without imposing one set of interests on everyone. It is suggested that narratives are a way to express the subjective and symbolic meaning of resilience, enhancing our ability to engage multiple voices and enable self-organising processes to decide what should be made resilient and for whose benefit.

Community and Economic Development: Seeking Common Ground in Discourse and in Practice

As communities evolve greater capacities for mobilisation and political action, local issues are finding new entry-points into development and land use planning. In this regard, two strong discourses emerge: that of economic development and community. What are the synergies, antagonisms, or other relationships between these two frameworks? Do policy actors reconcile the differing discourses by appealing to a metanarrative, engaging in a pluralistic or agonistic process, or finding compromise solutions? Are there differing narratives within each of these broad frameworks? This article examines the divergences and convergences of these two discourses. It then focuses on Taylor Yard, a vacant brownfield in downtown Los Angeles, California, to study how policy actors reconciled differing visions for the use of the land. It can be seen that attempts to construct a metanarrative, that of a park, served to create a coalition of policy actors that was powerful enough to overturn a strong pro-industrial narrative. However, the weakness of the metanarrative became evident when tested by the need for explicit action, pointing to the need to fashion movements out of real relationships and grounded action. If discourse is conceived as text, then action requires that text encounter and be shaped by context.

PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH FOR ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH: ENCOUNTERING FREIRE IN THE URBAN BARRIO

ABSTRACT: The community-based approach to health research and intervention is a model of inquiry rooted in Freire’s participatory action research (PAR). We need to show, in concept and practice, what it is about PAR that may be well suited for the types of health issues we encounter in inner-city environments. What type of learning results, how does this respond to particular health issues in the urban context, and what are the particular challenges faced in translating Freire’s model into today’s urban setting? To investigate these questions, we describe a recent PAR project in Southeast Los Angeles, California—an area known to some as “Asthmatown.” One salient finding of the research is that PAR allows the integration of complex and multiple forms of knowledge, and this is a necessary response to the complex and multiplex nature of cumulative impacts. There are challenges to translating the model to the urban setting, however, such as the difficulties of participation in today’s urban milieu. The research leads to some lessons for practitioners, such as the need to build “constant” elements into PAR projects. Lastly, we reflect on implications of this model for institutional reform.

The Importance of Context: Integrating Resource Conservation with Local Institutions

This article focuses on the manner by which resource management regimes, often conceived far away from their areas of application, are integrated into the local institutions, practices, and social structures of a place. This process of contextualization may be especially critical where, for reasons of resource scarcity, remoteness, or system complexity, the state cannot engage in effective program management. The thesis of the article is that if the program is to be sustainable, contextualization may be necessary and, moreover, can induce profound changes in the form and function of the original program. This process can lead to a type of governance that operates through webs of social relationships rather than hierarchical and bureaucratic lines of authority. We use this mode of analysis to show how a unique and viable species conservation program evolved on the Turtle Islands, Philippines, how the process of contextualization transformed it, and why it all unraveled.

Theorizing Peace Parks: Two Models of Collective Action:

In a reversal of the historical role of territory in intergroup conflict, the article focuses on an emergent notion of territory as an instrument for peace. In this article, the author begins to theorize about the mechanisms by which so-called peace parks might act in resolving conflict and ushering in regional stability. Two models are utilized that differ in their portrayal of how these parks might work. The first model, built on a game-theoretic foundation, provides insight into incentive mechanisms by which parties might agree to a border park. Furthermore, the model sheds light on whether these parks might serve as vacant buffer zones or, alternatively, active zones of cooperation. However, the game-theoretic model should be complemented by another, qualitative model that focuses primarily on how these interactions are embedded in history, culture, tradition, and group identity. To this end, the author develops a second model, which portrays institutions as structures of care. In the model of care, relationships are constitutive of identity, and institutions and practices (including war and peace) evolve in coherence with the web of relationships. It is the employment of mutually complementing analytics that might afford a deeper understanding of how these peace parks might actually serve as effective bridges for peace.

New Urbanism and the Barrio

The last decade has seen a growing turn toward New Urbanism in the redevelopment of urban neighborhoods. In October 2007 the City of Santa Ana released a draft Renaissance Plan to revitalize a transit-oriented district and government center supported by two neighborhoods. The plan exemplifies New Urbanist design principles which promote mixed income residential neighborhoods and respect local culture. Using a case study in two Mexican and working-class immigrant barrios and the adjacent downtown district, we investigate these principles. We describe different community-wide perspectives concerning ‘redevelopment’ and employ a textual analysis of the Renaissance Plan. One salient finding is that local planning codes reflect and support cultural and class beliefs that alienate Latino barrios. Another finding is that it is in the construction of a new science of form that the disciplinary gaze of New Urbanism reshapes places upon cultural-alien and class-alien norms. We conclude by suggesting research on the tensions between ethno-cultural-dominant city councils and ethno-cultural and economically marginalized neighborhoods while exploring how policy and discourse impact urban place.

Tragedy of the Temporal Commons: Soil-Bound Lead and the Anachronicity of Risk

In 2002, a team of researchers from the University of California, Irvine collaborated with the community of Pacoima, California around a co-ordinated effort to analyze soil around the neighborhood for lead. The team found both total and bioavailable lead to be markedly higher in areas close to major highways, almost 20 years after leaded gasoline had been completely phased out. Multi-regression and cluster analyses reveal the association of elevated levels of total and bioavailable lead with proximity to major highways that cut through Pacoima. Moreover, bioavailability ratios are higher next to highways than elsewhere. What this reveals is an unexpected persistence of lead deposited by vehicular emissions over a long period of time, a potentially intractable policy issue. The long residence time of soil lead represents an enduring public health problem, especially considering the numbers of those potentially exposed over time. It is unclear how expedient or realistic the conversion of land use around major highways might be, or how this new information might be integrated into ongoing movements for change. However, some policy actions can, even now, be considered—e.g. a closer policy focus on the bioavailable, not just total, fraction of soil lead. We also reflect upon how these traces in the soil give us a more profound sense of the cumulative burden that some communities have to bear due to a history of neglect.