Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
development of new (or reconfiguration of) formal and informal rules, organization,
responsibilities, and structures.
Place and community are important in policy development, cooperation, and ob-
servance of formal and informal rules. Regional landscape contexts are shaped by so-
cial-ecological interactions and interdependencies from which emerge identity with a
place and respect that subsequently produce meaningful civic participation. This cre-
ates the backdrop and stage for the adaptive dance between actors from different sets
of jurisdictions of property and policy on which ride many elements required for suc-
cessful ecological restoration and resource governance. There are ecological and
socioeconomic advantages in using landscape ecology in designing “landscapes of
property” applications for the design and practice of ecological management that are
effective at multiple scales. Applying systems theory in practice is assisted by using
landscape ecology principles that contribute practical design elements for overcom-
ing the erosion of resilience produced by narrow, linear applications of property
tenures and policies. More interdisciplinary research is needed to guide cross-scale in-
tegration of landscapes of people, place, policy, and property into practice—trials of
new dance steps that can adapt to a changing beat. Innovative, creative minds can
connect across tenures and jurisdictions toward specific environmental and social out-
comes beneficial to all actors. As experiences from case studies in this topic testify, this
might best be achieved by forging a greater number of deliberative, on-ground trials
and learning-by-doing experiments within
and
across landscapes of politics, policy,
and property—novel dance steps adapting to the tune of changing landscapes.
Notes
1. Complex systems theory provides valuable insights on social-ecological systems interac-
tions, nonlinear interdependencies, fast and slow variables, emergent properties, and resil-
ience. See Pattee (1973), Costanza (1996), Folke, Holling, and Perrings (1996), Carpenter and
Turner (2001), Walker and Salt (2006).
2. Institutions are sets of formal and informal rules and norms that shape interactions of hu-
mans with others and with natural resources. Property is an institution that is the concept of
“owning something,” inferring exclusivity, in that nonowners do not have a right of access or
use of that thing, and common property is a thing or right of use that is collectively owned by a
defined group. Open access is a situation of nonproperty where property or resource rights
have not been defined and inevitably leads to overuse and degradation of the resource (open
access is Garrett Hardin's (1968) publication “Tragedy of the Commons”). There are a variety
of kinds of property in relation to rights of access and use of natural resources. In this chapter,
for ease of readability, my use of the term “property” refers to a landholding (of some tenure
type), in the colloquial sense that the word “property” tends to be used in general conversation
(see Ostrom 1990; Freyfogle 2003; Brunckhorst and Marshall 2007).
3. There is an increasing dialogue and knowledge building about the importance and spa-
tial representation of the contextual characteristics of social-ecological interactions in terms of
defining “communities of interest,” “place,” and identity influencing local civic interest and
engagement in natural resource management and restoration (see Altman and Low 1992;
McGinnis 1999; Stedman 2003; Cheng, Kruger, and Daniels 2003; Parisi et al. 2004; Brunck-
horst, Coop, and Reeve 2006; Brunckhorst et al. 2008).
