The sustainability transition - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 87

One element of an effective programme to address these issues will cen-
tre on the roles that institutions play in guiding human/nature interactions
(Young et al . 1999). Treated as clusters of rights, rules and decision-making
procedures that govern human actions in various issue areas, institutions often
loom large as causes of problems in human/nature interactions (e.g. situations
that lead to what is known as the tragedy of the commons) as well as responses
to such problems (e.g. the creation of the ozone regime as a means of address-
ing the seasonal depletion of stratospheric ozone). In a sense, institutions are
transmitters that channel the impacts of human actions towards ecosystems
and provide opportunities for human actors to respond to relevant changes
(or predicted changes) in major biophysical systems (Berkes and Folke 1998).
This linking role of institutions coupled with the perception that institutions
are social artefacts subject to purposive adjustment or restructuring has given
rise to a surge of interest in improving our understanding of environmental
institutions (Ostrom et al . 2002).
Three challenges for science
Rethinking our analytical tools is easier said than done. Although acknowl-
edgement of the logic underlying the argument sketched in the preceding
section is spreading rapidly, old ways die hard. The potential contributions
of reductionist procedures have not been exhausted; mature scientists social-
ized into familiar modes of analysis typically find it hard to shift to new and
unfamiliar research agendas, and finding tractable approaches to analysing the
dynamics of coupled systems is genuinely hard. Yet there is no alternative to
tackling this agenda if we want to manage coupled human/natural systems in
order to avoid the onset of massive problems as we move progressively deeper
into the Anthropocene. Three scientific challenges loom especially large in
this context: (i) melding diverse forms of intellectual capital, (ii) exploring
interactive causal clusters and (iii) designing governance systems that are well
matched to the key attributes of the relevant socio-ecological systems.
Melding diverse forms of intellectual capital
The analysis of coupled systems requires a sustained effort to integrate models
and methods derived from both the natural sciences and the social sciences.
This is not simply a matter of constructing good biophysical models (e.g.
MSY models focusing on the population dynamics of fish) together with mod-
els of related social phenomena (e.g. models of markets in fish products) and
joining the two together by introducing simple linking devices (e.g. stimu-
lus/response mechanisms). Not only are such models based on fundamentally
different premises, they also yield results that are difficult to translate into
common metrics of the sort needed to generate meaningful conclusions.
We know, of course, that population dynamics for specific stocks of fish are