Multidimensionality of Social Ecological Systems

 

At the advent of the Anthropocene or the geologic epoch in which humanity has become the prevailing geophysical force driving the overall dynamics of the Earth, we are experiencing a reconfiguration between the human and natural spheres. How may policy practitioners best approach adaptive management of ecosystem services within this changing context? The work of Elinor Ostrom will help us navigate this new framing by way of her approach to Social Ecological Systems (SES) which overcomes this duality between humanity and nature. Social Ecological Systems are adaptively managed by what Ostrom refers to as the commons, which not only conceptualizes sustainable relationship between humanity and nature but also transcends the political left-right binary anchored in the constructs of the state and the market respectively. 

A Nobel laureate in economics, Ostrom challenged the myth of the “tragedy of the commons” introduced in the 1968 paper by Garrett Hardin who argued that resources available to all – in the commons – are doomed to be overused by everyone. In his essay, Hardin explained that there was no way to manage communal property sustainably. The only solution was to obliterate the communal aspect. Either the commons could be managed by the state in the form of top-down regulation or the commons could be ordered by the market in the form of privatization dividing up property to individuals, who would then look after their own land responsibly. 

How could this tragedy be reoriented into a narrative of successful adaptive management? Ostrom instead studied real world empirical examples of commons and argued that people cooperate and agree among themselves about resource management, without enforced rules of law, as long as certain criteria are met - known as a set of “design principles.” According to Ostrom, when a common-pool resource is closely connected to a larger Social Ecological System, gov­ernance activities are organized in multiple nested layers or a polycentricity. This paper will examine how Social Ecological Systems or the commons, offers an alternative paradigm to the nature versus humanity and state versus market dichotomies by looking to the Balinese subak as an example of a Social Ecological System or commons. 

 With the dawn of the geological epoch of the Anthropocene, we live in a time in which humanity has become the predominant influence on climate at least since industrialism.  At the convergence of geologic history and human history, we must now understand humanity as a climatological force, driving planetary dynamics alongside nonhuman influences. Yet global climate change is only one example among many of the monumental environmental degradation. The Anthropocene coalesces a multitude of examples of environmental degradation including but not limited to global climate change; mass extinction and biodiversity loss; deforestation; pollution of the land, water and skies; as well as bioengineering and geoengineering. This unprecedented human impact on the natural environment marks a measurable quantitative shift in the relationship between humanity and nature. Humans have evolved as the adaptive managers of ecosystem services. Human society plays a fundamental role in designing ecosystems around the planet.  We have essentially replaced many natural regulatory processes with those that we have engineered. Altering hydrological cycles through irrigation, nitrogen cycles through agricultural, carbon cycles through combustion, or just the sheer movement of biomass, humans engineer almost all Earth’s systems on all scales.  

Within this new context of the Anthropocene, Social Ecological Systems offer a new paradigm in which to conceive of humanity and nature not as fragmented and in conflict but rather as an integrative and interdisciplinary framework that considers interactions between coupled social and ecological systems. This model acknowledges how the natural environment is deeply embedded in the socio-cultural fabric of societies around the world as well as how human societies thoroughly rely on ecosystem services for the maintenance of their wellbeing. This approach has systems theory as its intellectual underpinning. A social ecological system is a type of complex adaptive system, consisting of two subsystems: human society and economy on one hand and a biological ecology on the other. They are systems in that they are entities composed of a set of interconnected parts that are interdependent in effecting some shared result that serves in the maintenance of the system or may lead to system failure. They are complex in that they typically consist of many parts interacting in a nonlinear networked pattern.  They are adaptive in that the components in the system change their state in response to that of others. In this capacity particularly, Social Ecological Systems exhibit strong coevolution as they develop over time. 

Like all complex adaptive systems, Social Ecological Systems are multidimensional, meaning they exist on many qualitatively different levels. Within the ecological domain we have basic geological process taking place as well as hydrological, atmospheric, and biological processes.  Within the social domain we have technology, industry, economics as well as social and cultural institutions. All of these levels are interacting and coevolving. Social Ecological Systems exist at all scales from the individual, agricultural farm, metropolitan area, nation-state, to the global economy. Like all complex systems both ecologies and economies are regulated on the macro and micro scales by a set of feedback loops. Governed by the laws of thermodynamics, the input of energy from the the sun and earth’s core drives the ecological systems and its energy is processed through networks of connections within biotic and abiotic processes. This is a complex system that has evolved through millions of years. Through this evolution negative feedback loops have developed the work to stabilize the system on various levels. Ecosystems will attempt to move away from thermodynamic equilibrium, selecting the components and the organization that yields the maximum flux of useful energy throughout the system. 

The social realm presents a complex interaction of various technological, cultural historical, communal, political and economic dynamics. An economy is an engineered construct produced by human beings for human beings. Such a subsystem is regulated by public policy as well as by market mechanisms. An economy tends to recognize value in terms utility which can be correlated to the desire or want of some economic agent, governed by law of supply and demand. In many ways humans have evolved as regulators of Earth’s systems, however, economies are also heavily interdependent with the ecological subsystem. Economies as dissipative systems take in much natural material, and export large amounts of waste materials. Additionally, ecologies serve human economy by the provisioning of food and water, control of climate and disease, supporting nutrient and crop pollination, as well as cultural forms of spiritual and recreational sustenance. As Garrett Hardin postulates, the solution to the problems that arise from a human economy that depends on flow of natural resources of all kinds is a binary set of choices in the form of the state or the market. Could there be a commons solution for this problem of state and market failure? Ostrom provides a third way to this dilemma by way of her study of functioning commons arrangements which lead to successful adaptive management of Social Ecological Systems.    

When economists show that market arrangements fail, they usually make the simple recommendation that the state should take care of these problems. When bureaucrats determine a failure of state intervention they may recommend privatization.  Elinor Ostrom has demonstrated empirically that the “state” or the “market” may not be “the” solution. Her study of the commons argues for the wisdom of institutional diversity. Instead of relying exclusively on top down, one-size-fits-all solutions she looks to social groups of individuals to solve problems. “Through innovative analysis in the field, in the experimental laboratory, and in theory, Ostrom’s work has shown that creative solutions to problems such as the depletion of common pool resources exist outside of the sphere of national or global governmental institutions as well as age old examples of marketization.”

Ostrom was able to discover an alternative to the dualististic traditions of market or state by way of her analysis of the traditions of political economy embodied in the the work of Adam Smith and Thomas Hobbes. In Ostrom’s view, the theorists in both traditions managed to keep the theories of market and state alienated and completely separated from each other. Smith's concept of market order was considered applicable for all private goods while Hobbes's conception of the single center of power and decision applied for all collective goods. “But what if the domains of modern political-economic life could not be understood or organized by relying only on the concepts of markets or states? Answering that challenge is achieved by Ostrom’s work on governance and common pool resources.” Her work is an empirically based contribution to building an alternative to the basic dichotomy of modern political economy, an effort to find an alternative to the conceptions derived from Smith and Hobbes. 

This dichotomy of political economy can be drawn out even further to the relationship between socialism and capitalism. In an attempt to breakthrough this dichotomy the autonomists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write of this false polarity stating: 

“the seemingly exclusive alternative between the private and the public corresponds to an equally pernicious political alternative between capitalism and socialism. It is often assumed that the only cure for the ills of capitalist society is public regulation and Keynesian and/or socialist economic management; and, conversely, socialist maladies are presumed to be treatable only by private property and capitalist control. Socialism and capitalism, however, even though they have at times been mingled together and at others occasioned bitter conflicts, are both regimes of property that excluded the common. The political project of instituting the common ... cuts diagonally across these false alternatives.”

As such, the falsity of the state-market dilemma is incredibly ingrained within prevailing ideologies of the political spectrum. The paradigm of “the commons” has emerged as a powerful and practical solution to the contemporary crisis and a step beyond the dominant state-market schema. Moreover, “it is an alternative that has been tried and tested in practice by communities, past and present.”

As such, traditional societies through their close interaction with their local ecosystem and strong social cultural integration were sustainable for prolonged periods using traditional sociocultural institutions to manage the commons. With the industrial revolution, many of these traditional socio-cultural institutions were disintegrated and the modern nation state became the new form of social contract providing the social institutions for managing the commons. Likewise with the unleashing of the forces of global capitalism, economies have developed beyond national borders into increasingly integrated global economy with an associated effect on the global biosphere. There are now many questions remaining as to whether the nation state based social contract is still fit for service within this new global context. The tragedy of the commons is a failure of trust, coordination and social institutions.  When everyone can trust everyone to cooperate than often an optimal global outcome can be achieved. But this often requires some form of social contract enabled by strong social institutions.

The philosophy of the commons goes beyond the ontology of the nation-state and the “free” market. In a sense it presupposes that we live in a common world that can be shared by all of society without some bureaucratic or market mechanisms to enclose it. The commons rejects bureaucratization and privatization, though it includes forms of communal self-control and individual self-limitation. As a result it manages to synthesize the social with the individual. 

Ostrom studied examples of the commons all around the world. The Swiss villages are a classic example of sustainable commoning she encountered. In these villages, local farmers tend private plots for crops but share a communal meadow for herd grazing. Ostrom discovered that an eventual tragedy of the commons, that is hypothetical overgrazing, is prevented by villagers reaching a common agreement that one is allowed to graze as much cattle as they can take care for during the winter. 

 Elinor Ostrom visited Nepal as well to research its farmer-governed irrigation systems.The management of these systems was done through annual assemblies between local farmers and informally on a regular basis. Thus, agreements for using the system, its monitoring and sanctions for transgression were all managed from the grassroots. Ostrom observed that farmer-governed irrigation systems were more likely to produce not in favor of markets, but for the needs of local communities. She concluded that although the systems in question vary in performance, few of them perform as poorly as the ones managed by the state. 

One of the most cited contemporary examples for reclaiming the commons is the Zapatista movement in Mexico. The zapatistas revolted in 1994 against the NAFTA agreement that was seeking the complete enclosure of common-pool resources and goods, vital for the livelihood of indigenous communities. Through the Zapatista uprising the locals have reclaimed back their land and resources, and have successfully managed them through a participatory system based on direct democracy. Ostrom also discovered other examples of effective communal management of commons, in the US, Guatemala, Kenya, Turkey, and elsewhere.

The commons provides the third alternative to the state versus market dipole that pervades the political imaginary. Ostrom’s studies reveal that rather than strict top-down regulation enforced by a bureaucratic state or privatization to individuals subject to the vagaries of the market, the commons presents local bottom-up system of individual stewards caring for society at large. The model of the commons is directed towards inclusiveness and collective access to resources which necessarily requires the cultivation of human beings that are socially active and devoted stewards of these commons. This means a radical break with the current dominant imaginary of economism, which views all human beings simply as rational materialists, always striving at maximizing their utilitarian self-interest. Instead it implies the radical self-instituting of society which allows citizens to directly manage their own commons. In this sense, the commons entails a synthesis of the enlightened self interest of the individual with a sustainable ecological society. 

Moreover, a main characteristic shared between the different cases of commons is grassroots interactivity. The broad accessibility of resources and their ownership being held in common by society, presupposes that their management is done by society itself. Thus a state involvement is incompatible with such a broad popular self-management, since statist forms are implying the establishment of bureaucratic managerial layers separated from society. The paradigm of the commons, as part of the wider project of direct democracy, could play the role of the breakthrough that manages to vanish the strict dichotomy between state and market as well as humanity and nature. 

The commons not only parses the paradigmatic political partitions but also heals the nature or culture distinction. Ostrom’s empirical investigations demonstrate that the “tragedy of the commons” offers a falsity. In actuality, the commons brings together nature and culture as two subsystems of a social ecology. When both nature and culture are viewed as mutually reinforcing holons of a greater whole, they enter sustainable relationship. A Social Ecological System is an organization of positive and negative feedback loops which informs the system of its stability and variance leading to adaptation or deficiency. In this way, Ostrom studied how humans and nature cooperate to continue onward in a sustaining dynamic. 

Ostrom’s work on the commons display’s an interwoven complex of overlapping political spheres when it comes to governance. In this way neither state, nor market, nor commons exists as a single monolith but rather co-existentially in a political ecology. But the commons goes beyond the political dimension to also encompass what Ostrom deems polycentricity. Not only are multiple governance models at play simultaneously, but yet polycentricity extends to the multidimensional composition of Social Ecological Systems. The Balinese subak is an illustrative example of such multidimensionality - as it will be analyzed from biological, geological, hydrological, technological, economic and religious perspectives among many others. 

Thus the example of the commons this paper will explore further is that of the Balinese subak, similar to the farmer governed irrigation systems empirically studied by Ostrom herself. The commons is the core dynamic of the adaptive management of a Social Ecological System that is the Balinese subak. The subak is a water management or irrigation system for rice paddy fields on the island of Bali, Indonesia. Its origins date back to the 9th century. However, for the Balinese, irrigation is not simply watering rice fields, but water is used to construct a complex ecosystem of terraced rice paddies and water temples intricately interwoven into religious life of the island. 

Ultimately, the subak is a practice in direct democracy for the management of collective resources. Farmers make decisions through a system of deliberation and egalitarian consensus. The subak is an agglomeration of farmers who own parcels of land tied into the larger irrigation network. Each and every farmer regardless of the amount of land held or social caste are invited to partake in assemblies that govern water usage as well as other agricultural practices. These assemblies come to consensus by way of social, cultural, and religious norms. 

Social Ecological Systems provide an apt description of the subak because the concept itself implies a sustainable relationship between nature and humanity. “[H]uman values are shaped by ecological features in the process of reshaping those features. Human beings are inescapably organisms in an environment, which renders the distinction between environmental and social systems artificial and arbitrary.” Accordingly, the conception of the Social Ecological Systems perspective connotes a need to reconnect to the biosphere, to realize our social interdependence with nature. This connection is visible in the way the subak system operates. Farmers have developed an adaptive management system, embedded in ritual, in which their needs are met in tune with the ecosystems in which they are dynamically interconnected. 

The subaks are a network of water temples, rice paddies, and farmers that coalesce into a “group of actors engaged in a process of coadaptation, in which adaptive moves by individuals have consequences for their neighbors.” This forms a complex adaptive system which is the interaction of a variety of parts by means of spontaneous order. “Among other features, a complex adaptive system is typically characterized by the diversity and connectivity of its components, simple rules of interaction, constant change, self-organization rather than planning, and emergence or system-wide features that result unpredictably from the interaction of individual components” Thus the subak represents the multidimensionality of Social Ecological Systems or what Ostrom refers to as the polycentricity of the commons. 

The Balinese subak system goes hand in hand with Ostrom’s other empirical studies. Ostrom instead argued that people cooperate and agree among themselves about resource management, without enforced rules of law, as long as certain criteria are met and they are able to communicate with each other. In the case of Bali, farmers closer to the main water source, the crater lake, could in theory increase their harvests by increasing their water use, having a negative effect on farmers downstream. However, If the upstream farmers leave enough water for the downstream farmers to flood their fields, that controls pests for all. 

“Yielding system-wide self-organization through simple information sharing. Small adaptations in one subak can have broad effects across a range of subaks.” (Hilde) The interactions of many farmers in cooperation by means of social contract produces the synchronized flooding and fallowing schedules across a wide pattern of various subaks without the necessitating top down planning. It is this schedule of irrigation that demonstrates why upstream farmers are incentivised to share water with downstream farms. “Downstream farmers required a steady flow of water, but upstream farmers required downstream farmers to coordinate cropping patterns in order to control pests. Thus, multi-scale coordination occurs across the landscape.”  

“An understanding of the subaks as a complex adaptive SES allows us to see how sustainability emerges at a systems level rather than through central planning or other programmatic efforts” on behalf of a centralized state as well as without the typical economism of rational self interested individuals of the market. Instead the subaks are populated by enlightened self interested actors. From their individual stewardship emerges systemic sustainable coordination of resources. The state of the entire Social Ecological System remains in stability due to the the feedback loop posed by water sharing by upstream farmers and pest control by downstream farmers. Thus the complex adaptive nature of the Balinese subak. 

Ostrom further frames the commons by a set of design principles observed in long term empirical study of common pool resource systems. Ostrom outlines this set of design principles for robust Social Ecological Systems and the management of common-pool resources in two major works: Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990) as well as Understanding Institutional Diversity (2005). They include the following principles: (1) clearly defined boundaries, (2) proportional equivalence between benefits and costs, (3) collective choice arrangements, (4) monitoring, (5) graduated sanctions and conflict resolution mechanisms, and (6) minimal recognition of rights to organize. This in effect is the glue that holds the social contract of the commons together. 

Socio ecological systems are a type of complex adaptive systems composed of two primary subdomains a human society and economy on the one hand and a biological ecology on the other. Each is driven by different internal feedback loops, those of the political-economy such as the state and the market, or those of thermodynamics of the human-environment for ecology. Creating integrated balancing feedback loops between them involves defining some common value often called ecosystem services.  Adaptive management of ecosystem services involves some form of commons best managed by social institutions that can build trust and enable cooperation towards effective societal outcomes. The Balinese subak provides a clear picture of how Ostrom’s empirical studies have provided a third alternative to both the state/market duality as well as the nature/culture divide. Through polycentricity of the commons’ political ecology, multiple political constructs can interact and co-adapt. Likewise, the multidimensionality of Social Ecological Systems on many qualitative levels provides a multi-scale framework that lessen the nature/culture divide.