Robustness of social-ecological system under global change: insights from community irrigation and forestry systems

Social-ecological systems (SES) are replete with hard and soft human-made components (or infrastructures) that are consciously-designed to perform specific functions valued by humans. How these infrastructures mediate human-environment interactions is thus a key determinant of many sustainability problems in present-day SES. This dissertation examines the question of how some of the designed aspects of physical and social infrastructures influence the robustness of SES under global change. Due to the fragility of rural livelihood systems, locally-managed common-pool resource systems that depend on infrastructure, such as irrigated agriculture and community forestry, are of particular importance to address this sustainability question. This dissertation presents three studies that explored the robustness of communal irrigation and forestry systems to economic or environmental shocks. The first study examined how the design of irrigation infrastructure affects the robustness of system performance to an economic shock. Using a stylized dynamic model of an irrigation system as a testing ground, this study shows that changes in infrastructure design can induce fundamental changes in qualitative system behavior (i.e., regime shifts) as well as altered robustness characteristics. The second study explored how connectedness among social units (a kind of social infrastructure) influenced the post-failure transformations of large-N forest commons under economic globalization. Using inferential statistics, the second study argues that some attributes of the social connectedness that helped system robustness in the past made the system more vulnerable to undesirable transformations in the current era. The third study explored the question of how to guide adaptive management of SES for more robustness under uncertainty. This study used an existing laboratory behavioral experiment in which human-subjects tackle a decision problem on collective management of an irrigation system under environmental uncertainty. The contents of group communication and the decisions of individuals were analyzed to understand how configurations of learning-by-doing and other adaptability-related conditions may be causally linked to robustness under environmental uncertainty. The results show that robust systems are characterized by two conditions: active learning-by-doing through outer-loop processes, i.e., frequent updating of shared assumptions or goals that underlie specific group strategies, and frequent monitoring and reflection of past outcomes.