Diagram #1 | (Ostrom 2009)
I have spent a lot of time staring at the above diagram finding the connections to this diagram …
Diagram #2 | (McGinnis and Ostrom 2014)
These diagrams represent a framework for understanding people’s relationship with nature. The seed for the discipline that has sprung from these diagrams was planted by the 2009 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Elinor Ostrom. The first diagram proposes that people interact with various units of “resources” constrained by: 1) the larger natural ecosystem (RS) and 2) the way we govern our societies (GS). This framework can be used to examine human-environmental interactions like farmers extracting commodities, hikers in a wilderness, people living in the suburbs, etc…. The second diagram sums up life by saying, that the interactions and outcomes of people are historically linked. The present state of a place and society has been determined by past interactions. The importance of societal memory is not to remember the past, but to teach us how to act appropriately in the future. Well, duh. Ostrom won the Nobel Prize because she was able to present a meaningful framework that is reusable to diagnostically study the state of any place on the globe. She lived her theory by teaching and mentoring a legion of disciples to grow this idea that can be applied to any space and time. Her framework is used to understand collaborations within the food web as well as the World Wide Web. She shared her ideas with others to humbly test her theory, and created a community that studies communities. The economic field of social-ecological system studies examines the tragedies and triumphs of collaboration among users of a common resource. It is the study of remembering the past to teach us how to act appropriately in the future. The solution is dependent on the confluence of the resource (RU), its system (RS), the governance (GS), and the stakeholders (A) (see Diagram #2).
This model for understanding social-ecological systems is not to be confused with Urie Bronfenbrenner’s Social Ecological Model for understanding human development. This field of sociological study is predicated on the idea that individual development is a result of one’s immediate environment and the macrosystems that act upon it. Its development led to important early education programs in the United States, namely Head Start. The below diagram sums up this idea of humans as nested individuals.
Diagram #3 | (Mash 2019)
One macrosystem not represented in the above diagram is the Chronosystem. The Chronosystem is defined by events in a person’s life, similar to the Focal Action Situations outlined in Diagram #2. When we recognize when particular events occurred in our lives, we can control our future development.
As I swim in this alphabet soup of SES, I wonder … when we recognize pivotal events, inflection points, that changed human-environmental relationships, can we control our future development? When we understand the historical forces that caused environmental regime shifts, can we reverse trends that are degrading our shared ecosystem? We haven’t even added ESG to the mix …
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