Dynamics of Resilience and Equity in Social-Ecological Systems with Power Asymmetries
Abstract
Equity is widely recognized as an important objective of resource management, yet there remains a need for generalizable models of system dynamics that allow for understanding how equity interacts with well-studied system characteristics like sustainability and resilience. The consideration of equity, and its potential tradeoffs with other desirable system characteristics, is particularly crucial in systems with a fundamentally unequal balance of power among resource users. Here we introduce a stylized dynamical systems model of the social and natural dynamics of such a system that links industrial resource degradation, community wellbeing, and migration in response to economic and resource conditions to understand the mechanisms determining when the natural and social systems will be sustainable, and the extent to which standard policy instruments can increase resilience by expanding the basin of attraction for sustainable equilibria, and perturb equilibrium outcomes. We find a complex set of tradeoffs within these sustainable equilibria between industrial profits and community wellbeing, as well as between resilience and equity in designing policy. The re sults reveal the mechanisms that drive the system to different outcomes and the potential and limitations of policies aiming to balance multiple objectives within these dynamics , highlighting the governance challenges and the conflict of values that necessarily arise in socially complex social-ecological systems.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMGC11A..05M
- Keywords:
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- 1622 Earth system modeling;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 4327 Resilience;
- NATURAL HAZARDS;
- 4353 Sociology of disasters;
- NATURAL HAZARDS