The key strategies that helped to save the Great Barrier Reefs involved internal reorganization and management innovations within a federal authority. This led to an ability to coordinate the scientific community, to increase public awareness of environmental issues and problems, to involve a broader set of stakeholders, and to maneuver the political system for support at critical times.
Many ocean environments around the world are in deep crisis. Marine species are depleted and ecosystems collapse because of overfishing and eutrophication, the discharge of environmental toxins and climate changes which have caused large losses of social and economic assets.
The crisis is really a crisis of governance. The organizational and institutional arrangements for governing marine resources are often characterized by compartmentalized decision-making process and tend to focus on one species and one population or one resource in isolation, without seeing the whole picture. Existing forms of governance and management are therefore poorly suited for coping with the complexity of ecosystems or for building capacity that can deal with uncertainty and change. They are often challenged by global economic drivers. The global ocean crisis cannot be solved in the traditional way but requires new and more flexible forms of governance and management.
How to change the management of ecosystems?
There is extensive research on the principles of ecosystem management of marine resources. This research emphasizes the importance of spatial planning, zoning and marine reserves. Focus is often placed on ecosystem management as a desirable state, but not on the strategies and mechanisms for actually shifting to such management. In contrast, studies in political science and sociology focus on the actual change in society, but generally ignore ecosystem aspects. In addition, our understanding is limited since each research discipline has its own theories and explanatory models. There is thus an urgent need for transdisciplinary research that can contribute to a broader understanding of transformations in interconnected social-ecological systems.
Our research focuses on understanding which factors obstruct or enable the emergence of new forms of governance and management for linked social-ecological systems. We are looking for social strategies and mechanisms for incorporating knowledge of the dynamics of ecosystems into flexible forms of governance and management that can secure the capacity of ecosystems to generate ecosystem services. Such flexibility is essential for dealing with both slow and incremental change and rapid and sometimes large scale change, such as surprises and crises.
The Great Barrier Reef
In one of our case studies we focused on changes in the management of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Our aim was to investigate and understand which factors have enabled a dramatic and comprehensive change in the attitude to the reef and the shift to a new form of ecosystem management which includes the entire coastal zone where the reef is situated. One authority, The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, GBRMPA, played a key role in this transition that occurred between 1998 and 2004.
We used a toolbox of various qualitative methods to collect and analyse data, in order to understand the strategies which were used to steer away from a large-scale ecological collapse.
The increasing threats to the Great Barrier Reef, including changes in land use in the drainage basin, overexploitation of the marine resources and global warming, triggered the transition. Together with unique political timing, this constituted the basis for reviewing the management of the area. GBRMPA, which realised the seriousness of the situation, used a window of opportunity to initiate the large-scale change.
The shift required leadership and a skillful navigation at various levels of society to overcome barrier to change along the way. We have identified five general strategies that GBRMPA used:
- Internal reorganisation and new innovative working methods within the authority which, in turn, made it possible to
- coordinate the science community and link it to the planning processes,
- increase awareness of the public regarding the environmental problems of the reef,
- involve a number of stakeholder groups, and
- navigate the political system to gain political support for the process at critical times.
The entire coastal zone in focus
Our study shows how an understanding of the dynamics of ecosystems and their ability to generate ecosystem services can be incorporated into more holistic approaches for governing and managing marine resources. Research on marine connectivity and spatial resilience has shown that individual coral reefs are dependent on surrounding areas for the recovery of important ecosystem functions after a perturbation, like coral bleaching caused by a rise in water temperatures. This was used to change the people’s attitudes toward the reef and, in turn, contributed to the change in focus from management of individual reefs to a large scale ecosystem approach that included the entire coastal zone.
Research and new insights concerning the dynamics of ecosystems, political support, economic control instruments, and the linking of research and policy, are all important components, but strategies and leadership that can link these processes in time and space seems to be equally critical for success.
Fig. 1. Three phases identified in social-ecological transformations - the preparation, navigation and stabilisation phases. Phases 1 and 2 are linked through a "window of opportunity". The transformation can be illustrated in two ways: a) a regime change between several stable states, by passing though a threshold, or b) as a tipping point.
Model for linked social-ecological systems
The study is instrumental in the further development of a model for what we call transformations in social-ecological systems (see Fig. 1).
The barrier reef study helps us understand the strategies and leadership to seize windows of opportunity to make large scale changes and to navigate the transition to new forms of governance and management. The study confirms that such shifts generally consist of slow, gradual processes and critical points when large-scale change can occur in a relatively short time. The study also demonstrates the importance of studying the interaction among various components such as leadership, mental models, networks, regulatory systems and ecosystems, in order to understand such transformations to ecosystem-based management.
Author
:
Per Olsson
Leader of the research theme Adaptive Governance at Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University
E-mail:
per.olsson@beijer.kva.se
Carl Folke
Director of research at Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University and director of Beijer Institute for Ecological Economics, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
E-mail:
carl.folke@beijer.kva.se
Literature:
P Olsson, C Folke, TP Hughes (2008). "Navigating the transition to ecosystem-based management of the Great Barrier Reef". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 105:9489-9494.
The study of the Great Barrier Reef is partly financed by Formas support for a Centre of Excellence.