Natural Resource Governance in Asia: From Collective Action to Resilience Thinking

By Inoue Makoto

Natural Resource Governance in Asia: From Collective Action to Resilience Thinking identifies key leverage points where interventions can be made surrounding current and future impacts of ongoing environmental and sociopolitical challenges. The book utilizes case studies from Asia, a key demographic for natural resource management, that can be applied globally in understanding solutions and the current state of knowledge in natural resource dynamics. Users will find valuable sections on community forestry and socioecological systems, community irrigation, competing water demand, robustness issues, climate change, and natural resource dynamics and challenges. This interdisciplinary tome on the topic is invaluable to researchers and policymakers alike.

• Combines collective action and resilience thinking to help readers understand complex issues and challenges in natural resource management
• Presents methods and case studies to validate theory in practice
• Includes up-to-date research applied to current issues to address both current and future risks and uncertainties

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Release date: Apr 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9780323897983

Book preview

Preface

Ganesh P. Shivakoti, Founding Director, Ostrom Center for Advanced Study in Natural Resources Governance (OCeAN), School of Environment, Resources and Development, Asian Institute of Technology, Khlong Nueng, Thailand

Rajendra P. Shrestha, Co-Director of OCeAN, Dean, School of Environment, Resources, and Development Professor, Natural Resources Management School of Environment, Resources, and Development, Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand

Makoto Inoue, Faculty of Human Sciences, Waseda University, Tokorozawa, Saitama, Japan

During the IASC Regional Asia Meeting in 2018, we realized that natural resource problems are recurring over time. The issues that we discussed in our earlier book volumes have become persistent, despite repeated interventions, and sometimes led to behavior that was the opposite of what the intervention intended. This made us question whether the sustainability of natural resources is unlikely in Asia. However, upon much deliberation and contemplation, the article by Rittel and Webber (1973) reminded us that natural resource problems are wicked in nature, where social complexity and interdependence lead to an indeterminable stopping point; the effort to solve one element of a problem often reveals other problems.

Natural resources’ complex adaptive systems (CAS) characterized by patterns at macrolevel that emerge from microlevel interactions, which subsequently feedback to those interactions. The CAS consist of nonlinear relations, historical dependency, multiple interdependencies, and limited predictably. Carpenter and Gunderson (2001) contended the need for continuous learning and knowledge building to deal with such challenges and disturbances over time. Community-based natural resources management is one of such CAS systems that have coevolved with the recognition of a social-ecological system (SES) dynamics and have built knowledge and practice to live with the change. However, such knowledge taxonomy is often decoupled in resource management. Thus the current contemporary knowledge system tends to decouple ecosystems and humans; even if they don’t do, they assume it to be static. The problems or challenges may seem to be solved for a while but reappears again in the near future.

It is also apparent from the chapters in this book volume that natural resources management in Asia is focused on immediate perceptions of results with little concern for long-term sustainability. However, we are glad that this book is able to introduce sustainability notions through resource integrity, livelihood security, collective action, and adaptive capacity. The amalgamation of these components is likely to direct toward building resilience in the long run by developing the capacity of SES to learn and self-organize. While historically, natural resource management has been dominated by theory, political ecology, and institutional economics, this book has advanced in understanding social processes through the examination of social learning and adaptive governance with the consolidation of the theory of resilience and theory of change. This conflation is likely to cultivate flexibility to continue on the current development pathways by innovating and improving on that path. But when the system is too robust or too rigid, it becomes crucial to move away into new pathways; this is where collective action and power dynamics come into play.

We believe this book is a general extension of findings and insights of Elinor Ostrom’s seminal work on commons and coupled SESs. It brings together multidisciplinary traditions and seminal work in a coherent way. The authors involved in this book, affiliated with different research organizations, have worked as a team SES-club (McGinnis & Ostrom, 2014) to explore sustainability and collective action problems in Asia that implies to strengthen institutional foundations of community-based natural resources management.

This book is the product of a long-term collaboration of multiple scholars and research centers who first connected through the legacy of Elinor Ostrom. A large number of authors have been involved, and a large assortment of financial streams has supported in bringing out this book. Without this support, this book would never have been possible. Ford Foundation country offices in Jakarta and Hanoi provided generous support to the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand to participate in the capacity development of academic and professional colleagues in these countries. International Grant Program 2013 supported by the Toyota Foundation was instrumental in effective networking among the natural resource managers in SE Asia. Makoto Inoue gratefully acknowledged support from the International Grant Program 2016–18, supported by the Toyota Foundation, to strengthen our network and collaboration with local communities and stakeholders. The Ostrom Center for the Advanced Study of Natural Resource Governance (OCeAN) has hosted multiple scholarly discussions to draft this book by organizing and engaging research and policy dialog to bring forward natural resource management issues of Asia to wider audience and policymakers. Last, we would like to thank all our readers and natural resource stewards for inspiring us every day to put a book like this.

References

[1] Rittel H.W.J., Webberl M.M. Peat swamp forest conservation withstands pervasive land conversion to oil palm plantation in North Selangor, Malaysia. International Journal of Remote Sensing. 2019;40(19):7409–7438. doi:10.1080/01431161.2019.1574996.

[2] Carpenter S.R., Gunderson L.H. Coping with collapse: Ecological and social dynamics in ecosystem management.. BioScience. 2001;51:451–457. doi:10.1080/01431161.2019.1574996.

[3] McGinnis M.D., Ostrom E. Social-ecological system framework: Initial changes and continuing challenges. Ecology and Society. 2001;19(2):doi:10.1080/01431161.2019.1574996 30.

Chapter 1: Managing natural resources in Asia: Challenges and approaches

Raza Ullaha; Makoto Inoueb; Ganesh P. Shivakotic; Shubhechchha Sharmad    a Institute of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of Agriculture Faisalabad, Pakistan

b Faculty of Human Sciences, Waseda University, Tokorozawa, Saitama, Japan

c Ostrom Center for Advanced Study in Natural Resources Governance (OCeAN), School of Environment, Resources and Development, Asian Institute of Technology, Khlong Nueng, Thailand

d Department of Community Sustainability, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, United States

Abstract

The natural resources of the Asian region are under severe threats arising from climate change, globalization, urbanization, and the need to keep feeding the ever increasing population. The situation demands for a more effective management of the already depleting natural resource base of the region. However, management of the natural resources is a complex problem. Elinor Ostrom in her seminal work proposed a more flexible, inclusive, and locally governed system to regulate overappropriation of natural resources as against Hardin’s stark choices between ecologic collapse and restricting exploitation of natural resources by private property or state-led dictates. Owing to the complex nature of the problem, Ostrom’s design principles are not sufficient to identify the success markers because the Asian commons closely interact at multiple and spatial scales. We combine Ostrom’s design principles with systems thinking and principles of resilience to understand and analyze practical solutions and evidence-based learning in effective management of common pool resources in the context of emerging challenges to the natural resource base of the Asian region.

Keywords

Systems thinking; Design principles; Resilience; Adaptive management; Social-ecological systems

1: Elinor Ostrom meets the resilience thinking

In 1968 the publication of Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons was a significant step to understand the issues concerning the management of the common pool resources and integrity of global environment. It was while the research on Earth system led to the discussion that Earth has entered the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch. Soon after that Donella Meadow’s Limits to Growth got recognized among academicians and policymakers. The conclusion was basically the same: the global environment was fundamentally threatened by humans. Their works have become the foundation for modern movements in both global and local commons. They inspired policies and environmental regulations through which the central governments sought to undertake command and control policies. For the time, they inspired a new generation of ecologic economists, political, and natural scientists to model and monitor changes in environment and natural resources to develop a new science in human and environment interaction.

Elinor Ostrom was one of many political economists who highly supported Donella Meadow’s work on the limits on the Earth’s capacity to support human economic expansion, a debate that continues to this day. However, she refused Hardin’s (1968) notion of a tragedy with nonsubstantial endings: a choice between coercive government, privatization or collapse of the resource, where the notion of the commons was a dilemma, or a drama. Many scholarly works and theoretical support were required to understand and explore the satisfying endings.

The foundation of discussion of this book, including this initial chapter is the contribution of Ostrom’s (1990) design principles for governing the commons that have the capacity to reorganize and adapt to emerging disturbances and challenges. Her empirical findings were based on the number of local-scale commons with wealth of experiences of success and failure. However, as the years passed, these local commons were interlinked with variety of organization that took place at spatial and temporal scales. Interactions between individual components of the commons at the local scales give rise to the unique properties at the macrolevel, an emergent phenomenon not predicted at the local level. For instance, rapid mechanization and industrialization intensified desertification due to deforestation by individual land dwellers on China. When a drought struck especially in the spring months, the massive bare land gives rise to intense dust storms in much of East Asia. Such macroscale feature in turn affects local lives, livelihoods, and processes. In the case of Asian dust, this has led to serious health problems, drying of topsoil, soil erosion, and abandonment of productive resources by thousands of families. Southeast Asian haze is another such example where fire-related large-scale problem occurs regularly that have economic and health impact in Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia. The haze is caused by illegal slash and burn practices in Indonesia’s Kalimantan and Sumatra. Both these examples illustrate how processes and action at one scale leads to unexpected outcomes at another level. Policies based only at a focal scale dynamic may lead to wrong judgments and inappropriate actions at the macroscale and vice versa. Besides, emergence of such macroscale phenomena that interact at multiple timescales with complex interaction and feedbacks makes the behavior of the commons extremely difficult to predict. Analyzing commons with simple reductionist dynamics, common technique in natural resource economics, may mislead representation of commons, with substantial implications for natural resources management practice and policy.

An alternative to linear reductionist methods in natural resources management is systems thinking and resilience, which is a holistic approach of understanding system’s interrelated parts that interrelate over time within the context of the larger systems. By systems, we mean the behavior of the commons that result from the feedback processes between human and natural component. Likewise, resilience thinking assumes a strong interaction between nature and human components at multiple spatial and temporal scales, which is subjected to abrupt change and undergoes nonlinear change. In particular, resilience thinking calls for governance approaches that are better able to deal with uncertainty and change. Given the current unsustainable trajectory of the commons at the wider scales, resilience thinking focuses on incremental change that adapts and self-organizes to address the dynamic of ongoing challenges. For the purpose, there is a need to understand how substantive positive changes in commons can be brought about, how features such as social learning enable experimentations, how social networks enhance trusts and reciprocity, how participation brings in new aspirations and ideas, and how bridging multiple organizational levels and leadership foster sustainability of the commons? This is where the eight design principles, systems thinking, and resilience thinking meet. This article puts an effort to examine the validity and understand the design principles from resilience perspective so that natural resources in Asia continue providing services to resource-dependent communities that underpin human well-being in the face of surprises.

2: Varieties of commons challenges in Asiaa

Asian region has undergone rapid and unprecedented change in terms of economic and financial growth, large-scale land cover changes to commercial agriculture, increase in population, and changes in sociopolitical settings. Despite these challenges, there has been significant improvement in local livelihood and poverty reduction. The region has seen significant improvement in life expectancy and reduction in food security. Asian population now has access to goods and services that was not possible few decades ago.

Nevertheless, the major concern is whether these improvements in Asian livelihood and well-being can be sustained, given that there is still significant population who live in poverty and deprivation in Asia. Despite massive strides in technological innovation and financial development, many people still depend on natural resources for variety of reasons. Such resources are only possible from the interaction between the nature and the people. There is a growing evidence that, in most of the rapidly developing countries of the Asian region, the sustainability outcomes have been impacted by the increasing levels of resource use, which is intensifying the depletion of ecosystems (UN, 2017). The fate of the rural poor across Asia is closely tied to the land and water resources that are considered the foundation for agricultural production, fisheries, and aquaculture and support the production of livestock and forest products that provide food, fuel, fodder, and building materials crucial for the livelihoods of local communities (Tyler & Fajber, 2009). Despite the fact that the growth in urban and industrial sectors fuels the region’s commercial economy, the rural poor remain dependent on the benefits derived from the ecosystems. The livelihoods of the poor will continue to erode as the land and water resources are under increasing stress of overexploitation, conflicts over rights, competing uses, commercialization of the rural economy, migration, technology transfer, and climate change.

Several governments in the region have responded to these issues by decentralizing and devolving management regimes through good governance. New issues and sustainability challenges to the natural resources of the region are emerging due to the interaction of human and natural systems which make the natural resources governance even more challenging. These emerging challenges include climate change leading to resource depletion and environmental degradation, ever increasing population that put increased stress on the natural resource base, the urge to meet the goals and targets set in the Sustainable Development Goals, land use and land cover changes, the mismatch of political and ecological boundaries, invasive alien species, migration, intergenerational and intragenerational equity, technology transfer, and natural resource property rights issues. These new and emerging issues require even greater attention and focused efforts to mitigate its ill impacts on local communities and surrounding resources.

Threat from over appropriation and the resultant depletion of natural resources, degradation of the ecosystem and pollution along with climate change are posing serious threats to the capacity of the environment in sustaining economic growth, livelihoods, and the natural environment across the region. The economic growth of the region came at heavy cost of natural capital, people’s health, and livelihoods that has worsen the issues of gender and income inequality. Climate change is causing alterations to hydrological systems, declining crop yields, accelerating extinction of species, increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters, boosting public health crises, increasing conflict, and migration and lowering economic productivity. These issues will ultimately undermine the economic development itself (UN-Water, 2018). Despite limited progress in some areas, there is an overall decline in the health of ecosystem and biodiversity in Asia. This is particularly alarming as all economic and social development in the region is based on natural environment.

The increased demand for both ground and surface water resources for intensified agricultural output and industrial needs put the quantity and quality of regional water resources under stress. The lowland regions rely on intensive water extraction that has long-term impacts on groundwater quality and availability as well as soil fertility. The degradation of wetlands affects the regulation of flood plains, fish-spawning habitat, and rice production. Moreover, the seasonal inundation patterns, water flow, fisheries habitat, and agricultural production are also affected by the construction of large hydro dams to meet demand for electricity which puts the livelihoods of natural resources dependent indigenous communities at risk. Migration and urbanization should be at the center when discussing the land and water resources management in the Asian region. The rural-urban migration is changing the dynamics of the natural resource management in the region. This situation is of particular concern in many countries of Asia that are experiencing high male urban migration, leaving rural women with additional agriculture and land management responsibilities but without the needed inputs, management services, or tenure security. Women are particularly disadvantaged, as they often have much less access than men to productive resources (e.g., land and water); technologies (e.g., inputs and management practices); and services (e.g., agricultural extension and credit) (Tyler & Fajber, 2009). The distinction of urban-rural is diminishing in terms of livelihoods, mobility, and resource pressures in densely populated Asian countries. There are new management challenges emerging from the increased demand for land and water resources in periurban zones of high population density and intensive agricultural and industrial production. The impacts of the urbanization can be felt not only on ecosystem provisioning services (supply of safe water and food) but also on the regulating services by flood plains and wetlands (as natural drainage systems are modified).

The economic growth of the region has masked the widespread failures of resource management efforts in the face of these stresses. The resource tenure and access rights of the natural resource-dependent poor and marginalized groups, who have limited voice in governance and decision-making about natural resources, have been often undermined by management policies. Conflicts have been generated and the traditional users have been displaced by the state policies that have historically favored large-scale commercial access to resources including forests, fisheries, or water. The focus of tenure reforms is on private household tenures rather than community-based management systems that can be more effective for managing common pool resources (Ostrom, 1990; Tyler, 2006). All these issues and challenges require effective and equitable land and water resources management as there are immense development challenges throughout Asia posed by the resource-based livelihoods of rural poor and the vulnerable living conditions of the urban poor. Moreover, impacts of climate change are expected to exacerbate most of these challenges and further imperil poverty alleviation efforts as climate change adaptation has not been adequately integrated into planning and policy in key natural resource management sectors (Tyler & Fajber, 2009). An integrated approach in conserving natural resources, ecosystems, and biodiversity, that build foundation for economic productivity and livelihoods, is thus required in Asia (UN-Water, 2018).

3: The design principles

Ostrom’s work on sustainable common pool management has resulted in application of design principles in the field of natural resources. Her work has significantly changed how resource users understand and manage commons in a particular sociopolitical and institutional settings. Contextual factors such as rules, and user group features such as trust and reciprocity influence if commons are overharvested or managed sustainably. Therefore, we are inspired by and believe in Ostrom to guide us in understanding governance and collective action in a wider context. Meanwhile, analyzing the problems indicated earlier tend to share the following distinct characteristics, which are quite different than what Ostrom (1990) anticipated (Stern, 2011):

a.The problems are bounded from a local to a national and a regional scale that consist of forest, watershed, irrigation system or land. Perhaps the concept of global common applies here.

b.The number of appropriators is very high, more than what Ostrom (2010) considered ideal. There are millions of actors involved.

c.The degradation of commons is apparently through a deliberative and conscious purpose or intentional action, actions mainly caused by secondary actors who are less dependent on the resources.

d.Heterogenous users, who do not share common cultural or institutional context.

e.Presence of significant externalities between appropriators across temporal and spatial scales.

f.Complex and dynamic interactions that is difficult to study and predict.

This gives an impression that these principles though may be formulated as a diagnostic tool in complex social and ecological settings, they tend not to prominently guide implementation of sustainability practices as the problem and challenges are quite complex, diverse, and complicated. Against this background, we tend to understand and ask, if design principles describe and diagnose problems that are temporal and spatial in dimension that are embedded in a larger system. We approach this issue by analyzing design principles that are pertinent from a systems perspective.

a.Clearly defined boundaries: All the systems are likely to have boundaries but given the cascading nature of the problems across temporal and spatial scale, boundaries in Asia are difficult to define as the systems are very dynamic. This indicates that variety of influence and needs and affects are underplaying, which can be difficult to manage. Such influences can be political, economic, technological, and societal in nature.

b.Congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions: This principle does seem applicable to the current challenges faced in Asia. However, some of the ecologic challenges faced by the Asian commons are impractical and difficult to specify and enforcing rules appear as insurmountable given there is absence of any sovereign authority, for instance, haze example from Indonesia (Chapter 18), and transboundary water management in Indus river basin (Chapter 14).

c.Collective choice arrangements: This principle can be a huge challenge as entire population of South and South-East Asia can be considered as the users. The costs and benefits of resource degradation apparently fall to groups that virtually ignite conflict in any governance settings. Perhaps, it requires further query on who should make the rules, who are the winner and losers of those rules. Also important is to understand how local community can and primary users participate when there are so many external actors and expert scientists.

d.Monitoring: This principle tends to be difficult to implement as holding somebody accountable in such a connected open system is difficult. First and foremost, mutually exclusive interests between major appropriator occur that hold position to monitor a particular common and there can be a huge incentive to not to report for the affected parties. The independence of appropriators from the monitors is important.

e.Graduated Sanctions and conflict resolutions: As other design principles, these design principles are more difficult to implement. The polluter for instance, are likely to settle outside a particular boundary’s jurisdiction and political system, and sanctioning under such circumstance becomes almost impossible.

Against this background, we tend to argue that users do tend to learn, and learning is the notion for adaptive management. This approach treats policies as hypotheses, and management as experiments, where resource users and mangers tend to accept and anticipate uncertainty at multiple scales (Folke et al., 2002). Resilience provides capacity for learning in a dynamic environment that protects the system from the failure of institutional action based on incomplete or poor understanding. As a result, those users and appropriators participating in resource management enrich their learning and knowledge of the system dynamics through which decisions are regularly monitored and revisited. Through this book, we anticipate we could find a particular leverage point that helps in responding to changes that allows for social and institutional learning to conserve collective memory. This collective memory become helpful during crisis and when the system tends to reorganize after crises (Folke et al., 2002). It is during this time, novelty and innovation arise in the system and the Ostrom’s design principles can help in crafting new institutional rules to adapt to the changing situation.

4: The objective of this book

The book is based in Asia, where natural resource-based communities are vulnerable to multiple environmental shocks due to their dependency toward natural resources. Impacts of these shocks are further compounded by changes in socioeconomic and political changes, which are changing the availability and access to natural resources. The impacts have shown cascading effects on livelihoods, patterns of migration, and conflict dynamics for the people of the region. Surprisingly, previous volumes of this book have also shown similar problems. This means that natural resources management problems are persistent, despite repeated interventions, and sometimes, behavior that’s the opposite of what the intervention intended are also prevalent.

The problem illustrates a systematic pattern of causation that requires understanding of human and natural components together. Although this nature of interactions has been recognized long before, the complex patterns and processes involved in such interactions have not been well characterized (Liu et al., 2007). Traditionally, social scientists only focused on human interactions that reduced the role of environmental context; and ecologists looked into environments, disregarding humans as dominant agents. As such, they failed to address environmental issues that required investigation on both environmental and social drivers. Despite the fact that interdisciplinary research continued to add crucial value to advance disciplinary inquires, it is not sufficient to deal with human-environment and social-ecological interactions. This book aims to move beyond previous understanding and view social and ecological research as coupled and embedded objects in the grid of interactions. In addition to identifying patterns and processes of interaction, this book aims to fulfill the gap and provide input to body of knowledge by studying reciprocal interactions and feedbacks, whereby the effect of environment on humans and effect of humans on environment could be better understood. This will ultimately break out of linear thinking patterns and install complex systems perspective while dealing with environmental issues. Based on these perspectives and given the rapid pace of change in Asia, this proposed book will try to provide an insight into the resilience of natural resource-based communities—that is, how they have been able to adapt and respond when faced with disturbance in the face of a changing natural resource base.

The aim of the book is to address this gap and identify core areas in the social-ecological systems (SES) where interventions can be made to promote resilience. The book is built directly on the earlier four book volumes that critically evaluated the dynamics of natural resources issues in Asia through empirical evidences. We further analyze these issues from the resilience thinking perspective as the problems evident in the earlier book volumes are seen to have recurring patterns of behavior, which almost results in negative consequences. The patterns of behavior are due to existence of multiple endogenous and slow variables, and feedback loops, which contributes to the unintended consequences of the pattern. We view the issues in the book through resilience lens and use systems thinking as a diagnostic tool to understand the behavior of the problems that have manifested an unwanted condition.

The theory behind this concept is that change is fundamental to SES, and resilience is fundamentally problem driven and integrates interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches to address the sustainability challenges. The SES has the capacity to learn and self-organize in response to internal or external conditions which is characterized by nonlinear dynamics. In the process, the unwanted results can be mapped to the common behavior models, which when studied in detail could lead to rich diagnosis of situation and a plan for recovery. This knowledge base helps in devising guidelines for understanding and determining what kind of behavior of the system is at play and how to approach an intervention that is sustainable.

From a proactive sense, this book can be a crucial part of natural resource management. Natural resource managers can test and implement variety of strategies to identify potential pitfalls in the SES and address them when they are easier to tackle. The book also hopes to provide a new common language in Asia to communicate among natural resource managers in Asia regarding how a particular SES should perform. Having a new and common language among natural resource stewards in Asia helps to document, communicate and develop consequential frameworks for creating flexibility to deal with such negative consequences in the future. Once, such knowledge is leveraged among a group of natural resource managers, a robust system is built that are immune to uncertainty and unintended consequences.

The objective of the book is also to identify leverage points within natural resource management issues in Asia, where small change can be made that has large-scale changes on the entire SES. An advantage of using systems thinking over traditional linear thinking is that it helps to reveal appropriate place within the system structure to enact change through the leverage points. Every SES contains leverage points and change can be accomplished by finding optimum leverage point to apply pertinent interventions. As such, systems resist attempts to change their behavior and a common issue for linear thinkers when identifying leverage points is that they are often counterintuitive to the goals of the system.

5: The approach

Overcoming challenges as mentioned earlier requires an understanding of the evolving and dynamic links between ecosystems and their populations (Fischer et al., 2015). For instance, food security in a drought situation cannot be achieved without also understanding sustainable agricultural production and the institutions that ensure a more equitable distribution of agricultural products (Lang & Barling, 2012). Similarly, overharvesting in a wetland fishery cannot be addressed separately from an ecological perspective or from the livelihoods and cultural norms of the fisher communities. Integrated approaches should be used to foster human well-being that does not compromise ecological integrity (De Vries, 2010). There are multiple ways of addressing well-being (assets, health, life satisfaction, etc.); likewise, multiple approaches to satisfy well-being outcomes (Martinetti, 2000). The overall goal of wellbeing of people is to ensure diverse diets, health, income sources, stable production, minimized risk of drought, regenerative use of land resources, and enhanced ecological integrity of the resources (Whitfield & Reed, 2012). As such, a single approach alone cannot address all the goals and hence multiple approaches are required. A pluralism of approaches also increases multifunctionality of resources, which indicate that a combination of stable and diverse approaches leads to achieving not only well-being but also socioeconomic outcomes such as income generation and environmental integrity (Ash et al., 2010). The challenge of warranting local livelihood and ecological integrity in the face ongoing environment and societal changes, and the considerable uncertainties that are generating, has given rise to a variety of new approaches and types of science (Biggs, Schlüter, & Schoon, 2015). One of such is social-ecological resilience, and system’s thinking which lies within the broader concept of sustainability science that captures the dynamics and interactions between nature and people, termed as SES.

When humans and ecological systems are linked, such as in irrigation system, they can be conceived as an SES (Berkes & Folke, 1998). Berkes and Folke (1998) used the concept of SES as humans-in-nature, where social refers to human dimension of people, communities, societies within diverse in terms of economic, political, institutional, and cultural facets; and ecological to biosphere, where human life included. SES are nested sets of coevolving social (e.g., economy and culture) and ecological (e.g., bio-geological, hydrologic, and atmospheric) subsystems (Walker & Salt, 2006). In an SES, ecological systems and human systems are inextricably linked across scales—from local to global, and from past to the future (Folke, 2006). Therefore, not only people are part of nature but also nature shapes them through their behavior and decisions as they are fundamentally dependent on the capacity of nature for their well-being (Fischer et al., 2015). SES are also termed as coupled human-environmental systems or coupled human-natural systems—whatever the terminology, the concept provides an analytical framework for understanding the interdependence and dynamics of social and environmental change (Liu et al., 2007). These SES, irrigation system or community forest, for example, are considered to have the capacity to self-organize and learn from the previous experiences. The resilience of such SES is the ability to provide deal with these kinds of challenges. Dealing with environmental and socioeconomic challenges not only includes creating flexibility but also avoiding undesirable conditions.

Over the past 20 years, the concept of resilience has received much attention, and apparently there has been much research on whether to promote or reduce the resilience of SES. Owing to the diverse attributes that promote or undermine resilience in SES, this book has drawn from number of disciplines and field of study—social, political, economic, and ecological sciences. Multiple factors and determinants deemed necessary for building resilience are proposed based on theoretical and empirical research, mainly through the work of Elinor Ostrom. The diversity of disciplines especially in the field of natural resource governance and resilience is somewhat fragmented and dispersed. This disconnection and fragmentation of resilience thinking, and natural resource governance is limiting coherence in conceptualizing what factors are crucial for building resilience in a particular SES setting and how can we strengthen such factors to better manage SES for long term sustainability and human well-being.

6: Organization of the book

The seminal work of Elinor Ostrom has inspired many researchers around the world to look into ways of sustainable natural resources management through collective actions, decentralized mode of resource governance and system’s thinking. Based on the Ostrom’s design principles, SES framework and complex thinking, chapters in the present volume attempted to provide practical solutions to the problems and issues of natural resources management. The volume is divided into three themes namely (i) Community Forestry and Social-Ecological Systems, (ii) Community Irrigation and Robustness Challenges, and (iii) Climate Change, Natural Resources Dynamics and Land Use Challenges. The details of issues discussed under each theme are provided as follow:

Theme I: Community forestry and social-ecological systems

The chapters under this theme discuss various issues related to community forestry and the SES using case studies from different locations of the Asian region. Chapter 2, for example, discusses the causes and consequences of peat land swamp forest degradation in Selangor, Malaysia. The chapter identified main causes of the peat land swap forest degradation and evaluated the decentralized mode of governance and community involvement in managing the peat land swamp forest of North Selangor, Malaysia. Chapter 3 provides an examination of the relationship between tenure security and agroforestry management practices using a multiple case study method in West Sumatra, Indonesia. The study also provides history of agroforestry in the studied location and highlighted factors responsible for change in the agroforestry practices. Chapter 4 assesses the rehabilitation potential of Calliandra in degraded areas through Landscape Function Analysis in Bukidnon, Philippines. For temporal effects, different seral stages of C. calothyrsus, found all over the rehabilitation areas, were tested for soil stability, infiltration, and nutrient cycling. For baseline, a field of Imperata cylindrica (cogon grass) was used while a secondary forest served as reference point. Chapter 5 analyzes the potential of the regulatory context in the efforts of pursuing sustainable forest management using an exploratory approach. The study uses a path analysis to track how regulations have evolved through time and indicate the gaps or synchronicities. The research also brings to light some incompleteness, lack of clarity over roles, and responsibilities.

Chapter 6 presents adaptability of the community forests as reflected in the format of systems’ coupling between community forests and livelihood systems to demonstrate the potential of coupling system in generating the most feasible scenarios for policy interventions and in generating strategies to accelerate the contribution of community forests to improve the quality of livelihoods. The issues related to postlogging forest management are discussed in Chapter 7. Using Ostrom’s SES framework, the study attempted to understand the causes of polices ineffectiveness in forest restoration in Thailand, Indonesia, and Philippines and identified several process variables that contributed to ineffective rehabilitation policy. An evaluation of the impact of Payment For Environmental Services on local forest governance at different levels in case of Vietnam has been presented in Chapter 8. The study also highlighted different factors responsible for the difference in the provincial and local forest governance. Using hydrodynamic and ecologic succession models, the chapter provides an understanding of the impacts of environmental factors caused by climate change and sea level rise (temperature, salinity, mudflats, sea water submerged level, etc.) on the mangrove ecosystem in the coastal area of Northern