Our Approach
Achieving effective social and ecological system management requires new thinking. In the past, management of natural resources was largely based on the principles of orthodox positivist science, which failed to take into account the complex, non-linear, and uncertain nature of these systems. Socio-ecosystem management must rest on the central tenets of complexity and uncertainty, and necessitates flexibility, anticipation, and adaptation rather than prediction and control in conservation planning and management. All scales, both spatial and temporal, must be considered in an analysis of a system and in the development of tools to make the system function better in its current and future configurations and more emphasis should be put on building adaptive capacity for change in collaboration with a variety of interest groups, and an appreciation of ecological scale, context, and historical change.
The perspectives employed in this Project is based on these consideration and can be described as “complex integrated social ecological systems perspective”. This perspective utilizes concepts from both post normal and the new science using a systemic lens of analysis, and both hard and soft system thinking. Viewing systems as complex assists in the development of holistic (social and ecological) management tools that can adapt to the change inherent in the system themselves.
With this background the Project aims at coupling scientific environmental analysis and ecosystem modeling with community based natural resource management techniques and soft system methodologies to achieve sustainable natural resource management in mountain areas.
The project's perspective involves a cutting-edge spectrum of concepts and approaches combining resilience theory and analysis, adaptive management, and the IUCN model of Ecosystem Management to ensure that the analysis of the socio-ecosystem and the development of decision support tools are sustainable over the long-term and applicable to multiple stakeholders. It will incorporate components of each approach, along with certain common principles. Each reinforces the other, especially in terms of making the strategies more complete. with such methodological development the project affords the opportunity to develop a methodology that could not only benefit the targeted region, but also socio-ecosystem management on the global level.