Department Environmental Social Sciences

A key condition for successful management of aquatic ecosystems is “socio-ecological fit”. Socio-ecological fit means that governance arrangements, including stakeholders from both the state and society, should be aligned with the scales of the governed ecological resources in order to be effective. Since ecological resources provided by rivers are embedded in larger catchment areas, a good fit would require governance arrangements which are able to potentially address issues related to ecological resources of rivers on a catchment area level, spanning both geographical and sectorial boundaries (e.g. forestry, water, agriculture, tourism, recreational issues on local, regional, national scales). Yet, very little is known about how given patterns of socio-ecological fit provide stakeholders with incentives and constraints for collective action and the development of common rules of behavior, or how it affects the quality and effectiveness of ecosystem service management and the very conservation of the natural resource. 

This project aims to address this research gap. Empirically, the project focuses on stakeholders that depend on, make use of, or regulate different types of ecosystem resources provided by rivers. We will analyze a) the relations between stakeholders (information exchange, coordination), and b) the relations between stakeholders and resources (resource use, resource dependency) by a building-blocks modeling approach and Exponential Random Graph Models.