Audio transcript
Indiana University
Phone interview with Joe Cone, conducted October 30, 2008.
Joe: Hello, and welcome to Communicating Climate Change, a series of conversations with social scientists whose research focuses on communicating with the public. I’m Joe Cone with the Oregon Sea Grant program at Oregon State University.
The goal of this series is to provide insights from social science to those who are out on the front lines, communicating with the public about climate. That includes a range of professionals, such as meteorologists, journalists, government agency personnel, university outreach specialists, and spokes-persons for non-governmental organizations.
Today’s conversation is the first of two parts with Dr. Elinor Ostrom, the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, and Co-Director, Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. Among many other professional awards and recognitions, Dr. Ostrom is a fellow of not only the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, but also the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She is considered one of the leading scholars in the study of common pool resources, about which she has written extensively.
Joe Cone: Welcome to the program. Your focus on systems, both social-ecological systems and resilient systems, is not necessarily familiar to those who communicate with the public. Perhaps the place to begin, therefore, is with a quick recap of how scholars come to talking, first, about social ecological systems and, second, then about resilient ones.
[Time: 1:41]
Ostrom: Well, those of us who do research on how humans use and abuse resources, have been trying to develop a better way of thinking about the ecological side, or biophysical side, as well as the social side, so that we’re not looking at this just as social scientists or just as biophysical scientists.
There are many names used for social-ecological systems. Some people use human environment systems. Others use coupled human and natural systems; and that’s abbreviated CHANS, C-H-A-N-S. There’s several papers in Science and there’s a program at NSF that uses the CHANS nickname. Resilience Alliance folks have tended to use social-ecological systems, and since I’ve been active in that group for some time, that seemed like a very natural name -- but I’m not wedded to it.
Joe Cone: I viewed on the web a lecture you gave in Stockholm last year about resilient systems, and read your article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – PNAS-- that complements that presentation. Perhaps you could highlight them for us.
E. Ostrom: The key aspect is that we are trying to think about how humans, as they are organized, interact and affect resource systems. And I have included resource units flowing from resource systems. I don’t know if in my lecture at Stockholm I was talking about the framework that we’ve developed now over two to three years. That framework comes out of a twenty-five year research program that did focus more on institutions. And, sometimes ecologists would look at it and not see the relevance, so I very purposely this time developed a framework that had big first tier working parts of a resource system, and its units, and a governance system and users interacting within a broader political social and economic system. And, within a broader, or affecting a smaller or larger ecological system. And, that was published in PNAS in 2007, after two years of hard work and lots of comment by social scientists and ecologists.
And, one of the things that biologists have learned long ago, that social scientists have yet to learn as well, is that our systems are nested. Linnaeus introduced the idea of what we would now call an ontology three hundred years ago as he was trying to classify plants. His language has been changed and changed and changed. The Linnaean system isn’t identical by any manner or means to what he presented. But because he presented it in a coherent way, where subtypes were identified at multiple levels, all the way down from animals to humans, taking what is it, six steps?
Biologists got used to this idea that you had to classify within broader concepts. And, that’s what we’ve been trying to do in the social ecological systems framework of trying to think of very high level, almost so high level…Well, it’s kind of like Linnaean. Animals. Well, that includes an incredible diversity.Well, when we talk about resource systems, that also includes and incredible diversity, all the way from a little local lake to the global commons. And, that’s been our effort to try to get those concepts worked through so that one would pick a research question and then ask what’s the focal SES, or Social Ecological System, where you want to be conducting research so you can answer that question. It conveys a sense that units are interacting. And the interaction produces outcomes.
E. Ostrom: It doesn’t mean it’s neat.
Joe Cone: [Laughs] No, it doesn’t.
E. Ostrom: Some people want to think of systems as being….you know, that means it’s real neat.
[Time 6:57]
Joe Cone: We’re unpacking terms here and I guess the question was, how do scholars come to, you know, now not talk just about social- ecological systems but about resilient ones. How did that come into the discussion?
E. Ostrom: Well, it came through ecology and was not very much focused on the social. Buzz Holling, a very distinguished ecologist, was studying the Canadian forests: he realized that the trees were undergoing a radical change and being destroyed at a fast rate. And he was then trying to figure out what was going on, and realized that back in the days of DDT a lot of birds that would have gone to Canada and eaten up the insects were destroyed in the United States before they had a chance to get up there and get those nice beetles. And, the trees were not too resilient to the increased beetle population. If they had been resilient, they would have had an increase in an external event, like beetles, and they would have adapted new strategies and adjustments so that they would have maintained some of their basic functions over time.
And, the concept of resilience caught on among ecologists big time, because it goes to some of the issues of forests and fisheries and other biological systems that they may be resilient to one kind of change, but adapting to that change may make them more vulnerable to another change. And so, nothing is eternally resilient. Basically, it means capacity to have a change and adjust, and continue functioning about like you did before, as a system.
[Time 9:23]
Joe Cone: I guess the next question is, so would having a resilient social-ecological system be a useful response to the risks posed by climate change, for example, during this century?
E. Ostrom: Well, the question is, are we going to be? And that is the big one on the table. So, it may be that global climate change is such a big and devastating change, that many of global and smaller systems are not resilient. Will there be a Netherlands?
E. Ostrom: Will there be a Bangladesh?
Joe Cone: So those are questions where essentially the thresholds are being exceeded and the system won’t be resilient, is that right?
E. Ostrom: Well, we might find that many systems in the world are able to adjust and adapt. But we don’t expect that all coastal systems will be resilient. And particularly, I’m more worried about Bangladesh than I am about the Netherlands. I do know scholars in the Netherlands who are already taking this very seriously. And already developing a wide diversity of plans for what they will do with increased storms, with increased ocean levels, with increased rainfall, etcetera. But Bangladesh is very poor and while there are discussions, I doubt that they will be able to take the actions that would enable them to be fully resilient.
[Time 11:02]
Joe Cone: Having said that and then acknowledging that, is planning to attempt to be resilient a worthwhile response from managers or government?
E. Ostrom: Yes, so long as people recognize how complex it is and don’t think it’s possible just to have a nice little neat optimal plan.
Joe Cone: Let’s talk about that.
E. Ostrom: Recognizing that this is something that must be done at multiple levels, so what I am concerned about is a lot of people think that the only way to cope with global change is international agreements. And if we sit around and wait for the national leaders of our respective countries to come to an agreement and operationalize it and make it effective, then people along the coast are going to lose their coasts. So, we must be thinking of diverse ways that we can increase the capacity to respond to external change. We can just call it capacity to respond to change.
We don’t need to use the fancy name “resilience.” How do we cope with change? And, the tragedy of Katrina was that three years before that hurricane, there had been a very well specified article showing that among the kinds of storms we could be facing in the next five years, was a storm like Katrina that would have devastating impacts on the coastal area. That was not predicted that it would occur, but it was predicted that it could well occur and nobody took it seriously. And so Katrina showed that federal, state and local authorities in New Orleans were not resilient and did not have an effective plan, and it was a disaster. And I think maybe that experience is making a lot more people think, well, we’d better be a little bit more self-conscious that these things could happen.
You have a health threat of some kind of release of new bugs. And, the people who need to be involved in that, coping with that threat, are different than a flood. So we need to be thinking about the diversity of things that could happen with global change. Part of global change involves globalization, and people traveling all over the world and bringing strange things back with them.
Joe Cone: If a small geographic region, say, a coastal county for example, were even oriented toward being prepared to adapt to change, become more resilient, those in the governance of systems would probably reach for a blueprint for how to achieve their goals. But I know in that National Academy of Science article that you wrote, you cautioned against blueprints. What do you mean and what’s wrong with blueprints?
E. Ostrom: Well, I’m cautioning, for one, against generalized ones that apply everywhere.
E. Ostrom: Community A has a very good plan for dealing with disasters and it’s sent around and everybody copies it verbatim. That is, I think itself a disaster. I’m strongly urging against. Because, the difference for a community that is below sea level and one that has cliffs right up to the edge of an ocean is dramatically different. And so…and the political structure in the United States, in California is different than even in Oregon or in Massachusetts. And so the relevant actors and how they’re organized will differ. Thank goodness. Because, we need diversity of response. I’m not recommending that nobody plan. I am recommending that people plan knowing a lot about their own ecological systems, their structure. How fragile are they to this threat versus that threat.
There may be some things that they are very robust, or resilient, and you don’t have to worry as much. You should be looking at your local community and ecology and saying, well, what are some of our worst fears? Let’s not only focus on those, but let’s look at those and think about how do we cope if something like that were to come along. And what are some of the threats?
So California, for example, right now is…Southern California is going through quite a change in availability of water because of our effort in Northern California to protect endangered species. And so we can have spill…That’s not a global change, as people normally think of it, but it is a threat that comes because we’ve linked systems sometimes over very substantial distance. And besides thinking about climate, we should be thinking where are we linked to others and how does that makes us exposed to decisions and actions taken by others that we hadn’t thought about earlier. And how do we react.
Joe Cone: Let’s talk a little bit about your “diagnostic approach for going beyond panaceas” [Subject of the PNAS article.]
E. Ostrom: I make a distinction between frameworks that try to lay out, well, what are some of the variables we should be thinking about. And models that say…or, theories that say, as “x” increases and “y” decreases, “z” will happen. And then models of those processes. So I go framework, theories, models in terms of ever more detail.
What I’m trying to do, and I’m talking a little bit more to some social scientists. They really wanted to have the three or four more most important variables that we’ve got to pay attention to.
And I’m trying to say, no. Do that and there will be lots of places where there are gonna be major threats and you’ve not even thought about the relevant variable. And, please don’t if we make governments owners of everything, presume that that’s going to always be better than having private owners. Or that private owners will always be better than communities. Or that communities will always be better than the others.
So, it’s those kind of broad foci of attention that I’m trying to get people to say, O.K., that’s dangerous. We won’t be resilient if we focus on such narrow solutions and such narrow set of variables. So sometimes let’s take up the difference in a resource system, where I talk about the units in the system – the water, the trees, the snow, or whatever. And I ask about mobility. Having studied water for years, all the way back to the ‘60s, in Southern California -- that’s a flowing resource. And the challenge of getting appropriate rules for managing a flowing resource are more challenging than land. Just sits there. Now, there can be threats to land, but the threats are usually a little bit more obvious and they are stationary threats. You put too much fertilizer on. You don’t have snow cover on, because of global warming. Things of this sort.
Lots of people don’t think about the difference between mobile and stationary resources. But if you’re going to think about designing rules, well, again, let’s look at fisheries and coastal. There’s a lot of interest in individual transferable quota systems. Well, that can work when you really have very good scientific knowledge about the ecological system and the fish, or aquatic species you’re interested in allocating, don’t go huge distances.
It doesn’t…It’s not a viable system for ocean fisheries. And it’s turning out that for some things like salmon, which is partly coastal partly ocean, it’s much more difficult. Because part of the problem is sometimes those salmon are way out there in the ocean and people from other nations come and pick them up, and you have no control over that at all. You’ve got to be thinking about how much flow, where do they go, how does that relate to different governance units.
And the ease of managing lobster on the coast, or sessile mollusks or other things on the coast, is dramatically easier than salmon. And it’s those kinds of things that I want people to recognize that rules must be tailored to the specifics of a system. Now they don’t have to be all the way down to detail, detail, detail to be reasonable. If you treat all fisheries as if the attributes of the fish made no difference at all and there’s one ideal way of managing fisheries, that’s what I’m criticizing.
Joe Cone: You’ve been listening to the first of two parts of a conversation with Dr. Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University. This is Joe Cone of Oregon Sea Grant, and we’re going to take a pause here in the conversation to keep the audio file from becoming too large. Please join us for the rest of this conversation in the file labelled as part two.
[Time: 21:22]
[Part 2 ]
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