ECOSENSUS: developing collaborative learning systems for stakeholding development in environmental planning

ECOSENSUS *(Electronic/Ecological Collaborative Sensemaking Support System) investigates the socio-technological issues around developing collaboration tools for participatory environmental decision making amongst (a) marginalised natural resource users, (b) professional 'experts' from different countries, and (c) key decision makers associated with managing ecosystems. An integral activity is the production of open content learning resources to support stakeholders in facilitating distributed environmental decision making. This involves the integrated use of three open source software tools: Moodle (online course management), Compendium (dialogue mapping) and uDig (user friendly desktop/internet GIS). In the first ECOSENSUS-1 phase, the pilot collaborative effort has been focused on supporting stakeholders in developing adaptive management plans for the Rupununi Wetlands in southern Guyana, a region rich in flora and fauna but also under intense pressure to expand the exploitation of its natural resources, including timber, gold, and commercially viable fish species. Results of the ECOSENSUS-1 are briefly described along with some preliminary notes on the current ECOSENUS-2 phase of associated research in Guyana supported by an additional grant from DEFRA. The paper prompts questions on how ECOSENSUS can feed into wider open source course development using the LabSpace on the OpenLearn project

Strengthening America's Best Idea: An Independent Review of the National Park Service's Natural Resource Stewardship and Science Directorate

NRSS requested that an independent panel of the National Academy conduct a review of its effectiveness in five core functions, its relationships with key internal stakeholders, and its performance measurement system. Among other things, the National Park Service's Natural Resource Stewardship and Science Directorate (NRSS) is responsible for providing usable natural and social science information throughout the National Park Service (NPS). NRSS leadership requested this review of the directorate's performance on five core functions, its relationships with key internal NPS stakeholders, and its performance measurement system.Main FindingsThe panel determined that NRSS is a highly regarded organization that provides independent, credible scientific expertise and technical information. The panel also found that NRSS and NPS have additional opportunities to advance natural resource stewardship throughout the Service. If implemented, the panel's eight major recommendations will: (1) help the Service respond to the parks' environmental challenges while raising public awareness about the condition of these special places; (2) strengthen NRSS as an organization; (3) promote scientifically based decision-making at the national, regional, and park levels; and (4) improve the existing performance measurement system

New Orleans, the Chesapeake, and the Future of Environmental Assessment: Overcoming the Natural Resources Law of Unintended Consequences

This is a tale of two disappearing wetlands - those surrounding Louisiana\u27s Gulf Coast and those fringing the Chesapeake Bay - each providing new insight into the old quandary of unintended consequences that lies at the center of natural resource management. Louisiana\u27s losses follow three hundred years of natural resource engineering to accomplish effective flood control along the Mississippi River, while the Chesapeake losses follow implementation of among the most meticulous wetlands-protection programs of its time. And yet, New Orleans suffered a catastrophic flood, and Chesapeake wetlands continue to disappear. How could this happen? Call it the Natural Resources Law of Unintended Consequences. As described in the piece, Louisiana\u27s pioneering natural resource managers tried to prevent flooding by channelizing the Mississippi River. However, river management efforts failed to account for the interdependence of laterally disparate elements of large-scale regional ecosystems, and interfering with the natural cycle of floodplain sediment deposition starved the coastal wetlands that could have mitigated the storm surge that drowned New Orleans after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Having learned this lesson, Virginia resource managers attempted to protect critical intertidal wetlands around the Chesapeake by establishing a development-free jurisdictional boundary landward of the vulnerable wetlands. Nevertheless, when landowners then hardened the shoreline up to the legal boundary, they inadvertently doomed the very wetlands intended for protection by hydrologically severing them from the natural shoreline systems that sustain them during such periods of sea-level rise as we are now experiencing. This time, program designers had failed to account for how ecosystems evolve over time in response to foreseeable external factors. The ironic result in both cases is that well-intended natural resource management accomplished the exact opposite of what policymakers had hoped for. Natural resource management inevitably proceeds from a state of disquieting uncertainty; we never have all the science, all the data, or all the information we need to make vexing management decisions about such complex adaptive systems as regional ecosystems. But the lesson is not that natural resource planning is a hopeless endeavor dooming us to failure no matter how well-intended. The lesson is to better align assessment techniques with the model of network connectivity demonstrated by complex adaptive systems. Complex adaptive systems - found not only in nature but also in economics, organizational behavior, developmental learning, game theory, and neuroscience - are characterized by interaction between components within a unified system that enables change to reverberate back and forth within the system, confounding more linear interpretations of cause and effect. Ideally, environmental intervention should thus follow assessment that takes full account of: (1) how the networked components of regional ecosystems work laterally; (2) how the systems work over ecologically meaningful periods of time; and (3) how remote network factors may intervene from beyond the forward linear path of conventional causal assessment. This third element is the most challenging, and the least satisfied by conventional assessment practices. Whereas traditional causal assessment begins with the proposed action and traces only those potential impacts that flow forward in time from the proposal, the Chesapeake story shows that some natural resource management strategies will fail on account of network interplay that will not appear in this forward-limited chain of projected events. A better approach would also consider how remote network factors might independently interfere with the success of the proposal. In other words, rather than simply considering what undesirable results might flow forward from the proposed action, assessment should also ask what foreseeable network factors are likely to intervene, at any point in the foreseeable time-line, that could cause the proposed action to become itself undesirable. Such causally-ambidextrous assessment techniques are frequently used in consumer product design, including software quality assurance, by which testers consider not only such harms as the product might cause, but also what uses might harm the product, what circumstances might arise in which the product could be misused, and therefore, the circumstances in which product use might fully backfire, producing a result opposite the product\u27s intended purpose. Ultimately, the message of the lost Louisiana and Chesapeake wetlands is that more ambitious environmental assessment has been made necessary by our own increasing power to alter the natural environment. The efficacy with which we have reshaped the Mississippi Delta since resource planning began in New Orleans (and the resulting devastation of the City after Hurricane Katrina) shows that we have simply become too good at what we do - too effective at natural resource management - and that assessment technique must advance to match our awesome capacity for environmental modification. The piece explores ways of mitigating the added burden of more ambitious assessment practices, but urges natural resources to begin experimenting with more causally-sophisticated assessment. Only by grappling with this problem can we hope to overcome the Natural Resources Law of Unintended Consequences

Proceedings of the Learning Workshop on Livelihoods Analysis. Long An, Vietnam 19-20 November 2002

Sustainable Aquaculture for Poverty Alleviation (SAPA) is a strategy under the overall national program for hunger eradication and poverty reduction. This reflects high attention by the Ministry of Fisheries (MOFI) to the poor. Since the strategy was initiated, several actions have been taken. Recently, conferences and meetings were conducted in Hanoi, Thai Nguyen and Quang Tri. Consequently we also have workshops on a regional basis, and today we are pleased to conduct a workshop in Long An on livelihoods analysis. Now at the Ministry, there are more than 340 projects in aquaculture to attack poverty. The launch of SAPA has been given a high priority among support agencies. Recently Mr Gill of the World Bank and the Ministry agreed that they would act to strengthen aquaculture for poverty reduction. So today with the support of the Long An People’s Committee, NACA and STREAM we have a workshop to strengthen learning about livelihoods analysis. (PDF has 61 pages.

Co-management: A Synthesis of the Lessons Learned from the DFID Fisheries Management Science Programme

For the last eleven years, the UK Department for International Development (DfID) have been funding research projects to support the sustainable management of fisheries resources (both inland and marine) in developing countries through the Fisheries Management Science Programme (FMSP). A number of these projects that have been commissioned in this time have examined fisheries co-management. While these projects have, for the most part, been implemented separately, the FMSP has provided an opportunity to synthesise and draw together some of the information generated by these projects. We feel that there is value in distilling some of the important lessons and describing some of the useful tools and examples and making these available through a single, accessible resource. The wealth of information generated means that it is impossible to cover everything in detail but it is hoped that this synthesis will at least provide an overview of the co-management process together with some useful information relating to implementing co-management in a developing country context and links to the more detailed re-sources available, in particular on information systems for co-managed fisheries, participatory fish stock assessment (ParFish) and adaptive learning that have, in particular, been drawn upon for this synthesis. This synthesis is aimed at anyone interested in fisheries management in a developing country context

Citizen science and natural resource governance: program design for vernal pool policy innovation

Effective natural resource policy depends on knowing what is needed to sustain a resource and building the capacity to identify, develop, and implement flexible policies. This retrospective case study applies resilience concepts to a 16-year citizen science program and vernal pool regulatory development process in Maine, USA. We describe how citizen science improved adaptive capacities for innovative and effective policies to regulate vernal pools. We identified two core program elements that allowed people to act within narrow windows of opportunity for policy transformation, including (1) the simultaneous generation of useful, credible scientific knowledge and construction of networks among diverse institutions, and (2) the formation of diverse leadership that promoted individual and collective abilities to identify problems and propose policy solutions. If citizen science program leaders want to promote social-ecological systems resilience and natural resource policies as outcomes, we recommend they create a system for internal project evaluation, publish scientific studies using citizen science data, pursue resources for program sustainability, and plan for leadership diversity and informal networks to foster adaptive governance. Effective natural resource policy depends on knowing what is needed to sustain a resource and building the capacity to identify, develop, and implement flexible policies. This retrospective case study applies resilience concepts to a 16-year citizen science program and vernal pool regulatory development process in Maine, USA. We describe how citizen science improved adaptive capacities for innovative and effective policies to regulate vernal pools. We identified two core program elements that allowed people to act within narrow windows of opportunity for policy transformation, including (1) the simultaneous generation of useful, credible scientific knowledge and construction of networks among diverse institutions, and (2) the formation of diverse leadership that promoted individual and collective abilities to identify problems and propose policy solutions. If citizen science program leaders want to promote social-ecological systems resilience and natural resource policies as outcomes, we recommend they create a system for internal project evaluation, publish scientific studies using citizen science data, pursue resources for program sustainability, and plan for leadership diversity and informal networks to foster adaptive governance

The ECOSENSUS Project: Co-Evolving Tools, Practices and Open Content for Participatory Natural Resource Management

ECOSENSUS (Electronic/Ecological Collaborative Sensemaking Support System)[www.ecosensus.info] is an ESRC e-Social Science pilot project, using a Participatory Action Research methodology to evolve tools and work practices for collaborative work in environmental and natural resource management between a European-based team, and stakeholders involved in the region of concern, the North Rupununi District of Guyana. To promote long term capacity building in the region and beyond, the project's outputs will be disseminated as open source learning resources. Given the disparities in knowledge and power in such a project, central to our work are issues of stakeholder empowerment in the geographical modelling, interpretation and decision making practices that constitute environmental management. We argue that in e-Science, such factors have yet to receive much attention. This paper reports work accomplished to date: progress towards an environment which integrates GIS modelling with participatory deliberation about the implications of the models, and reactions from the indigenous Amerindians to this tool

APFIC Regional Workshop on "Mainstreaming Fisheries Co-management"

This is the report of the APFIC regional workshop on "Mainstreaming fisheries co-management" held in Siem Reap, Cambodia from August 9-12, 2005 . The goal of the workshop was to provide a forum to learn from past experience and to promote devolved management of fisheries. Participants at the workshop had the opportunity to be exposed to a range of coastal and inland fisheries co-management interventions and the elaboration of approaches needed to make fisheries co-management a "mainstream" activity in developing countries. The objective of the workshop was to develop summary conclusions on the status of co-management in the region and provide some concrete recommendations for action towards mainstreaming fishery co-management in the Asia-Pacific region. The report contains the action plan and recommendations of the workshop. Many agencies (both governmental and non-governmental) are striving to improve the livelihoods of poor people that are dependent on aquatic resources by including these stakeholders in the planning and implementation of fisheries management. Many states have adopted decentralization as the way to implement future fisheries management, especially in developing countries, which often involves a partnership between government and the local communities, i.e. a co-management approach. The challenge is to find a way for co-management to become a mainstream practice of both government and non-government organizations and communities