Co-management institutions, knowledge, and learning: Adapting to change in the Arctic

How vulnerable are Arctic Indigenous peoples to climate change? What are their relevant adaptations, and what are the prospects for increasing their ability to deal with further change? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change makes little mention of Indigenous peoples, and then only as victims of changes beyond their control. This view of Indigenous peoples as passive and helpless needs to be challenged. Indigenous peoples, including the Canadian Inuit, are keen observers of environmental change and have lessons to offer about how to adapt, a view consistent with the Inuit self-image of being creative and adaptable. There are three sources of adaptations to impacts of climate change: 1) Indigenous cultural adaptations to the variability of the Arctic environment, discussed here in the context of the communities of Sachs Harbour and Arctic Bay; 2) short-term adjustments (coping strategies) that are beginning to appear in recent years in response to climate change; and 3) new adaptive responses that may become available through new institutional processes such as co-management. Institutions are related to knowledge development and social learning that can help increase adaptive capacity and reduce vulnerability. Two co-management institutions that have the potential to build Inuit adaptive capacity are the Fisheries Joint Management Committee (established under the Inuvialuit Final Agreement), and the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board.Jusqu’à quel point les peuples autochtones de l’Arctique sont-ils vulnérables au changement climatique? Comment s’y adaptent-ils et quelles sont leurs aptitudes potentielles à affronter les changements encore à venir? Le Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ne mentionne qu’à peine les peuples autochtones, et seulement sous l’aspect de victimes impuissantes de changements qui échappent à leur contrôle. Cette conception des peuples autochtones comme passifs et désarmés doit être sérieusement revue. Les peuples autochtones, y compris les Inuit du Canada, sont des observateurs avisés du changement environnemental et peuvent donner des leçons sur les possibilités de s’y adapter, idée qui s’accorde par ailleurs à l’image de créativité et d’adaptabilité que les Inuit ont d’eux-mêmes. Il existe trois fondements à ces adaptations aux impacts du changement climatique: 1) les adaptations culturelles autochtones à la variabilité de l’environnement arctique, dont nous discutons ici dans le cadre des communautés de Sachs Harbour et d’Arctic Bay; 2) des ajustements à court terme (stratégies au cas par cas) qui ont fait leur apparition au cours des dernières années en réponse au changement climatique; et 3) de nouvelles réponses adaptatives apparues dans la foulée de nouveaux processus institutionnels tels que la co-gestion. Certaines institutions en lien avec le développement de la connaissance et l’apprentissage social peuvent contribuer à accroître le potentiel d’adaptation et à réduire la vulnérabilité. Deux institutions de co-gestion qui ont le potentiel d’accroître la capacité adaptative des Inuit sont le Comité mixte de gestion des pêches (établit par le Inuvialuit Final Agreement) et le Conseil de gestion des ressources fauniques du Nunavut

The Birthday Letters Myth

Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters (1998) has, for the most part, been judged in terms of its autobiographical content rather than for its poetic achievement. The poems are addressed to Hughes's first wife Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963 shortly after they separated. The poems describe their relationship and deal with the aftermath of her suicide and Hughes's role in managing and promoting her writings, in many of which he was characterised as a villain. Hughes has been criticised for his subjective treatment of these events in Birthday Letters. Furthermore, the drama of the poems takes place in an apparently fatalistic universe which has led to accusations that Hughes uses fatalism in order to create a deterministic explanation for Plath's suicide and absolve himself. In The Birthday Letters Myth I will be arguing that Hughes's mythopoeia in Birthday Letters is part of his overtly subjective challenge to the discourses that have hitherto provided the "story" of his life. In Birthday Letters, there are two versions of Hughes: the younger Hughes who is character involved in the drama, and the older Hughes, looking back on his life, interpreting 'omens' and 'portents' and creating a meaningful narrative from the chaos. By his own method, Hughes highlights the subjectivity and retrospective determinism of those narratives (or 'myths') about his life that often uncritically adopt the dramatic dialectic of' victim' and 'villain' in Plath's poems. In Birthday Letters, Hughes adopts the symbols and drama from Plath's writings in order to create his own dramatic "myth" that resists contamination from the other discourses that have perpetuated the drama within her poems. The underlying myth of Birthday Letters is the shamanic myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Hughes believed the role of the poet and that of the shaman were analogous and in Birthday Letters, as Orpheus, he goes on an imaginary journey to recover his private assumptions and conclusions about his relationship with Plath. In doing so, he achieves a redemptive, cathartic healing image for himself and the reader

Sandy beach social–ecological systems at risk: regime shifts, collapses, and governance challenges

Approximately half of the world’s ice-free ocean coastline is composed of sandy beaches, which support a higher level of recreational use than any other ecosystem. However, the contribution of sandy beaches to societal welfare is under increasing risk from local and non-local pressures, including expanding human development and climate-related stressors. These pressures are impairing the capacity of beaches to meet recreational demand, provide food, protect livelihoods, and maintain biodiversity and water quality. This will increase the likelihood of social–ecological collapses and regime shifts, such that beaches will sustain neither the original ecosystem function nor the related services and societal goods and benefits that they provide. These social–ecological systems at the land–sea interface are subject to market forces, weak governance institutions, and societal indifference: most people want a beach, but few recognize it as an ecosystem at risk.CSIC: Grupos ID 3

Transdisciplinary partnerships for sustainability: an evaluation guide

Transdisciplinary research, in which academics and actors from outside the academy co-produce knowledge, is an important approach to address urgent sustainability challenges. Indeed, to meet these real-world challenges, governments, universities, development agencies, and civil society organizations have made substantial investments in transdisciplinary partnerships. Yet to date, our understanding of the performance, as well as impacts, of these partnerships for sustainability is limited. Here, we provide a guide to assess the performance and impacts of transdisciplinary partnerships for sustainability. We offer key steps to navigate and examine the partnership process for continuous improvement, and to understand how transdisciplinary partnership is contributing to sustainable futures

Linking Wellbeing and Resilience to Improve Fishery Governance

Transdisciplinary approaches and innovative combinations of social and ecological theory are required to deal with complexity and change in fisheries and other human-ecological systems. This paper examines the interplay and complementarities that emerge by linking resilience and social wellbeing approaches to better understand and govern fisheries. After first discussing the nature of resilience and of wellbeing, and the limitations of applying each concept individually, the paper explores the interplay of resilience and wellbeing in fostering a social-ecological perspective that promises more appropriate management and policy actions. Five key points of interplay are examined: (1) the limitations of simplistic optimization thinking; (2) the role of human agency and values; (3) understandings of scale; (4) insights on “controlling variables” and (5) perspectives on thresholds and boundaries. This analysis leads to a series of insights for enhancing transdisciplinary research and fishery governance.Keywords: Well-Being and Fishery Governance, Fisheries Economics, Special Topic

From Isotopes to TK Interviews: Towards Interdisciplinary Research in Fort Resolution and the Slave River Delta, Northwest Territories

Evolving research in Fort Resolution and the Slave River Delta, Northwest Territories, aims to improve understanding of how the natural ecosystem functions and responds to various environmental stressors, as well as to enhance the stewardship of natural resources and the capacity of local residents to respond to change. We seek to integrate approaches that span the natural and social sciences and traditional knowledge understandings of change, employing a research design developed in response to the concerns of a northern community. In doing so, we have strived for a research process that is collaborative, interdisciplinary, policy-oriented, and reflective of northern priorities. These elements characterize the new northern research paradigm increasingly promoted by various federal funding agencies, northern partners, and communities. They represent a holistic perspective in the pursuit of solutions to address complex environmental and socioeconomic concerns about impacts of climate change and resource development on northern societies. However, efforts to fulfill the objectives of this research paradigm are associated with a host of on-the-ground challenges. These challenges include (but are not restricted to) developing effective community partnerships and collaboration and documenting change through interdisciplinary approaches. Here we provide an overview of the components that comprise our interdisciplinary research program and offer an accounting of our formative experiences in confronting these challenges

Human dimensions of ecosystem-based management: Lessons in managing trade-offs from the Northern Shrimp Fishery in Northern Peninsula, Newfoundland

The final publication is available at Elsevier via https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2018.08.018 © 2018. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Fisheries can have significant impacts on the structure and function of marine ecosystems, including impacts on habitats and non-target species. As a result, management agencies face growing calls to account for the ecosystem impacts of fishing, while navigating the political and economic interests of diverse stakeholders. This paper assesses the impacts of two specific factors on the attitudes and well-being of shrimp fishers in the context of a selective fisheries closure designed to protect crabs in the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada: (1) the species portfolios of fishers; and (2) democratic rulemaking. The results of this analysis suggest that shrimp fishers were more likely to support selective closures for the shrimp fishery if they also fished for crab, and felt they had an influence on the management of the fishery. The results further indicate that species portfolio diversification had a positive and statistically significant impact on the subjective economic well-being of fishers. This study contributes to an emerging literature on the human dimensions of ecosystem-based fisheries management, highlighting opportunities to address trade-offs in fisheries through species diversification and by enhancing the role and influence of fishers in management processes.OceanCanada Partnership through a grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canad

What makes a young assertive bystander? The effect of intergroup contact, empathy, cultural openness, and in-Group bias on assertive bystander intervention intentions.

The present research tests the indirect effects of intergroup contact on adolescents’ bystander intervention intentions via four potential mediators: “empathy,” “cultural openness,” “in-group bias,” and “intergroup anxiety.” British adolescents (N = 855), aged 11–13 years, completed measures of intergroup (interethnic) contact and the identified indirect variables. Intended bystander behavior was measured by presenting participants with an intergroup (immigrant) name-calling scenario. Participants rated the extent to which they would behave assertively. The findings extend previous intergroup contact research by showing a significant indirect effect of intergroup contact on assertive bystander intentions via empathy, cultural openness and in-group bias (but not via intergroup anxiety). Theoretical implications and practical suggestions for future prejudice-reduction interventions are discussed