Double Coupling: Modeling Subjectivity And Asymmetric Organization In Social-Ecological Systems

Social-ecological organization is a multidimensional phenomenon that combines material and symbolic processes. However, the coupling between social and ecological subsystem is often conceptualized as purely material, thus reducing the symbolic dimension to its behavioral and actionable expressions. In this paper I conceptualize social-ecological systems as doubly coupled. On the one hand, material expressions of socio-cultural processes affect and are affected by ecological dynamics. On the other hand, coupled social-ecological material dynamics are concurrently coupled with subjective dynamics via coding, decoding, personal experience, and human agency. This second coupling operates across two organizationally heterogeneous dimensions: material and symbolic. Although resilience thinking builds on the recognition of organizational asymmetry between living and nonliving systems, it has overlooked the equivalent asymmetry between ecological and socio-cultural subsystems. Three guiding concepts are proposed to formalize double coupling. The first one, social-ecological asymmetry, expands on past seminal work on ecological self-organization to incorporate reflexivity and subjectivity in social-ecological modeling. Organizational asymmetry is based in the distinction between social rules, which are symbolically produced and changed through human agents’ reflexivity and purpose, and biophysical rules, which are determined by functional relations between ecological components. The second guiding concept, conscious power, brings to the fore human agents’ distinctive capacity to produce our own subjective identity and the consequences of this capacity for social-ecological organization. The third concept, congruence between subjective and objective dynamics, redefines sustainability as contingent on congruent relations between material and symbolic processes. Social-ecological theories and analyses based on these three guiding concepts would support the integration of current structuralist-functionalist methods, which sufficiently and appropriately characterize ecological organization, with ethnographic and narrative methods exploring human intentionality, reflexivity, and biographical development

Science for Place-based Socioecological Management: Lessons from the Maya Forest (Chiapas and Petén)

The role humans should play in conservation is a pervasive issue of debate in environmental thinking. Two long-established poles of this debate can be identified on a preservation-sustainable use continuum. At one extreme are use bans and natural science-based, top-down management for preservation. At the other extreme is community-based, multidisciplinary management for sustainable resource use and livelihoods. In this paper, we discuss and illustrate how these two strategies have competed and conflicted in conservation initiatives in the Maya forest (MF) of the Middle Usumacinta River watershed (Guatemala and Mexico). We further argue that both extremes have produced unconvincing results in terms of the region’s sustainability. An alternative consists of sustainability initiatives based on place-based and integrated-knowledge approaches. These approaches imply a flexible combination of disciplines and types of knowledge in the context of nature-human interactions occurring in a place. They can be operationalized within the framework of sustainability science in three steps: 1) characterize the contextual circumstances that are most relevant for sustainability in a place; 2) identify the disciplines and knowledge(s) that need to be combined to appropriately address these contextual circumstances; and 3) decide how these disciplines and knowledge can be effectively combined and integrated. Epistemological flexibility in the design of analytic and implementation frameworks is key. Place-based and integrative-knowledge approaches strive to deal with local context and complexity, including that of human individuals and cultures. The success of any sustainability initiative will ultimately depend on its structural coupling with the context in which it is applied

"Sustainable places": place as a vector of culture

Peer Reviewe

Theorizing Scientific Tourism in Indigenous Community: A Horizontal Co-Production Approach to Research

This conceptual paper explores theoretical linkages between scientific tourism and sustainability outcomes within indigenous communities. Drawing on sustainability science, boundary work theory, indigenous knowledge, and decolonial frameworks, we present a typology of scientific tourism situations mapped according to the degree in which they allow co-production of solutions that combine indigenous and scientific knowledge. This paper is based on the premise that co-produced solutions are essential for sustainability outcomes and they require effective boundary organizations capable of translating and coordinating across cultural paradigms. Two approaches to scientific tourism that can facilitate sustainability outcomes, particularly in indigenous communities, are proposed. The first approach requires cognition of knowledge plurality and researcher reflexivity. The second entails boundary organizations as well as tools and strategies necessary for horizontal co-production. Implications for future scholarship on scientific tourism in marginalized and/or global south communities are discussed

Entanglements of power and spatial inequalities in tTourism in the Mexican Caribbean

Research on entanglements of power inquires into the multiple positions from which power of domination and resistance are exercised across time-spaces. This paper discusses the dominating efforts of colonizers (Europeans, Yucatecans, Mexicans and US-Americans) to territorialize the Mexican Caribbean in order to anchor it to global patterns of accumulation. The hegemonic power to grid, survey and discipline a region that for a long time was conceived as “empty space” becomes entangled with the resistance power exerted by indigenous Maya and local ecosystems. These entanglements of power have converged in contemporary Akumal to produce a geometry of spatial segregation in which Mestizo and Maya workers are segregated by government and businesses from spaces designated for tourist use. My findings show that spatial inequality has been constructed along a pattern of increasing globalization, local reconfigurations of local power positions, and the trans-nationalization of space. In Akumal this pattern could only be imposed by reinterpreting space, through tourism, from the logic of a resource to be exploited, to the logic of a good to be preserved and enjoyed in-situ. Local resistances to this hegemonic pattern have managed to delay and sometimes bend some of its spatial outcomes. The latest of these bends led to the creation of Akumal Pueblo. An analysis of the detailed genealogy of this bending reveals that a great source of resistance power to alter hegemonic spatial outcomes resides in human agents whose identities were formed autonomously, that is, squarely outside the region’s entanglements of power, but who have chosen to re-signify them in order to fully embed themselves within these entanglements

A Mathematical Model to Evaluate the Impact of the Maintenance Strategy on the Service Life of Flexible Pavements

[Abstract] The structural failure of a flexible pavement occurs when the accumulated fatigue damage produced by all the vehicles that have passed over each section exceeds a certain threshold. For this reason, the service life of pavement can be predicted in terms of the damage caused by the passage of a single standard axle and the expected evolution of traffic intensity (measured in equivalent standard axles) over time. In turn, the damage caused by the passage of an axle depends on the vertical load exerted by the wheels on the pavement surface, as given by the technical standard in application, and the depths and mechanical characteristics of the layers that compose the pavement section. In all standards currently in application, the unevenness of the road surface is disregarded. Therefore, no dynamic effects are taken into consideration and the vertical load is simply given in terms of the static weight carried by the standard axle. However, it is obvious that the road profile deteriorates over time, and it has been shown that the increase in the pavement roughness, when considered, gives rise to important dynamic effects that may lead to a dramatic fall in the expected structural service life. In this paper, we present a mathematical formulation for the fatigue analysis of flexible pavements that includes the effects of dynamic axle loading. A pavement deterioration model simulates the sustained growth of the IRI (International Roughness Index) over time. Time is discretized in successive time steps. For each time step, a road surface generation model provides a profile that renders the adequate value of the IRI. A QHV (Quarter Heavy Vehicle) model provides the dynamic amplification function for the loads exerted on the road surface along a virtual ride. This function is conveniently averaged, what gives the value of the so-called effective dynamic load amplification factor (DLA); this is the ratio between the effective dynamic loading and the static loading at each time step. Finally, the damage caused by the passage of the standard axle can be evaluated in terms of the dynamic loading. The product of this damage times the number of equivalent standard axles gives the total fatigue damage produced in the time step. The accumulated fatigue damage at each moment is easily computed by just adding up the damage produced in all the previous time steps. The formulation has been implemented in the software DMSA (Dynamic & Maintenance Simulation App). This tool has been specifically developed for the evaluation of projects in applications for financing submitted to the European Investment Bank (EIB). DMSA allows for quantifying the expected structural service life of the pavement taking into account both the rise of the dynamic axle loads exerted by the traffic as the road profile deteriorates over time and the different preventive maintenance strategies to be taken into consideration.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad; DPI2015-68431-RXunta de Galicia; GRC2014/03

Social Production and Consumption of Space: A Lefebvrian Analysis of the Kumbh Mela

Kumbh Mela is the world’s largest pilgrimage gathering on the shores of the River Ganges. Drawing on Lefebvre’s (1991) trialectics of space framework, this paper interrogates the spatial dynamics of the Kumbh Mela through the spatial meanings espoused by local and international pilgrims. Accounting for dominant discourses that frame the event as occurring in and around a sacred waterscape, five focus groups with pilgrims were conducted at the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, India. The findings indicate that local pilgrims were aware of river pollution, but they used discursive strategies to decouple this material fact from their lived spiritual experiences; from this vantage point the sacred was believed to be insulated from the secular. International pilgrims’ perceptions significantly differed, from those of their local counterparts, in that the sacred waterscape was seen as polluted and the onus was on them to remedy what they believed locals had neglected to do; for this group cleaning the River was a sacred act. The findings indicate that despite the existence of dominant spatial conceptualisations of a sacred waterscape, through use of the space, new and often competing spatial meanings arise that illuminate our understanding of the human condition and the social relations therewithin

Ejercicio físico y salud en supervivientes de cáncer infantil. Un programa educativo para los padres

Introducción: A día de hoy, la amplia mayoría de niños y adolescentes que padecen cáncer sobreviven a la enfermedad y ven perjudicadas su salud y calidad de vida por esta y los tratamientos utilizados para superarla. Este hecho, unido al gran porcentaje de población infantil y adolescente que no cumple con las recomendaciones de ejercicio físico establecidas por la Organización Mundial de la Salud, supone un problema para los supervivientes de cáncer infantil, pues en su gran mayoría tampoco cumplen dichas recomendaciones. De la misma forma, numerosas barreras impiden que este grupo de pacientes lleve a cabo actividad y ejercicio físicos. Para sortearlas, los padres y los profesionales sanitarios podrían ser parte de la estrategia a seguir.Objetivo: La meta del presente trabajo fue la elaboración de un programa de educación para la salud basado en la evidencia dirigido a los padres y madres de niños y adolescentes que han superado un cáncer acerca del ejercicio físico y su relación con la salud y calidad de vida de sus hijos e hijas.Metodología: Se llevó a cabo una revisión de la literatura en las bases de datos PubMed, SPORTDiscus y Cuiden en inglés o español. También se incluyeron páginas web de organizaciones oficiales y guías y protocolos redactados de acuerdo a la evidencia científica disponible sobre el tema. Todo ello según las bases de PRISMA. Una vez terminada, se creó un programa de educación para la salud de 4 sesiones impartido por un equipo sanitario multidisciplinar y especializado en el tema de estudio.Conclusiones: El ejercicio físico resulta benigno para la salud y calidad de vida de los supervivientes de cáncer infantil. Promovido por los padres y madres y un equipo multidisciplinar, este podría mejorar la situación física, psicológica y social de los niños y adolescentes a los que el programa se dirige.Palabras clave: “ejercicio físico”, “supervivientes de cáncer”, “neoplasias”, “calidad de vida”, “pediatría”.<br /