Tapaiitam : human modifications of the coast as adaptations to environmental change, Wemindji, eastern James Bay

Concerns about environmental changes have prompted scholars to search for adaptation lessons and insights from local ecosystem-based management approaches. Unfortunately, Eurocentric misconceptions of wilderness persist as powerful obstacles to understanding and appreciating aboriginal land and resource management. This thesis provides a comprehensive case analysis of the James Bay Wemindji Crees' responses and adaptations to coastal change. Specifically, it examines how Crees modify the coast for subsistence resource harvesting, how these modifications and associated harvesting strategies are intended to function, and their significance for local and mainstream society. I investigate past (as far back as four-hundred years) and present land management practices, as well as future initiatives, through ethnographic methods, field surveys, and remote image measurements. Crees' local knowledge is shown to inform camp location decision-making and the maintenance and/or creation of hunting areas. A dynamic interplay of various bio-physical, socio-cultural, and technological factors is reflected through persistence and change in camp locations. A humanized landscape is further evidenced by the dikes, tillage areas, burnings, fish weirs, and forest-corridors that Cree construct to increase resource predictability. I show that Cree adaptations to environmental change are informed by a commitment to maintaining tradition while also embracing contemporary opportunities. Cree resource management also seeks to harmonize investments in place by opposing or delaying environmental change, while remaining flexible and open to experimentation in accordance with change. The resulting relationships between Crees and their environment have immediate implications for Wemindji Cree efforts to establish a local-management based protected area. These relationships are also instructional for mainstream society as it grapples to find appropriate responses and adaptations to environmental change

Reprint of: Participant engagement in environmentally focused social network research

Environmentally focused social network analysis (Env. SNA) has increasingly benefited from engagement, which refers to the process of incorporating the individuals, organizations, actors, stakeholders or other study participants into the research process. Research about engagement in the wider field of environmental management shows that successful engagement often requires significant planning and exchange among researchers and stakeholders. While there is no one size fits all approach, several important guiding principles have been established. To date, this engagement literature has not focused specifically on SNA, even though several examples of engaged SNA exist in the literature and point to some specific challenges to engagement when working with relational data. Drawing upon data from a survey of researchers who have incorporated engagement into Env. SNA, we focus specifically on the goals, scope, effectiveness, benefits and challenges of doing engaged Env. SNA research. We additionally highlight four case studies and demonstrate that researchers and participants find engagement to be a valuable experience with benefits in the researchers’ understanding of the context and meaning of their findings. Finally, we provide recommendations to scholars looking to embark on engaged Env. SNA research

Vulnerability and its discontents: the past, present, and future of climate change vulnerability research

The concept of vulnerability is well established in the climate change literature, underpinning significant research effort. The ability of vulnerability research to capture the complexities of climate-society dynamics has been increasingly questioned, however. In this paper, we identify, characterize, and evaluate concerns over the use of vulnerability approaches in the climate change field based on a review of peer-reviewed articles published since 1990 (n = 587). Seven concerns are identified: neglect of social drivers, promotion of a static understanding of human-environment interactions, vagueness about the concept of vulnerability, neglect of cross-scale interactions, passive and negative framing, limited influence on decision-making, and limited collaboration across disciplines. Examining each concern against trends in the literature, we find some of these concerns weakly justified, but others pose valid challenges to vulnerability research. Efforts to revitalize vulnerability research are needed, with priority areas including developing the next generation of empirical studies, catalyzing collaboration across disciplines to leverage and build on the strengths of divergent intellectual traditions involved in vulnerability research, and linking research to the practical realities of decision-making

Fisheries monitoring in Puerto Morazán, Nicaragua: methodological considerations

Fisheries monitoring is a fundamental component to understanding how these natural resources areresponding to pressures, both anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic. A good monitoring program must start with clear goals and objectives that take into consideration the needs, values, and opinions of all stakeholders. No one person can answer all the questions necessary for monitoring. This document has laid out ideas, questions and recommendations to facilitate the development of a fisheries program for CIDEA

A social-ecological approach to estuary restoration planning: integrating social networks into landscapes

Restoring the Salish Sea and its watersheds is vital for human wellbeing in the Pacific Northwest. However, restoring large regions is challenging from both social and ecological perspectives. Many government, non-profit, business, and citizen groups, acting at different scales (from local to national), need to coordinate their efforts to achieve restoration goals. Furthermore, the areas where groups work - formally or informally - often do not align with watershed boundaries, a phenomenon known as scale mismatch, which can undermine restoration efforts and natural resource governance more broadly. Thus, understanding how restoration groups are connected to one another and across the landscape is essential for restoration success. We provide this network perspective by integrating social and hydrologic networks and assess how social collaboration bridge hydrologic boundaries at multiple spatial levels. We then discuss how network actors perceive social borders and collaborations affect their restoration work. We use salmon recovery in the Whidbey Basin region, northeast Puget Sound, WA as a case study. We surveyed and interviewed people (n = 167 and a subset of 94, respectively) at local, county, state, federal, tribal government, non-profits, citizen groups, farming and shellfishing industries, and dike/drainage districts. We use the survey data to build a social network of organizations involved with restoration and relate this to the hydrologic network. This social-ecological integration allows us to visualize and identify where the structure of social collaborations may hinder, or promote restoration efforts. Our in-depth qualitative interviews ground our structural analysis revealing how collaborations and borders affect restoration. We present our framework as a social-ecological planning tool that can be integrated with ecological planning efforts such as WA Dept. of Ecology’s Watershed Characterization Project to better restoration efforts

Social-ecological network analysis of scale mismatches: an application to estuary watershed restoration

Incongruences between governance boundaries and the natural resource system they are meant to govern is a fundamental sustainability challenge, often causing failed or inefficient resource management. While diagnosing such incongruences, called scale mismatches, can improve natural resource governance (NRG), few spatially explicit, rigorous approaches exist. We develop and apply a novel, spatially explicit social-ecological network analysis (SENA) framework to map and analyze scale mismatch. We analyze structural patterns among local and regional organizations, defined by their geographic extent, to assess scale mismatch bridging. We then combine our SENA with existing ecological data to identify social-ecological hot-spots (i.e., areas with both social and ecological problems) and low hanging fruit (i.e., areas with ecological problems and social processes conducive to NRG success). We demonstrate our approach by focusing on large-scale estuary restoration in Puget Sound, USA. Analysis shows potentially problematic areas in nearshore environments, where collaboration networks measured by density (percentage of possible network connections) and perceived productivity are weakest. Many areas also have high centralization (a few nodes hold the network together) increasing the network cohesion dependence on key organizations. We further find that higher centralization is related with lower productivity, and that lower productivity is also found at low and high levels of network density. Our analysis aids policy makers by identifying areas where governance capacity needs strengthening and considers these in tandem with ecological conditions. Our work advances SENA by developing a novel, multi-level governance approach to assess scale mismatch

Social-Ecological network analysis of scale- mismatches in estuary watershed restoration

Resource management boundaries seldom align with environmental systems, which can lead to social and ecological problems. Mapping and analyzing how resource management organizations in different areas collaborate can provide vital information to help overcome such misalignment. Few quantitative approaches exist, however, to analyze social collaborations alongside environmental patterns, especially among local and regional organizations (i.e., in multilevel governance settings). This paper develops and applies such an approach using social-ecological network analysis (SENA), which considers relationships among and between social and ecological units. The framework and methods are shown using an estuary restoration case from Puget Sound, United States. Collaboration patterns and quality are analyzed among local and regional organizations working in hydrologically connected areas. These patterns are correlated with restoration practitioners\u27 assessments of the productivity of their collaborations to inform network theories for natural resource governance. The SENA is also combined with existing ecological data to jointly consider social and ecological restoration concerns. Results show potentially problematic areas in nearshore environments, where collaboration networks measured by density (percentage of possible network connections) and productivity are weakest. Many areas also have high centralization (a few nodes hold the network together), making network cohesion dependent on key organizations. Although centralization and productivity are inversely related, no clear relationship between density and productivity is observed. This research can help practitioners to identify where governance capacity needs strengthening and jointly consider social and ecological concerns. It advances SENA by developing a multilevel approach to assess social-ecological (or social-environmental) misalignments, also known as scale mismatches

Securing a Future: Cree Hunters' Resistance and Flexibility to Environmental Changes, Wemindji, James Bay

Accounts of the adaptive responses of northern aboriginal peoples include examples of purposive modification and management of ecologically favorable areas to increase resource productivity. Practices include clearing of trees, burning of berry patches and construction of fish weirs. This paper examines the adaptive capacity of the northern aboriginal community of Wemindji, east coast James Bay, in relation to long term landscape changes induced by coastal uplift processes. Associated changes are noticeable within a human lifetime and include the infilling of bays, the merger of islands with the mainland, as well as shifts in vegetative and wildlife communities. In response, generations of Cree hunters have actively modified the landscape using a variety of practices that include the construction of mud dykes and the cutting of tuuhiikaan, which are corridors in the coastal forest, to retain and enhance desirable conditions for goose hunting. We provide an account of the history, construction, and design of these features as well as the motivations and social learning that inform them. We reveal a complex and underappreciated dynamic between human resistance and adaptation to environmental change. While landscape modifications are motivated by a desire to increase resource productivity and predictability, they also reflect an intergenerational commitment to the maintenance of established hunting places as important connections with the past. Our findings support a revised perspective on aboriginal human agency in northern landscape modification and an enhanced role for aboriginal communities in adaptive planning for environmental change

Who collaborates and why: Assessment and diagnostic of governance network integration for salmon restoration in Whidbey Basin, Puget Sound, WA

Governance silos are settings in which different organizations work in isolation and avoid sharing information and strategies. Siloes are a fundamental challenge for environmental planning and problem solving, which generally requires collaboration. Siloes can be overcome by creating governance networks. Studying the structure and function of these networks is important for understanding how to create institutional arrangements that can respond to the biophysical dynamics of a specific natural resource system (i.e., social-ecological, or institutional fit). Using the case of salmon restoration in a sub-basin of Puget Sound, USA, we assess network integration, considering three different reasons for network collaborations (i.e., mandated, funded, and shared interest relationships) and analyze how these different collaboration types relate to productivity based on practitioner\u27s assessments. We also illustrate how specific and targeted network interventions might enhance the network. To do so, we use a mixed methods approach that combines quantitative social network analysis (SNA) and qualitative interview analysis. Overall, the sub-basin\u27s governance network is fairly well integrated, but several concerning gaps exist. Funded, mandated, and shared interest relationships lead to different network patterns. Mandated relationships are associated with lower productivity than shared interest relationships, highlighting the benefit of genuine collaboration in collaborative watershed governance. Lastly, quantitative and qualitative data comparisons strengthen recent calls to incorporate geographic space and the role of individual actors versus organizational culture into natural resource governance research using SNA

Participant engagement in environmentally focused social network research

Environmentally focused social network analysis (Env. SNA) has increasingly benefited from engagement, which refers to the process of incorporating the individuals, organizations, actors, stakeholders or other study participants into the research process. Research about engagement in the wider field of environmental management shows that successful engagement often requires significant planning and exchange among researchers and stakeholders. While there is no one size fits all approach, several important guiding principles have been established. To date, this engagement literature has not focused specifically on SNA, even though several examples of engaged SNA exist in the literature and point to some specific challenges to engagement when working with relational data. Drawing upon data from a survey of researchers who have incorporated engagement into Env. SNA, we focus specifically on the goals, scope, effectiveness, benefits and challenges of doing engaged Env. SNA research. We additionally highlight four case studies and demonstrate that researchers and participants find engagement to be a valuable experience with benefits in the researchers’ understanding of the context and meaning of their findings. Finally, we provide recommendations to scholars looking to embark on engaged Env. SNA research