The 28^th Resilience Seminar

Date & time:	Monday August 3rd, 2009 15:00-16:00
Venue:	RIHN Seminar Room 3, 4 ( access)
Title:	"A Spatial Structure for the Institutional Analysis of Common Pool Resource Systems"
Speaker:	Dr. Tom P. Evans, Department of Geography, Indiana University, Indiana, U.S.A.
Language:	English

Abstract:

Dynamics within common pool resource (CPR) systems are the product of a diverse array of socio-economic and biophysical processes. The spatial structure of these systems often influences the management of resources (e.g. forests, water, fish) including the institutional rules that are developed governing how these systems can be used. Prior work has developed frameworks to describe social-ecological systems (SES) to investigate the institutional contexts that make SESs resilient or sustainable, but without articulating the spatial relationships inherent in these systems. The objective of this paper is to develop an ontology designed to describe the actors, resources and relationships within an SES, with an emphasis on the spatial relationships inherent in human-environment interactions. The field of computer science uses the term "ontology" to refer to an implementation of a conceptual framework. From an analytical perspective, ontologies can be used to translate data compiled for case studies into a formal database that enables cross-site analysis. Many elements of SESs have explicitly spatial characteristics that in part affect the dynamics within those systems such as the proximity of actors to a resource, or the size of land holdings. The ontology presented here emphasizes the actors and resources in a system as well as the spatial characteristics and relationships that relate to the institutional factors affecting system dynamics. A series of three distinct case studies (a community forest in Midwest United States, an irrigation network in southwest United States and a fishery system in Mexico) are used to demonstrate how this ontological framework can be applied to specific CPRs and social-ecological systems more generally.