To address the global challenges of environmental degradation and poverty we need to vastly improve our understanding of natural resource governance—the social and political processes by which people make decisions about the environment. Yet empirical methods for assessing resource governance remain spread across several disciplines, and are often costly and difficult to replicate. Scientists and policy makers thus continue to lack a coherent set of methods and data for understanding resource governance in different contexts and at different scales. Even in our current era of ‘big data’, governance remains a blind spot. Through this project my main research objective was to help address this gap by testing a set of existing and new interdisciplinary methods observing dimensions of resource governance. My focus was on combining qualitative and quantitative approaches, and on integrating potential new big/open data approaches.
I conducted this research with a focus on resource governance in the southern African savanna woodland biome—the world’s biggest savannah, spanning 12 countries from Angola to Tanzania. This vast area contains a network of over 10,000 research plots, coordinated by the Social-Ecological Observatory for Southern African Woodlands (SEOSAW)—a voluntary research network of 19 universities from Europe, North America and southern Africa. They have pooled their data to form the world’s largest dataset on savannas, but they lack critical methods and analyses on resource governance. During this project I worked as a part of SEOSAW to test methods for observing resource governance in the region.
As a Marie Curie Global Fellowship, an additional objective of this project was to further develop my technical skills and professional network through training and mentorship from academics at three world-class hubs of sustainability research: Prof. Brian Robinson at McGill University (Montreal, Canada, outgoing phase); Dr Casey Ryan at the University of Edinburgh (UK, secondment), and Dr Tim Daw at Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) (Stockholm University, incoming phase).
The main conclusions of the action were:
1. The finding that, while field-based approaches to generating data on governance are likely to remain the most robust and precise, such methods are likely to remain methodologically arduous, ethically difficult and very costly (even despite advances in remote data generation and automated data processing). Analysts in search of cost effective options are thus likely to need to use the increasingly wide array of interdisciplinary mixed-method (and not necessarily highly quantitative) approaches that are emerging in social-ecological systems research.
2. Empirical research showing that human factors (including dimensions of protected area governance) have significantly altered the structure of almost all of the world’s remaining savanna woodlands. The paper argues that savannas should thus be assumed to be anthropic systems by default—and that unless human factors (including aspects of governance) are accounted for in empirical analyses, savanna ecology risks becoming, in essence, an archaeological discipline examining the functioning of historical biomes that no longer commonly exist in the real world.
3. A theory-based piece proposing radical alternatives for assessing and rewarding carbon sequestration (and other ecological outcomes) in ecological markets, whereby carbon suppliers would be rewarded based on their adaptive capacity and resilience (including aspects of their governance regime), rather than for inherently uncertain estimates of carbon change.
