Panaceas and diversification of environmental policy

Abstract

We consider panacea formation in the framework of adaptive learning and decision for social-ecological systems (SESs). Institutions for managing such systems must address multiple timescales of ecological change, as well as features of the social community in which the ecosystem policy problem is embedded. Response of the SES to each candidate institution must be modeled and treated as a stochastic process with unknown parameters to be estimated. A fundamental challenge is to design institutions that are not vulnerable to capture by subsets of the community that self-organize to direct the institution against the overall social interest. In a world of episodic structural change, such as SESs, adaptive learning can lock in to a single institution, model, or parameter estimate. Policy diversification, leading to escape from panacea traps, can come from monitoring indicators of episodic change on slow timescales, minimax regret decision making, active experimentation to accelerate model identification, mechanisms for broadening the set of models or institutions under consideration, and processes for discovery of new institutions and technologies for ecosystem management. It is difficult to take all of these factors into account, but the discipline that comes with the attempt to model the coupled social-ecological dynamics forces policy makers to confront all conceivable responses. This process helps induce the modesty needed to avoid panacea traps while supporting systematic effort to improve resource management in the public interest.

Fig. 1.

Temporal scale (measured as return time) vs. spatial scale (measured as extent of spatial patterns) for some key ecological (blue ellipses) and social phenomena (brown ellipses) in the NHLD.

Fig. 2.

Scales of decision making by recreational users, and dynamics of people and fish stocks in lakes.

Fig. 3.

Cycle of adaptive learning and decision. The set of institutions and set of models for the SES change from cycle to cycle. These dynamics depend, in part, on introduction of innovations by people or by emergence of new ecological or social phenomena.