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The social-ecological systems approach is one that recognizes the interactive nature of human-natural world activities, and thus recognizes in interdependence of people and nature. Its roots are said to be in the 1920s Chicago school of social or human ecology (cf. Berkes, 2011), but that thinking focused on people and society, and incorporated the natural world only as a set of independent variables that influenced social structure (Steward, 1955). More useful, in today’s threatened environments, is the way in which the construct has been developed by Fikret Berkes and others (Berkes & Folke, 1998; Berkes, Colding, & Folke, 2003) and tied to issues of complexity, panarchy (Gunderson & Holling, 2002), and natural resource governance (Ommer & team, 2008; Ommer, 2010; Ommer, Ian Perry, Cochrane, & Cury, 2011).
Social-ecological systems thinking, then, treats people and nature as one integrated biogeophysical unit. Such systems are complex...
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References
Berkes, F. (2008). Sacred ecology (2th ed.). New York/London: Routledge.
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Perry, R. I., Ommer, R. E., Barange, M., Jentoft, S., Neis, B., & Sumaila, R. (2011). Marine social-ecological responses to environmental change and the impacts of globalization. Fish and Fisheries Blackwell, 1–24. doi:10.1111/j.1467-2979.2010.00402.
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Ommer, R., Castleden, H. (2014). Social-Ecological System(s). In: Michalos, A.C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0753-5_2798
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