UC Davis

The social-ecological systems paradigm emerged as an alternative to traditional approaches to natural resources management, bringing together a complex systems approach rooted in multi-equilibrium ecology that emphasizes managing feedbacks and transformations, a recognition of the intertwined nature of social and environmental dynamics, and a focus on institutions as a means of addressing collective action problems. However, despite the promise of this paradigm in integrating the social and natural sciences of natural resources management and governance, insights and methods from the complexity sciences have yet to be fully harnessed in understanding the social-ecological dynamics of natural resources, while social-ecological systems models tend to fall short in capturing the aspects of human systems that are distinct from ecological systems; namely, self-organization, heterogeneity, and subjectivity. This dissertation develops dynamical systems modeling approaches that address this gap in exploring how these dynamics shape system responses to change and differentiated outcomes. The first chapter develops a dynamical systems model of communities that are economically dependent on natural resource exploitation (e.g. mining, logging, and industrial agriculture communities) that links resource dynamics, migration, and community wellbeing. The results reveal an inevitable misalignment between policies that support a higher quality of life for communities and those that ensure resilience of the industry, and the temporal dynamics of this misalignment. To explore how the structure of resource governance shapes its function, Chapter 2 uses a generalized version of dynamical systems modeling to develop a modeling approach for linking system aspects, such as diversity, heterogeneity, and connectivity, correspond to stability. The results reveal that greater complexity – greater diversity of stakeholders and decisionmakers and greater interdependence among actors – corresponds to lower stability, while strategies such as venue shopping and a greater number and diversity of non-government organizations are stabilizing. Finally, the final chapter draws on the general principles and methods from the previous chapters in the context of the San Joaquin Valley (SJV), an industrial agriculture-dominated region that is rife with inequality and with rapidly degrading groundwater, to explore actors' strategies, narratives, and power in shaping how water governance and agriculture in the SJV change. Narrative analysis of interviews and focus groups with growers, various advocacy groups, and residents of rural communities alongside modeling of actors' interactions with each other and with water is used to explore how these narratives influence actors’ strategies for enacting change, and the implications of their envisioned changes for how different groups can influence and are influenced by each other. The results reveal how the structure of agriculture and water governance create a conflict for small growers and rural communities between seeking more just distribution of the benefits from water consumption and increasing their water access within the status quo, which tends to channel most of the benefits of water management to larger growers. Overall, this dissertation develops complex systems approaches to understanding how linked natural and social dynamics shape the resilience and equity of natural resources exploitation and governance systems, yielding methodologies that can be applied to diverse cases, general principles for natural resources governance and resource-based communities, and concrete insights for guiding management and transformation of these systems.