Unpacking pathways to diversified livelihoods from projects in Pacific Island coastal fisheries.

Livelihood diversification has become an integral focus of policies and investments aiming to reduce poverty, vulnerability, and pressure on fishery resources in coastal communities around the globe. In this regard, coastal fisheries in the Pacific Islands have long been a sector where livelihood diversification has featured prominently. Yet, despite the widespread promotion and international investment in this strategy, the ability of externally funded livelihood diversification projects to facilitate improved resource management and rural development outcomes often remains inconsistent.

How much of a market is involved in a biodiversity offset? A typology of biodiversity offset policies.

Biodiversity offsets (BO) are increasingly promoted and adopted by governments and companies worldwide as a policy instrument to compensate for biodiversity losses from infrastructure development projects. BO are often classified as 'market-based instruments' both by proponents and critics, but this representation fails to capture the varieties of how BO policies actually operate. To provide a framing for understanding the empirical diversity of BO policy designs, we present an ideal-typical typology based on the institutions from which BO is organised: Public Agency, Mandatory Market and Voluntary Offset.

Human responses to social-ecological traps.

Social-ecological (SE) traps refer to persistent mismatches between the responses of people, or organisms, and their social and ecological conditions that are undesirable from a sustainability perspective. Until now, the occurrence of SE traps is primarily explained from a lack of adaptive capacity; not much attention is paid to other causal factors. In our article, we address this concern by theorizing the variety of human responses to SE traps and the effect of these responses on trap dynamics.

An empirical model of the Baltic Sea reveals the importance of social dynamics for ecological regime shifts.

Regime shifts triggered by human activities and environmental changes have led to significant ecological and socioeconomic consequences in marine and terrestrial ecosystems worldwide. Ecological processes and feedbacks associated with regime shifts have received considerable attention, but human individual and collective behavior is rarely treated as an integrated component of such shifts. Here, we used generalized modeling to develop a coupled social-ecological model that integrated rich social and ecological data to investigate the role of social dynamics in the 1980s Baltic Sea cod boom and collapse.

The historical dynamics of social-ecological traps.

Environmental degradation is a typical unintended outcome of collective human behavior. Hardin's metaphor of the "tragedy of the commons" has become a conceived wisdom that captures the social dynamics leading to environmental degradation. Recently, "traps" has gained currency as an alternative concept to explain the rigidity of social and ecological processes that produce environmental degradation and livelihood impoverishment.