Improving network approaches to the study of complex social-ecological interdependencies.

Achieving effective, sustainable environmental governance requires a better understanding of the causes and consequences of the complex patterns of interdependencies connecting people and ecosystems within and across scales. Network approaches for conceptualizing and analyzing these interdependencies offer one promising solution. Here, we present two advances we argue are needed to further this area of research: (i) a explicating the causal aims of any given network-centric study of social-ecological interdependencies; (ii) unifying research design considerations that facilitate conceptualizing exactly is interdependent, through what of relationships, and in relation to what of environmental problems. The latter builds on the appreciation that many environmental problems draw from a set of core challenges that re-occur across contexts. We demonstrate how these advances combine into a that facilitates leveraging case-specific findings of social-ecological interdependencies to generalizable, yet context-sensitive, theories based on explicit assumptions of causal relationships.