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Simon

West

PhD

Researcher

simon.west@su.se

+46 701 917 902

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Staff profile

Simon is a researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Department of Systems Ecology at Stockholm University

Profile summary

  • Adaptive governance
  • Adaptive management
  • Practice theory
  • Qualitative methods
  • Social science
  • Biosphere reserves
  • Biodiversity conservation

Simon’s research primarily focuses on how people create, share, and use knowledge within the day-to-day practice of ecosystem management and governance. He studies this mainly in the context of biodiversity conservation in South Africa and Australia.

In South Africa, Simon studies how values, politics, and science come together to shape knowledge and management of biodiversity, and understandings of successful conservation interventions. In Australia, he studies how scientists create knowledge about ecosystems within adaptive management projects.

Simon is particularly interested in developing social science theories and methods to study social-ecological complexity. He has co-designed a PhD course together with Wijnand Boonstra, ‘Why bother with Durkheim? Using (classical) social science to understand the social dynamics of social-ecological systems.’ He has also co-run the SRC’s MSc programme course module ‘Adaptive Governance’ together with Lisen Schultz.

Simon has a BA in American and English Literature from the University of East Anglia and a MA in Environmental Law and Sustainable Development from the School of Oriental and African Studies (London). Simon has extensive experience volunteering in practical conservation projects in the UK.

West, Simon

Publications by West, Simon

Learning to live with social-ecological complexity: An interpretive analysis of learning in 11 UNESCO Biosphere Reserves

Schultz, L., West, S., Bourke, A.J., d'Armengol, L., Torrents, P., Hardardottir, H., Jansson, A., Roldán, A., M.

2018 - Journal / article

Learning is considered a means to achieve sustainability in practice and has become a prominent goal of sustainability interventions. In this paper we explore how learning for sustainability is shaped by meaning, interpretation and experience, in the context of UNESCO Biosphere Reserves (BRs). The World Network of Biosphere Reserves brings environmental conservation, socio-economic development and research together in ‘learnin...

What constitutes a successful biodiversity corridor? A Q-study in the Cape Floristic Region, South Africa

West, S., R. Cairns, L. Schultz

2016 - Journal / article

‘Success’ is a vigorously debated concept in conservation. There is a drive to develop quantitative, comparable metrics of success to improve conservation interventions. Yet the qualitative, normative choices inherent in decisions about what to measure — emerging from fundamental philosophical commitments about what conservation is and should be — have received scant attention. We address this gap by exploring perceptions of w...

Rethinking social barriers to effective adaptive management

West, S., L. Schultz, S. Bekessy

2016 - Journal / article

Adaptive management is an approach to environmental management based on learning-by-doing, where complexity, uncertainty, and incomplete knowledge are acknowledged and management actions are treated as experiments. However, while adaptive management has received significant uptake in theory, it remains elusively difficult to enact in practice. Proponents have blamed social barriers and have called for social science contributi...

Dwelling in the biosphere: exploring an embodied human–environment connection in resilience thinking

Cooke, B., S. West, W.J. Boonstra

2016 - Journal / article

Resilience has emerged as a prominent paradigm for interpreting and shaping human–environment connections in the context of global environmental change. Resilience emphasizes dynamic spatial and temporal change in social–ecological systems where humans are inextricably interwoven with the environment. While influential, resilience thinking has been critiqued for an under-theorized framing of socio-cultural dynamics. In this ...

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West, Simon

Stockholm Resilience Centre is a collaboration between Stockholm University and the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Stockholm Resilience Centre
Stockholm University, Kräftriket 2B
SE-10691
Phone: +46 8 674 70 70
info@stockholmresilience.su.se

Organisation number: 202100-3062
VAT No: SE202100306201