Beatrice started her Assistant Professorship at the centre, funded by Formas, in May 2008. Her work focuses broadly on resource governance issue with particular focus on marine related issues. The research can be broadly divided into three strands:
1. Learning and knowledge systems in natural resources governance
Her research on this topic focuses on how resource users and other stakeholders build and communicate their knowledge about the resource and how this feeds into the governance process.
- Following an ongoing collaborative governance initiative in the Lake Vättern fishery in Sweden
- Studying the public perception of water quality and water scarcity in Phoenix, Arizona, using innovative methods for understanding local ecological knowledge (LEK) in an urban context
- Examining knowledge transfer in a science-policy context. Focus is on examining the socio-environmental/organization conditions that promote learning in boundary and bridging organizations and how learning can be systematically assessed in an adaptive governance context
2. Social networks in natural resource governance
This research focuses on how structural characteristics of social networks affect the outcomes of management initiatives and collective action.
- The study of five integrated coastal zone management initiatives along the Swedish coast
- The role of social networks in promoting learning in boundary organizations and adaptive governance. Same projects as mentioned under the previous topic in which we also study the role of different types of social relations on knowledge transfer in boundary organizations and how this relates to adaptive governance
- Social networks as a means to assess social capital in fisheries management. Case study examining how bonding and bridging social ties affect fisheries management outcomes in four cooperatives on the Chilean coast
3. Social-ecological feedbacks and traps — with particular focus on small-scale fisheries
This line of research examines the feedbacks between social and ecological systems, particularly in small-scale fisheries.
- The role of small-scale traders and markets in mediating feedbacks between social and ecological components of tropical coasts. Examines how feedbacks lead to different system trajectories such as sustainable livelihood trajectories or poverty traps with degraded environments (aka social-ecological traps)
- Fishers' migration in small-scale fisheries in East Africa and the ecological, social and institutional impacts of fishers' mobility on communities of destination. Focus on understanding the interplay between mobility and social and environmental factors and how this affects the trajectories of small, fisheries dependent communities. Download policy brief
(pdf, 420 kB)
Research Background
PhD in Marine Ecotoxicology/Natural Resource Management at the Dept of Systems Ecology, Stockholm University in Sept 2006. Thesis: Of Mangroves and Middlemen - A study of social and ecological linkages in a coastal community (pdf, 4 MB)
2007- 2008 postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity (CSID) at Arizona State University, funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR), and was affiliated to the lab run by Associate Professors Marco Janssen and Marty Anderies, and Prof Lin Ostrom.
Other research interests
- Ecosystem services related to mangrove ecosystems
- Marine fisheries
- Global governance of marine related resources
See interview with Beatrice on the French nature documentary film Oceans (interview in Swedish):
