Centre researchers and collaborators awarded 3 million SEK Swedish Science Council grant. The project will explore if collaborative natural resource management is improving ecological status, and If so, how this occurs. Photo: BLMOregon/Flickr


2016 GRANTs

Centre researchers receive Swedish Research Council grant

A 3 million SEK grant from Swedish Research Council awarded to centre researchers Örjan Bodin and Erik Andersson

Story highlights

  • Centre researcher Örjan Bodin granted three million SEK Swedish Research Council grant
  • The project will explore if collaborative natural resource management is improving ecological status, and If so, how this occurs
  • Project will fund a PhD position

Centre lecturer and associate professor Örjan Bodin recently received a 3 million SEK grant from the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet). The project aims to explore the questions: Is collaborative natural resource management improving ecological status? If so, how?

Research has shown that environmental processes rarely adhere to socially defined boundaries, and because of this, traditional management schemes tend to fail in effectively managing and conserving boundary-spanning ecosystems.

In the past decades, research has suggested that collaborative governance arrangements are better suited to align with the ecosystem in question, and therefore should lead to better ecological outcomes. However, there has been a lack of empirical evidence involving both ecological and social data to support these claims.

This project will help to address this research gap, and aims to develop a theoretical and methodological framework partly based on a network modelling approach. It will take an interdisciplinary approach grounded in previous research from ecology, natural resource management, and political science.

This newly funded project will run over four years, and will be led by Bodin. However, it will work in collaboration with centre researcher Erik Andersson; Daniel Nohrstedt from Uppsala University researcher and Sara Borgström from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). It will also fully fund a PhD position.

Bodin says that “this project will enable us to conduct an empirical investigation of a long-standing question in environmental research, namely if collaborative arrangements improve the ecological status of the managed ecosystem.”

Published: 2016-11-15

Related info

Örjan Bodin is a lecturer and associate professor at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. His research focuses on developing a better understanding of social-ecological systems through quantitative modelling and analyses of empiricail data.

Erik Andersson is a researcher and associate professor at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, where his research explores spatial reality of ecosystem service generation, landscape management, and resilience.

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