Publications

Blanca González-Mon, María Mancilla-García, Örjan Bodin, Willem Malherbe, Nadia Sitas, Catherine B. Pringle, Reinette (Oonsie) Biggs, Maja Schlüter. 2024. The importance of cross-scale social relationships for dealing with social-ecological change in agricultural supply chains. Journal of Rural Studies. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2023.103191

Agricultural systems are important for the livelihoods and food security of millions of people. These systems are increasingly interconnected across scales and face challenges in responding to multiple, and coalescing types of environmental, social, and economic change. Most studies on how actors respond to change have focused on farmers and farming communities. In this study, we investigate the connectivity of farming systems...

Tilman Hertz, Thomas Banitz, Rodrigo Martínez-Peña, Sonja Radosavljevic, Emilie Lindkvist, Lars-Göran Johansson, Petri Ylikoski, Maja Schlüter. 2024. Eliciting the plurality of causal reasoning in social-ecological systems research. Ecology and Society. https://doi.org/10.5751/es-14806-290114

Understanding causation in social-ecological systems (SES) is indispensable for promoting sustainable outcomes. However, the study of such causal relations is challenging because they are often complex and intertwined, and their analysis involves diverse disciplines. Although there is agreement that no single research approach (RA) can comprehensively explain SES phenomena, there is a lack of ability to deal with this diversit...

Thomas E. Currie, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Laurel Fogarty, Maja Schlüter, Carl Folke, L. Jamila Haider, Guido Caniglia, Alessandro Tavoni, Raf E. V. Jansen, Peter Søgaard Jørgensen, Timothy M. Waring. 2024. Integrating evolutionary theory and social–ecological systems research to address the sustainability challenges of the Anthropocene. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0262

The rapid, human-induced changes in the Earth system during the Anthropocene present humanity with critical sustainability challenges. Social–ecological systems (SES) research provides multiple approaches for understanding the complex interactions between humans, social systems, and environments and how we might direct them towards healthier and more resilient futures. However, general theories of SES change have yet to be ful...

Maja Schlüter, Tilman Hertz, Anja Klein, Nanda Wijermans. 2024. Disentangling the entangled in productive ways: modelling SES from a process-relational perspective. SocArXiv Papers. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/hb9ry

Process-relational perspectives have been proposed as new ways of conceptualising, analysing and engaging with social-ecological systems (SES) that are capable of dealing with intertwinedness and complexity. The application of PR perspectives in SES research, however, remains challenging and mostly conceptual. We explore the possibilities and limitations of combining process-relational thought with agent-based modelling as a m...

Rodrigo Martinez Peña, Kirill Orach, Pero Olsson, Maja Schlüter. 2024. Explaining change and stability in social-ecological transformations from a morphogenetic approach. OSF. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/trfxu

Studies on social-ecological transformations have explained change and no-change at systemic level through and overlooked the contribution of agents that keep the system from changing and how their actions respond to their position, which constitutes a critical analytical gap due to the limited success of societies at transforming social-ecological systems. However, when it comes to analysing underlying dynamics, frameworks fo...

Victoria Junquera, Maja Schlüter, Juan Rocha, Nico Wunderling, Simon A. Levin, Daniel I. Rubenstein, Jean-Christophe Castella, Patrick Meyfroidt. 2024. Crop booms as regime shifts. Royal Society Open Science. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.231571

A crop boom is a sudden, nonlinear and intense expansion of a new crop. Despite their large impacts, boom-bust dynamics are not well understood; booms are largely unpredictable and difficult to steer once they unfold. Based on the striking resemblances between land regime shifts and crop booms, we apply complex systems theory, highlighting the potential for regime shifts, to provide new insights about crop boom dynamics. We an...

Blanca González-Mon, Örjan Bodin, Maja Schlüter. 2023. Small-scale fisheries and agricultural trade networks are socially embedded: emerging hypotheses about responses to environmental changes. Ecology and Society. https://doi.org/10.5751/es-14265-280309

Global change is threatening the production and livelihoods of millions of smallholders. The capacity of smallholders to deal with such changes is influenced by the increasingly complex trade networks that connect them to local and global markets. Moreover, the social relationships (e.g., trust, reciprocity) in which these trade networks are embedded likely influence smallholders’ capacity to respond to change. However, the pr...

Radosavljevic, S., Banitz, T., Grimm, V., Johansson, L.-G., Lindkvist, E., Schlüter, M., Ylikoski, P.. 2023. Dynamical systems modeling for structural understanding of social-ecological systems: A primer. Ecological Complexity. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecocom.2023.101052

Dynamical systems modeling (DSM) explores how a system evolves in time when its elements and the relationships between them are known. The basic idea is that the structure of a dynamical system, expressed by coupled differential or difference equations, determines attractors of the system and, in turn, its behavior. This leads to structural understanding that can provide insights into qualitative properties of real systems, in...

Maja Schlüter, Tilman Hertz, María Mancilla García, Thomas Banitz, Volker Grimm, Lars-Göran Johansson, Emilie Lindkvist, Rodrigo Martinez Peña, Sonja Radosavljevic, Karl Wennberg, Petri Ylikoski. 2023. Navigating causal reasoning in sustainability science. OSF. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/kn49v

Sustainability researchers aim to generate knowledge about causes of societal problems and possible solutions. Given the multidisciplinary nature of the field and the complexity of the problems, the causal reasoning that underlies these activities may vary significantly across studies and research approaches. Causal reasoning involves many assumptions, e.g. about what aspects of a system matter, what counts as evidence for a c...

Guido Caniglia, Maja Schlüter. 2023. Practical causal knowledge for sustainability: Implications of co-production for a philosophical understanding of causality in sustainability science. OSF. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/cg9nk

Participatory and collaborative processes of co-production in sustainability science combine knowledge generation and action, take place within the situations addressed by policies or interventions, and stimulate mutual learning through inter- and transdisciplinary methodologies. In this Chapter, we introduce the notion of practical causal knowledge for sustainability. Using examples from participatory modelling, we highlight ...