Plastics pollution is a global planetary threat to both humans and the environment, leading to injustice throughout its lifecycle and disproportionately affecting the most vulnerable. The United Nations Environmental Assembly adopted Resolution 5/14 to create a legally binding instrument to end plastics pollution, known colloquially as the Plastics Treaty. The treaty is currently under negotiation, and the implicit understandings of justice that will be incorporated will significantly impact the outcome of the treaty. This thesis employs critical discourse analysis and key stakeholder interviews to examine the various justice narratives and framings of actors in the treaty through an environmental justice lens. Additionally, the role of power in shaping these narratives is examined from a critical and decolonial perspective. My research demonstrates the value of a critical approach in addressing power dynamics and normative concepts such as justice in social-ecological and sustainability research. This study identifies three distinct discourses, each offering different problematizations of plastics and justice framings. The analysis reveals competing definitions of just transition, a disconnect between the recognition of Indigenous Knowledge and the rights of Indigenous People, and underdeveloped gender and intersectional considerations. Furthermore, this thesis highlights the enduring influence of colonial dynamics on plastics pollution, potentially reinforcing waste colonial relations in the Plastics Treaty. Finally, this thesis contends that problematizing plastics as a human rights issue offers a valuable approach to address these shortcomings, thereby enhancing the treaty's potential for promoting justice by ensuring that the voices of those most affected are heard.

Angesichts der weltweit zunehmenden Zerstörung von Ökosystemen spielen ökologisch wirksame und sozial gerechte Umweltschutzinstrumente eine wichtige Rolle. Zahlungen für Ökosystemleistungen (Payments for Ecosystem Services, PES) finden zunehmend Anwendung. Sie dienen als freiwillige und konditionale Anreize für die Bereitstellung von Ökosystemleistungen. Einige dieser PES-Verträge werden mit lokalen Gemeinschaften abgeschlossen, die die Vertragsbedingungen gemeinsam erfüllen (Collective PES, C-PES). Während diese Programme einerseits als Chance für einen erfolgreichen Umweltschutz gesehen werden, wird zum anderen befürchtet, dass sich die Einführung von Marktprinzipien negativ auf lokale Gemeinschaften auswirkt. Vor diesem Hintergrund widmet sich die Dissertation der Frage, inwieweit C-PES-Programme die sozial-ökologische Transformation in Richtung Nachhaltigkeit fördern oder erschweren. Paper I gibt einen literaturgestützten Überblick über Definitionen und Systematisierungen von Kommodifizierungsprozessen und deren sozial-ökologische Auswirkungen. Basierend auf einem im ersten Paper entwickelten Framework werden in Paper II 29 C-PES-Programme weltweit hinsichtlich ihres ökosystemleistungsbezogenen Kommodifizierungsgrades untersucht. Paper III fokussiert auf Mensch-Wildtier-Konflikte im Zusammenhang mit einem Schutzprogramm für Vielfraße und Luchse im Kontext indigener Samen-Gemeinschaften in Schweden. Insgesamt zeigt sich, dass C-PES nicht per se eine Transformation in Richtung sozial-ökologischer Nachhaltigkeit unterstützen, sondern nur dann einen erfolgreichen Beitrag leisten können, wenn bei der Umsetzung die lokalen Gegebenheiten berücksichtigt und Entscheidungen über die Programmgestaltung inklusiv getroffen werden. Darüber hinaus ist es wichtig, dass C-PES Programme engere Mensch-Natur-Beziehungen ermöglichen und in einen umfassenden institutionellen Wandel eingebettet sind, der sich über verschiedene räumliche und politische Ebenen erstreckt. / As ecosystems around the world continue to degrade, the implementation of ecologically effective and socially just conservation instruments is critical. Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are an increasingly popular tool. PES are voluntary and conditional incentives for the provision of ecosystem services, rewarding landowners for their conservation efforts. Some PES programs target local communities that collectively meet contractual obligations (collective PES, C-PES). Proponents see C-PES as a promising tool for successful nature conservation, while critics argue that the introduction of market principles into areas not previously characterized by them can have negative effects, such as the erosion and replacement of well-functioning local community institutions and the crowding out of intrinsic conservation motivations. Against the background of these controversies, this dissertation aims to contribute to answering the question of how paying local communities for their conservation efforts supports or hinders the social-ecological transformation towards sustainability. Paper I reviews definitions and systematizations of program-related commodification processes and local land tenure structures, and their links to social-ecological program outcomes. Based on a framework developed in the first paper, Paper II examines 29 C-PES programs worldwide regarding their ES-related degree of commodification. Paper III focuses on human-environment conflicts in the context of conservation performance payments for wolverines and lynxes in Sweden, which are made to indigenous Sámi communities. Overall, the findings of the three papers suggest that C-PES programs do not in themselves address leverage points for a sustainability transformation, but can only be fully effective when implemented in a careful and inclusive manner, ensuring that they contribute to a larger institutional change across scales and when they support closer connections between people and nature.

Progress towards sustainability requires changes in our individual and collective behaviour. Yet, our fundamental understanding of behaviour in relation to environmental change remains severely limited. In particular, little attention has been given to how individual and collective behaviours respond to, and are shaped by, non-linear environmental change (such as ‘regime shifts’) and its inherent uncertainties. The thesis makes two main contributions to the literature: 1) it provides one of the first accounts of human behaviour and collective action in relation to ecological regime shifts and associated uncertainties; and 2) extends the incipient behavioural common-pool resource literature that acknowledges social-ecological dynamics and ecological complexity. The overarching aim of this thesis is to further advance an empirically grounded understanding of human behaviour in social-ecological systems. In particular, the thesis attempts to unravel critical social-ecological factors and mechanisms for the sustainability of common-pool resources. This is especially relevant for contexts in which livelihoods can be more directly threatened by regime shifts. The following methods are applied: behavioural economic experiments in the lab (with students; Papers I and II) and in the field (with small-scale fishers from four different communities in the Colombian Caribbean; Paper III), and agent-based modelling empirically informed by a subset of the lab experiments (Paper IV). Paper I tests the effect of an endogenously driven regime shift on the emergence of cooperation and sustainable resource use. Paper II tests the effect of different risk levels of such a regime shift. The regime shift in both papers has negative consequences for the productivity of the shared resource. Paper III assesses the effect of different degrees of uncertainty about a climate-induced threshold in stock dynamics on the exploitation patterns; as well as the role of social and ecological local context. Paper IV explores critical individual-level factors and processes affecting the simultaneous emergence of collective action and sustainable resource use. Results cumulatively suggest that existing scientific knowledge indicating the potential for ecological regime shifts should be communicated to affected local communities, including the remaining uncertainties, as this information can encourage collective action for sustainable resource use. Results also highlight the critical role of ecological knowledge, knowledge-sharing, perceived ecological uncertainties, and the role local contexts play for sustainable outcomes. This thesis enriches the literature on social-ecological systems by demonstrating how a behavioural experimental approach can contribute new insights relevant for sustainability. Overall, these insights indicate that, given the opportunity and the willingness of people to come together, share knowledge, exchange ideas, and build trust, potential ecological crises can encourage collective action, and uncertainties can be turned into opportunities for dealing with change in constructive ways. This provides a hopeful outlook in the face of escalating environmental change and inherent uncertainties. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following paper was unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 3: Manuscript.</p>

Alors que les activités anthropiques font basculer de nombreux écosystèmes vers des régimes fonctionnels différents, la résilience des systèmes socio-écologiques devient un problème pressant. Des acteurs locaux, impliqués dans une grande diversité de groupes — allant d’initiatives locales et indépendantes à de grandes institutions formelles — peuvent agir sur ces questions en collaborant au développement, à la promotion ou à l’implantation de pratiques plus en accord avec ce que l’environnement peut fournir. De ces collaborations répétées émergent des réseaux complexes, et il a été montré que la topologie de ces réseaux peut améliorer la résilience des systèmes socio-écologiques (SSÉ) auxquels ils participent. La topologie des réseaux d’acteurs favorisant la résilience de leur SSÉ est caractérisée par une combinaison de plusieurs facteurs : la structure doit être modulaire afin d’aider les différents groupes à développer et proposer des solutions à la fois plus innovantes (en réduisant l’homogénéisation du réseau), et plus proches de leurs intérêts propres ; elle doit être bien connectée et facilement synchronisable afin de faciliter les consensus, d’augmenter le capital social, ainsi que la capacité d’apprentissage ; enfin, elle doit être robuste, afin d’éviter que les deux premières caractéristiques ne souffrent du retrait volontaire ou de la mise à l’écart de certains acteurs. Ces caractéristiques, qui sont relativement intuitives à la fois conceptuellement et dans leur application mathématique, sont souvent employées séparément pour analyser les qualités structurales de réseaux d’acteurs empiriques. Cependant, certaines sont, par nature, incompatibles entre elles. Par exemple, le degré de modularité d’un réseau ne peut pas augmenter au même rythme que sa connectivité, et cette dernière ne peut pas être améliorée tout en améliorant sa robustesse. Cet obstacle rend difficile la création d’une mesure globale, car le niveau auquel le réseau des acteurs contribue à améliorer la résilience du SSÉ ne peut pas être la simple addition des caractéristiques citées, mais plutôt le résultat d’un compromis subtil entre celles-ci. Le travail présenté ici a pour objectifs (1), d’explorer les compromis entre ces caractéristiques ; (2) de proposer une mesure du degré auquel un réseau empirique d’acteurs contribue à la résilience de son SSÉ ; et (3) d’analyser un réseau empirique à la lumière, entre autres, de ces qualités structurales. Cette thèse s’articule autour d’une introduction et de quatre chapitres numérotés de 2 à 5. Le chapitre 2 est une revue de la littérature sur la résilience des SSÉ. Il identifie une série de caractéristiques structurales (ainsi que les mesures de réseaux qui leur correspondent) liées à l’amélioration de la résilience dans les SSÉ. Le chapitre 3 est une étude de cas sur la péninsule d’Eyre, une région rurale d’Australie-Méridionale où l’occupation du sol, ainsi que les changements climatiques, contribuent à l’érosion de la biodiversité. Pour cette étude de cas, des travaux de terrain ont été effectués en 2010 et 2011 durant lesquels une série d’entrevues a permis de créer une liste des acteurs de la cogestion de la biodiversité sur la péninsule. Les données collectées ont été utilisées pour le développement d’un questionnaire en ligne permettant de documenter les interactions entre ces acteurs. Ces deux étapes ont permis la reconstitution d’un réseau pondéré et dirigé de 129 acteurs individuels et 1180 relations. Le chapitre 4 décrit une méthodologie pour mesurer le degré auquel un réseau d’acteurs participe à la résilience du SSÉ dans lequel il est inclus. La méthode s’articule en deux étapes : premièrement, un algorithme d’optimisation (recuit simulé) est utilisé pour fabriquer un archétype semi-aléatoire correspondant à un compromis entre des niveaux élevés de modularité, de connectivité et de robustesse. Deuxièmement, un réseau empirique (comme celui de la péninsule d’Eyre) est comparé au réseau archétypique par le biais d’une mesure de distance structurelle. Plus la distance est courte, et plus le réseau empirique est proche de sa configuration optimale. La cinquième et dernier chapitre est une amélioration de l’algorithme de recuit simulé utilisé dans le chapitre 4. Comme il est d’usage pour ce genre d’algorithmes, le recuit simulé utilisé projetait les dimensions du problème multiobjectif dans une seule dimension (sous la forme d’une moyenne pondérée). Si cette technique donne de très bons résultats ponctuellement, elle n’autorise la production que d’une seule solution parmi la multitude de compromis possibles entre les différents objectifs. Afin de mieux explorer ces compromis, nous proposons un algorithme de recuit simulé multiobjectifs qui, plutôt que d’optimiser une seule solution, optimise une surface multidimensionnelle de solutions. Cette étude, qui se concentre sur la partie sociale des systèmes socio-écologiques, améliore notre compréhension des structures actorielles qui contribuent à la résilience des SSÉ. Elle montre que si certaines caractéristiques profitables à la résilience sont incompatibles (modularité et connectivité, ou — dans une moindre mesure — connectivité et robustesse), d’autres sont plus facilement conciliables (connectivité et synchronisabilité, ou — dans une moindre mesure — modularité et robustesse). Elle fournit également une méthode intuitive pour mesurer quantitativement des réseaux d’acteurs empiriques, et ouvre ainsi la voie vers, par exemple, des comparaisons d’études de cas, ou des suivis — dans le temps — de réseaux d’acteurs. De plus, cette thèse inclut une étude de cas qui fait la lumière sur l’importance de certains groupes institutionnels pour la coordination des collaborations et des échanges de connaissances entre des acteurs aux intérêts potentiellement divergents. / As anthropic activities are slowly pushing many ecosystems towards their functional tipping points, social-ecological resilience has become a pressing concern. Local stakeholders, acting within a diversity of groups — from grassroots organizations to higher-scale institutional structures — may act on these issues and collaborate to develop, promote, and implement more sustainable practices. From these repeated collaborations emerge complex networks, the topologies of which have been shown to either enhance or hinder social-ecological systems’ (SES) resilience. The main topological characteristics of a stakeholder network enhancing SES’s resilience include a combination of: a highly modular community structure, which helps groups of stakeholders develop and propose solutions both more innovative (by reducing knowledge homogeneity in the network), and close to their interest and values; high connectivity and synchronizability, in order to improve consensus building, social capital and learning capacity; and high robustness so as to prevent the first two characteristics from sharply decreasing if some stakeholders were to leave the network. These characteristics are straight-forward both in concept and in their mathematical implementation, and have often been used separately to discuss the structural qualities of stakeholder networks in case studies. However, some of these topological features inherently contradict each other. For example, modularity is in direct conflict with connectivity, which is in conflict with a network’s robustness. This issue makes the creation of a more global measure difficult, as the level to which stakeholders contribute to enhancing SES’s resilience cannot simply be a summation of these features, but instead needs to be the outcome of a delicate trade-off between them. The present study aims to: (1) explore the trade-offs at work between these structural features; (2) produce a measure of how well-suited empirical stakeholder networks are to enhancing the resilience of their SES; and (3) thoroughly analyze an empirical stakeholder network in the context, among other things, of its resilience-enhancing qualities. This dissertation is organized in four parts. The first part (Chapter 2) is a review of the literature on SES resilience. It identifies a series of structural features (as well as their corresponding network metrics) associated with resilience-enhancement in SES. The second part (Chapter 3) is a case study on the Eyre Peninsula (EP), a rural region of South Australia where land-use, as well as climate change, contribute to biodiversity erosion. For this case study, field work was conducted in 2010 and 2011, during which time a series of face-to-face interviews was conducted to populate a list of individuals — and groups of individuals — holding a stake in biodiversity conservation on the EP. The data was thereafter used to develop an online questionnaire documenting interactions between these stakeholders. The two steps led to produce a weighted, directed network of 129 stakeholders interacting through 1180 collaboration links. The third part (Chapter 4) describes a methodology to measure the level to which stakeholder networks contribute to resilience-building in SES. The method is articulated in two steps: (i) an optimization algorithm (simulated annealing — SA —) is used to craft a semi-random archetypal network which scores high in one compromise of modularity, connectivity, synchronizability, and robustness, and (ii) an empirical stakeholder networks (such as our EP network) is compared to the archetypal network through a measure of structural distance. The shorter the distance, the closer the empirical network is to its ideal configuration. The fourth and last part of the dissertation research (Chapter 5) is an improvement on the simulated annealing used in Chapter 4. As is frequently done for this kind of optimization technique, the SA used in Chapter 4 projected the four dimensions of the multi-objective problem into one (as a weighted average). While performing well, this only resolves one of the possible trade-offs between the objectives. To better explore the trade-offs at work in this optimization problem, a true multi-objective simulated annealing (MOSA) is proposed where, instead of optimizing one solution, the algorithm optimizes a multidimensional surface of solutions scoring better than the others in a least one of the objectives. This study, which focuses on the social part of SESs, improves our understanding of the stakeholder collaboration structures which, theoretically, best contribute to resilient SESs. It shows that while some resilience-enhancing topological characteristics are in conflict (modularity vs. connectivity, and connectivity vs. robustness to a lesser extent) others can be easily reconciled (connectivity vs. synchronizability, and, less-so, modularity vs. robustness). It also provides an intuitive method to quantitatively assess empirical stakeholder networks, which opens the way to comparisons between case studies, or monitoring of stakeholder network evolution through time. Additionally, this thesis provides a case study which highlights the importance of a key institutional group in coordinating collaborations and information exchanges among other stakeholders of potentially diverging interests and values.

In transboundary water resources policy and management situations, such as the governance of the Columbia River Basin, complex social, ecological, and economic factors seem to be in irreconcilable competition with one another. However, cooperative negotiation provides an outlet for entities and stakeholders to "expand the pie" and develop creative alternatives for integrated, resilient management. To achieve these goals, it is critical that stakeholders have meaningful dialogue that goes beyond positions to identify the underlying values and interests in the basin. Furthermore, parties must develop a shared understanding of the substantive complexities of the social-ecological system. Collaborative learning allows participants to meet both of these objectives at once, and facilitators can spark collaboration through carefully planned interventions. The goal of this study was to test a carefully crafted "facilitative" documentary film as a facilitation tool to promote dialogue, understanding, and creative scenario development amongst parties. The study has three main components: 1) the resilience and learning analysis of the case study (the Columbia River Treaty) policy situation, 2) the creation of a facilitative film featuring interviews with diverse stakeholders in the basin, and 3) the qualitative and quantitative assessment of the effects of the film in the cooperative negotiation process. The film, A River Loved: A film about the Columbia River and the people invested in its future, premiered at the Universities Consortium Symposium on Columbia River Governance- an informal forum for dialogue held in Kimberley, British Columbia in October 2011. I measured participants' reactions to the film and found substantial support for my hypotheses, concluding that interventions such as facilitative documentary film have great potential to transform complex, multi-stakeholder social-ecological policy situations. / Graduation date: 2012

River basins provide essential services for both humans and ecosystems. Understanding the connections between ecosystems and society and their function has been at the heart of resilience studies and has become an increasing important endeavor in research and practice. In this dissertation, I define basin resilience as a river basin system's capacity to absorb, manage, and adapt to biophysical, social-economic, and political changes (or stressors) while still maintaining its essential structure, feedbacks, and functional integrity. I address the question of resilience, scale, and development in the Mekong and Columbia River Basins. This dissertation answers the following questions: 1) is systems theory an appropriate model to evaluate basin resilience, 2) is the Mekong Basin resilient, 3) are the Mekong and Columbia River Basins resilient across multiple scales, 4) can conflict management and collaborative learning enhance resilience, 5) can a resilience framework be used for basin comparisons, and 6) what lessons can the Mekong basin take from rapid development in the Columbia basin? In Chapter 2, I create and apply a social-ecological systems (SES) model of the Mekong River Basin to assess resilience at sub-basin (provincial), watershed (national), and basin (regional) scales. Feedbacks, thresholds, vulnerability, and adaptive capacity are determined and used as inputs into an overall basin resilience assessment. Drawing upon field work done in the Mekong Basin, Chapter 3 uses Conflict Management and Collaborative Learning processes to address resilience weaknesses across multiple scales in the Mekong Basin. Chapter 4 uses the basin resilience framework to compare the Mekong and Columbia Basins against physical characteristics, development rate, conflict and cooperation, and institutional responses to development projects. In this dissertation I find the Mekong has medium-low basin resilience and that scale is a critical determinant in basin resilience assessments. I find that in this study, vulnerability is inversely proportional to resilience, and low resilience at one scale, for example fisheries in the Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia, decreases resilience for the entire basin. I find that Cambodia and Lao PDR are the least resilience and Thailand the most resilient countries in the Mekong Basin ��� Thailand more resilient in some sectors than the Mekong River Commission (MRC). I find that the MRC's conflict management strategy is hampered by a restrictive mandate and weakness in capacity building at tributary and national scales but that Collaborative Learning processes are effective in enhancing resilience at the sub-basin scale. Finally, I demonstrate through the basin comparison that the Mekong has a highly resilient biophysical system and traditionally a resilient institutional system however, the proposed rate of development is unsustainable with trends indicating a significant erosion of resilience. I find the Columbia Basin lacking resilience in fishing, hydropower, and water quality ��� sectors mitigating the effects of development in the Columbia Basin, manifesting as overall negative trends in cooperation. However, the Columbia shows signs of increasing cooperation due recent inclusion of Tribal Nations in water management. Flexible and inclusive institutional responses to water resource development challenges, in the Mekong to rapid development on the mainstream and in the Columbia to negotiations over renewal of the Columbia River Treaty, are key determinants to whether or not each basin can halt the current negative trends and strengthen basin resilience to face the challenges now and those coming in the future. / Graduation date: 2013

The development of human societies rests on functioning ecosystems. This thesis builds on integrated theories of linked social-ecological systems and complex adaptive systems to increase the understanding of how to strengthen the capacity of ecosystems to generate services that sustain human well-being. In this work, I analyze such capacity in human-dominated production ecosystems in Tanzania and Madagascar, and how this capacity is related to local management practices. Resilience of social-ecological systems refers to the capacity to buffer change, to re-organize following disruption, and for adaptation and learning. In Papers I and II, qualitative interview methods are used for mapping and analyses of management practices in the agroecosystem of the Mbulu highlands, Northern Tanzania. Practices such as soil and water conservation, maintenance of habitats for pollinators and predators of pests, intercropping, and landscape diversification, act to buffer food production in a variable environment and sustain underlying ecological processes. The practices are embedded in a decentralized but nested system of institutions, such as communal land rights and social networks, that can buffer for localized disturbances such as temporary droughts. Paper II compares these findings with practices in a farming system in Sweden, and suggests that similar mechanisms for dealing with uncertainty and change can exist in spite of different biophysical conditions. In Papers III and IV, interviews are combined with GIS tools and vegetation sampling to study characteristics and dynamics of the dry forests of Androy, southern Madagascar. Paper III reports on a previously underestimated capacity of the dry forest of southern Madagascar to regenerate, showing areas of regeneration roughly equal areas of degenerated forest (18 700 ha). The pattern of forest regeneration, degradation, and stable cover during the period 1986-2000 was related to the enforcement of customary property rights (Paper III). Paper IV reports on a network of locally protected forest patches in Androy that is embedded in a landscape managed for agricultural or livestock production and contributes to the generation of ecosystem services and ecosystem resilience at a landscape scale. Forest protection is secured by local taboos that provide a well-functioning and legitimate sanctioning system related to religious beliefs. In Paper V, two spatial modeling tools are used to assess the generation of two services, crop pollination and seed dispersal, by the protected forest patches in southern Androy. The functioning of these services is dependent on the spatial configuration of protected patches in the fragmented landscape and can be highly vulnerable to even small changes in landscape forest cover. In conclusion, many of the identified practices are found to make ecological sense in the context of complex systems and contribute to the resilience of social-ecological systems. The thesis illustrates that the capacity of human-dominated production ecosystems to sustain a flow of desired ecosystem services is strongly associated with local management practices and the governance system that they are embedded in, and that, contrary to what is often assumed, local management can and does add resilience for desired ecosystem services. These findings have substantial policy implications, as insufficient recognition of the dynamics of social-ecological interactions is likely to lead to failure of schemes for human development and biodiversity conservation.