Definitions
Adaptive Capacity: The ability of social actors or systems to cope with change or disturbance and/or learn through uncertainty.
Adaptive Co-Management: A flexible system of collaborative resource management, tailored to specific places and situations, supported by, and working in conjunction with, various organizations at different levels. This concept merges the principles and practices of co-management and adaptive management (Armitage et al. 2009).
Adaptive Management: Systematic learning-by-doing.
Agency: The ability of individuals or groups to undertake actions despite constraints imposed by larger social or material structures (Giddens 1984; Bourdieu 1977).
Bridging Organizations: Serving as catalysts and facilitators, these organizations provide an arena for knowledge co-production, trust-building, sense-making, learning, vertical and horizontal collaboration, and conflict resolution (Berkes 2009).
Clumsy Solutions: Exploratory solutions that include inputs from a range of stakeholders along the fish chain and require information-sharing, knowledge synthesis and trust-building, where approximations are needed to move forward (Khan and Neis 2010).
Co-Management: A resource management partnership in which local users and other stakeholders share power and responsibility with government agencies (Armitage et al. 2007).
Community Conservation: The practice of conservation initiated and developed by local people. However, in some cases, community conservation may be the result of devolution of the government to the local people. Satria and Matsuda (2004) identified types of awiq-awiqas models of community conservation based on source of initiation.
Community of Practice: A social group or learning network that develops around shared interests or activities.
Community Resilience: The existence, development and engagement of community resources by community members to thrive in an environment characterized by change, uncertainty, unpredictability and surprise (Magis 2010).
Community Vulnerability: Refers to the degree a community is sensitive to and exposed to particular conditions and shocks, while considering the community’s adaptive capacity to deal with these conditions and shocks. If a community is too sensitive to natural hazards and has a low adaptive capacity, the community is vulnerable.
Complex System: A number of non-linear interactions among its interdependent parts. One cannot understand the system behavior by just considering each of the parts and combining them. Instead one must consider how the relationships between the parts affect the behavior of the whole. Feedback among interdependent parts allows for the self-organization of complex systems.
Co-Production of Knowledge: The collaborative process of bringing a plurality of knowledge sources and types together to address a defined problem, and build an integrated or systems-oriented understanding of that problem (Armitage et al. 2011).
Culture: The customs, art, social institutions, etc. of a particular sector, society or nation (CBD Ecosystem Approach). Different sectors, societies or nations view ecosystems in terms of their own cultural and economic needs. Therefore, culture considerably influences how the ecosystems and their services are valued by a specific sector, society or nation.
Driver: A natural or human induced factor that causes a change in a system.
Ecosystem Services: The benefits to human society from ecosystems.
Emergence: A characteristic of a complex adaptive system that cannot be predicted or understood simply by examining the components of the system.
Feedback Loops: The process by which system outputs are returned to the system as an input, either to oppose the initial input (negative feedback), or to enhance it (positive feedback).
Governance: The public and private interactions undertaken to address challenges and to create opportunities within society. Governance thus includes the development and application of the principles, rules, norms and enabling institutions that guide public and private interactions (Armitage et al. 2009).
Incentives (regarding resource conservation and stewardship): Building of institutional systems that provide incentives to individual fishers and enterprises that lead to behaviour consistent with conservation (Hilborn et al. 2005).
Institutions: The formal (rules, laws, constitutions, organizational entities) and informal (norms of behaviour, conventions, codes of conduct) practices that structure human interaction (Armitage et al. 2009).
Institutional Interplay and Linkages: Relationships among organizations and institutions, both vertically across levels and horizontally within the same level, have been identified as critical factors in building resilient social-ecological systems (Gunderson et al. 2006).
Integrative science: Methods and processes to support suitable institutional responses, a broader planning perspective, and development of suitable resilience-building strategies (Miller et al. 2010).
Level: see scale.
Memory: Accumulated experience and history of the system (both social and ecological) which provide the basis for self-organization (Armitage et al. 2009).
Multi-Level Governance: Governance involving links that may be horizontal (across geographic space) or vertical (across levels of organization), with the recognition that there often is no single spatial or temporal level of analysis for governing social-ecological systems (Brondizio et al. 2009).
Networks: The interconnections among people and organizations within a social-ecological system. Networks may structure themselves around resource use, administrative responsibility and/or other functions and may be connected to other networks (Armitage et al. 2009).
Polycentric Systems: Institutions which are nested, quasi-autonomous decision-making units operating at multiple scales, balancing between centralized and decentralized control (Folke et al. 2005).
Regime Shift: A regime shift (or “flip”) is said to occur when a critical threshold has been crossed and a system shifts into an alternate configuration controlled by different feedbacks.
Resilience: the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks (Walker et al. 2004).
Scale: The spatial, temporal, quantitative, or analytical dimensions used to measure and study any phenomenon; levels are the units of analysis that are located at different positions on a scale (Cash et al. 2006).
Self-Organization: In adaptive co-management, self-organization involves the emergence of formal and informal networks, working in a collaborative and creative process, often drawing on a range of knowledge sources and ideas (Armitage et al. 2009).
Social Capital: The social norms, networks of reciprocity and exchange, and relationships of trust that enable people to act collectively (Armitage et al. 2009).
Social-Ecological Systems: integrated complex systems that include social (human) and ecological (biophysical) subsystems in a two-way feedback relationship (Berkes 2011).
Social Learning: The collaborative or mutual development and sharing of knowledge by multiple stakeholders through learning-by-doing. Learning may involve the identification of strategies or actions (e.g., harvesting techniques) to resolve specific problems and improve outcomes (e.g., improved incomes, higher yields). Alternatively, learning may involve fundamental changes in underlying values or worldviews, sometimes referred to as transformative learning.
Stewardship (ecosystem stewardship): A strategy to respond to and shape social-ecological systems under conditions of uncertainty and change, to sustain the supply and opportunities for use of ecosystem services to support human well-being (Chapin et al. 2010).
Surprise: Unexpected findings about the natural environment or social-ecological system that do not conform to formal hypotheses or working conceptions of what is deemed likely (Lindenmayer et al. 2010).
Threshold: An abrupt breaking point between alternate states of a system, where a small change in the controlling variable produces a large change in the characteristic structure, function and feedbacks of the system (Arctic Council 2013).
Tipping Point: A kind of threshold characterized by bifurcation in a system (Arctic Council 2013).
Wicked Problems: Problems that have no definitive formulation, no stopping rule, and no test for a solution.
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