The Social-Ecological Action Situations (SE-AS) framework “builds on Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) (Ostrom 2005, 2011; McGinnis 2011a) and social-ecological systems frameworks (Ostrom 2009) and the Networks of Actions Situations (NAS) approach (Kimmich et al., 2022, 2023; McGinnis 2011b). However, the SE-AS framework goes beyond these frameworks by incorporating relations between and agency of social elements (SE) and ecological elements (EE) and interactions across multiple levels to overcome the dichotomy between the social and the ecological, and thus to better account for the intertwined nature of social-ecological systems. Besides “social” action situations (SE/SE-AS), it integrates “social-ecological” action situations (SE/EE-AS) and “ecological” action situations (EE/EE-AS; Fig. 1). The integration of SE/EE-AS and EE/EE-AS enables a shift away from the environment as an externality and instead allows to consider configurations of ASs that are linked through coevolving relationships which generate the nexus case phenomena of interest (Schlüter et al., 2019); Fig. 1). This allows capturing those interactions that are most relevant for the phenomenon of interest, which is necessary to define the system boundary of the configuration” (Kellner and Martin, 2023).
Figure: Social-Ecological Action Situations (SE-AS) framework. This conceptualization of social-ecological system (SES) cases enables the study of continuous adaptive responses between elements and between the elements and the resulting emergent SES phenomenon; AS = Action Situation; SE = Social Element; EE = Ecological Element (Kellner and Martin (2023) adapted from Schlüter et al. (2019))
I am involved in different activities regarding the Social-Ecological Action Situations (SE-AS) framework:
- 10/2023 – present: Co-chair, International Working Group “Working group on conceptual avenues for studying the governance of social-ecological systems”. Earth System Governance.
- 05/2022 – present: Initiator and co-organizer of an international workshop series on the Social-Ecological Action Situations framework. Collaboration with the Stockholm Resilience Centre at the Stockholm University, SE.
- 10/2023: Co-organizer of two panels at the Conference on Earth System Governance, Nijmegen, NL: “Overcoming the dichotomy of humans and nature in Earth System Governance research (I): An innovative approach to address the complex, intertwined, and coevolving social-ecological nature of governance challenges”, and “Overcoming the dichotomy of humans and nature in Earth System Governance research (II): Navigating frameworks to study governance challenges in complex social-ecological systems”
Own publication using the Social-Ecological Action Situations (SE-AS) framework:
Kellner, Elke; Martin, Dominic A. (2023): Learning from past coevolutionary processes to envision sustainable futures: Extending an action situations approach to the Water-Energy-Food nexus. In Earth System Governance 15, p. 100168. DOI: 10.1016/j.esg.2023.100168.
Colorado, US (Photo: E. Kellner)