Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SENet (Social and ecological networks supporting biodiversity and food security)

Teaser

Sustainability issues cannot be separated from their social and biophysical context, and collaborative governance responses to interdependent sustainability issues are inherently complex. Previous empirical research has not adequately captured whether or not collaboration...

Summary

Sustainability issues cannot be separated from their social and biophysical context, and collaborative governance responses to interdependent sustainability issues are inherently complex. Previous empirical research has not adequately captured whether or not collaboration networks are matching the patterns among multiple sustainability issues that are interdependent and thus influencing each other, such as livelihoods, infrastructure, food security, biodiversity and land use. Failing to address this match or mismatch increases the risk that the policies and management responses will be inefficient or have unforeseen and even adverse consequences. In the Jimma zone, a rural area in southwest Ethiopia, I investigated if and how different types of collaborative institutions improved how interlinked sustainability issues are managed (objective B), with focused studies on biodiversity conservation and food security in poor farming households (objective A).

Objective A was to investigate if and how informal small-group traditional collaboration among smallholder farmers influenced their food sovereignty and crop choices. Collaboration is generally assumed to have many positive effects, but little research has actually measured the outcomes. I made 183 household interviews to investigate three types of traditional informal ways of collaboration,
in which farmers help with each other’s crops, and mitigate and share crop losses by joint planning, cultivating and by crop guarding against animal pest. In the local language Oromoo these institutions are called the didaro, the dado and daboo. Among my research questions were: To what extent and under which conditions is the dado, daboo and didaro improving household food security and diversity? Who gets to mobilize cooperative labor and what are the individual and structural barriers for participating? Among the preliminary conclusions are that traditional collaboration improved household food security, significantly reduced crop losses to wild animals, facilitated social learning and trust, but at the cost of a slightly limited individual freedom over crop choice.

Objective B included two main tasks:
• To design a conceptual and analytical model of how governance gaps arise when collaborative governance responses fail to recognize how sustainability issues and actors are interlinked. I did this by modelling the intersection of two networks: an actor-collaboration network, and a network of interlinked societal issues (Fig.1–2).
• To identify critical governance gaps in southwest Ethiopia consisting of 60 actors and 38 sustainability issues, by applying my network model (Fig.3–4).

I differentiated between integrative governance gaps that arise when interdependent issues are managed in separation without recognizing their interdependencies, versus collaborative gaps that arise when actors working on common issues do not collaborate (Fig.2). One of my conclusions is that it that actors and policymakers should, in order to be cost-effective, (re)allocate resources to the most pressing governance gaps, which I in southwest Ethiopia identified as: forest and wildlife issues (collaborative gaps), and the access provision of finance, transportation, schools, food and crop markets (integrative gaps, see Fig. 4–5).

Work performed

My approach towards objective A through designing and conducting two household surveys totaling 183 households in southwestern Ethiopia, during three field trips in 2016. My survey data is currently being analyzed together with researchers at Leuphana University Lueneburg in Germany, and thus forms the empirical basis for three papers in preparation.

I pursued objective B through the following activities. First, I developed a network-analytical model for identifying governance gaps in systems with many actors and many interdependent societal issues (Fig.1–2). Second, I implemented the model in the data-processing language R, in order later to apply it on real-world data from Ethiopia. Third, I combined three sets of network data, each of which I compiled from raw data collected by other researchers within my ERC-funded partner project at my host institution Leuphana University Lueneburg (Fig.3). Fourth, I developed a robust statistical analysis of the network results, which enabled me to identify the actors and sustainability issues associated with the abovementioned types of governance gaps (Fig.4).

So far objective B has resulted in two manuscripts. The first is titled “Identifying governance gaps among interlinked sustainability challenges” and is under review in the journal Environmental Science and Policy. The second is titled “Governance of interdependent problems: collaborative networks for the integrative management of interlinked problems” and will be submitted to a policy journal and will presented in August 2018 at the international conference for European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR). In addition, the SENet project has contributed to five other papers covering, among others, the following topics: challenges and contrasting approaches for the integration of food security and biodiversity conservation in multilevel network governance in Ethiopia, identification of advocacy coalitions in the food production policy in Romania, and the conceptual paper “Reframing the Food–Biodiversity Challenge” in Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

Final results

For objective A, this fellowship has yielded unprecedented data on the informal collaborative institutions dado, daboo and didaro, which had previously not been studied scientifically. This research has the potential to provide management implications to local Ethiopian stakeholders on how to support these informal institutions for socio-economic benefits, while taking into account the aspects of gender, social equality and biodiversity conservation. There is currently a vivid discussion in the global North about “sharing economy” that refer to different communal informal approaches that includes sharing and helping among individuals. The design of such current approaches can potentially gain from insights from other parts of the world, including from my research on the traditional long-lived labor-sharing Ethiopian institutions of the didaro, dado and daboo.

Objective B resulted in an entirely new approach to identify and diagnose governance responses to interdependent, complex sustainability issues, moving beyond the simplified but common assertion that more collaboration and more cross-sector integration is desirable for all sustainability issues. As a suggestion to the involved actors and policy makers, I have proposed a process for how my analysis c can be used by involved governance actors individually and collectively in order to achieve a more cost-efficient use of management and collaboration resources for achieving desired governance outcomes in sustainability (see Fig.5). My approach is generic enough to be applied in many different disciplines and policy domains and in virtually any empirical setting in which different actors are collectively influencing multiple interlinked societal problems. For example, I suggest that extended collaboration should be prioritized around forest and wildlife conservation, and that extended cross-sector integration should be prioritized around the issues of social trust and traditional culture, and around access provision of finance, transportation, schools, food and crop markets.