Reconciling contradictory narratives of landscape change using the adaptive cycle: a case study from southeastern Australia

Reconciling contradictory narratives of landscape change using the adaptive cycle: a case study from southeastern Australia

Blog Article

This paper addresses the methodological challenge of exposing and reconciling contradictory narratives of change in a social-ecological system (SES).Our research occurred in the Ovens Valley in southeastern Australia.Other studies have used the adaptive cycle to interpret change, but those efforts have been based on researcher-derived interpretations.We drew on the Factors Actors Sectors framework as a structure for coding qualitative interview data provided by key informants.Our analysis suggested that interpretations of SES change fell into three groups: farmers, employees of government and local organizations, and local politicians.

Those narratives were then overlaid on the adaptive cycle as a way of exposing and interpreting the narratives.To farmers, the SES was based on agriculture and approaching collapse, apunisw2 and intervention was required to prevent a collapse.Employees of government and local organizations thought the SES had already collapsed, and local people were struggling to identify a prosperous new trajectory.The local politicians also thought the system had collapsed but unlike the other stakeholders, considered the SES as having already caruso rhodiola reorganized.We then drew on a range of secondary data to reconcile those contradictory narratives and form a consolidated interpretation of landscape change.

Our synthesis of the primary and secondary data suggested that the SES had collapsed and reorganized as a multifunctional landscape.We suggest our approach may be useful to others attempting to interpret landscape change using a resilience framework.The case study also illustrates the importance of exploring multiple perspectives of landscape change as a way of exposing the role of power as a force shaping discourse and, therefore, policy and planning.