Ecologically Effective Social Organization as a Requirement for Sustaining Watershed Ecosystems

Abstract

The social sciences can make significant contributions to solving watershed management problems. Sustainable watershed management requires knowledge about ecologically effective forms of social organization. Including humans as a component of the ecosystem permits scientists and policy makers to consider how resource management activities affect biophysical processes regulating ecosystems. A major reason for the failure of human societies to develop sustainable resource management activities has been the limitations on their ability to acquire and process ecological information. Difficulty in maintaining adequate information on the state of ecological systems originates in the inability of people to develop an effective cognitive map of their environment. Institutional structure has a major influence on cognitive learning of environments, and institutional arrangements determine the scale of human social organization and the incentives for people to learn and adopt ecologically sustainable practices. Institutionalization of sustainable resource and ecosystem management practices will require better information about the appropriate scale and form of social organization. Small, flexible institutional units may be best suited for the adaptive learning necessary to achieve sustainable resource management.

Symbiotic relationships mean creative partnerships. The earth is to be seen neither as an ecosystem to be preserved unchanged nor as a quarry to be exploited for selfish and short-range economic reasons, but as a garden to be cultivated for the development of its own potentialities of the human adventure. René Dubos (1976)