What makes a fruit a fruit?

(by Maja and Romina)

Here we report back from our three-days retreat on a beautiful island called Muskö in the Stockholm archipelago. The whole group was working hard to move a step forward in creating a typology of social-ecological links and the dynamics they give rise to. We hope to identify sets of social, ecological and social-ecological interactions that are likely to lead to a regime-shift or a trap situation. We build on Elinor Ostrom’s IAD framework, particularly the action-situation, as a means to describe interactions and develop a typology. Ultimately, we hope to contribute to the development of SES-theory through a combination of empirical analysis with theoretical deduction much in the way social sciences have developed middle range theories. To make the challenging task of building a typology and theorizing about it a bit easier at the beginning, we practiced on classifying fruits and vegetables for a “warm-up”. (picture ;-)). We also mapped several of our empirical cases using our action situation-based framework. We will report more as soon as we elaborate this further!

View from Muskö.

Happy SESlink members on Muskö.