cross-scale relationships to better navigate ongoing changes.
By Elena M Bennett and Belinda Reyers.
The interactions and relationships connecting people and the environment are central to sustainable development efforts. The Anthropocene (the current human-dominated epoch) and its enhanced interconnectivity through global trade, information, and financial flows, has wrought changes on these human-nature relationships. The changes now result in novel, ever-shifting, and hard-to-predict patterns and pathologies in these interactions. It is no longer sufficient to understand and engage with these interactions as if they are simple, static and spatially bounded. Instead, we need a new approach to understanding and improving people’s relationships to the environment that can take the novel complexity and cross-scale dynamism of the Anthropocene into account.
Drawing from experiences and insights we’ve learned through social-ecological systems (SES) research and applications, we point to three entry points that may offer ways to proactively and pragmatically engage with the complex realities of people-nature relationships. These three entry points are:
(1) Beyond interactionalism: Move away from a focus on either people or nature and the interactions between them and move towards a focus on the relationships that unite people with nature. Experience from SES research and practice highlights that it is the relationships themselves, rather than the human or environmental parts of the system, that ultimately determine sustainable development outcomes and pathways.
(2) Beyond multi-scale: Account for the cross-scale nature of these relationships. It is no longer enough to recognize the need for local, global or even multi-scale work; now we must assume that boundaries are porous, external factors are key and human-environment interactions connect scales influencing outcomes at other scales, often in novel and surprising ways. Power asymmetries exacerbate these cross-scale dynamics further entrenching inequality and environmental degradation.
(3) Beyond solutions: Acknowledging the dynamic nature of people-nature relationships implies that sustainable development is about process navigation rather than control. As humans and their environment constantly shape and are shaped by one another, attention must focus on the mechanisms that determine how these relationships and innovations are maintained or changed. From this perspective sustainable development interventions are seen as becoming part of this mutual shaping, ultimately determining which relationships are kept and which are lost forever.
Taken together, these entry points for the study of and engagement with human-environment interactions may offer a route to bridge the gap between how complex and intertwined we know these relationships are, especially in the context of the Anthropocene, and the practical tendency to treat them as simple, static and linear. To bridge such a gap, multiple approaches and diverse perspectives are required. Experiences from SES research and practice can play a part by suggesting new and plausible avenues to be able to appreciate, embrace and navigate the complexity and continuous change involved in human-environment interactions.
Relational Thinking 