Issues of Fit (an installment)

Sustainable development requires that we better understand how our economic activities are interwoven with the ecological goods and services that are either factors of production directly, or are implicated within their supply chain. However to limit the analysis to economic and environmental factors, and not fully embrace the social dimensions of the SD challenge, is to overlook instrumental, institutional and political dimensions that may make or break the potential for progress. From a water management and ecosystem service perspective many fundamentally important social factors are of a geographical nature, and this requires that issues of fit be considered.

One take on fit begins with the notion of a dislocation of ecosystem service supply from the accruing of benefits. Similarly there are temporal dimensions and associated incongruities between the human and ecological dimensions of integrated socio-ecological systems. These factors have important implications that present serious challenges for our policy systems.

Better linkages between science and policy is agreed upon as essential to realising more sustainable development. However natural scientists are more typically focused on the factors of ecosystem service supply. Social scientists on the other hand tend to be more interested in the benefits. Where supply and benefit may be separated by large distances in both time and space, including municipal (or even state/province) jurisdictional divides, managing these discontinuities is essential to moving forward, but it falls in the middle, not in either camp, and is often overlooked.

Politically it is important that users understand their dependence on ecosystem services, but moreover that those users and their representatives understand that the source of the associated benefits may lie beyond their jurisdictional reach. Similarly their decision making may have externalities in jurisdictions elsewhere.  Accordingly adaptive policies that work across scales and jurisdictions are therefore necessary, but very new and often untested ground for public administration.

Moreover, the notion that a watershed may be a jurisdiction in its own right, with citizens who have rights and obligations to one another that transcend political boundaries, but who also may be at odds with one another in terms of values and goals, is still very much a theoretical construct. This condition presents a host of institutional challenges, both formal and informal, which, taken together, speak to perhaps one of the most daunting meta-challenges of sustainable development: that of values, culture and cultural lock-in.

These general remarks are intended as an informal introduction to some of the issues at play as concerns fit and the lack of fit. Future installments on this issue are expected to discuss topics in more detail, including, nested and cross-scale institutions, as well as institutional effectiveness; socio-ecological resilience and (dynamic, evolving) complex ecological-economic systems; and the effects of watershed political economy on institutional development and implementation.