by present and future actions (Baumolet al., 1992). This type of relationship is characterised by reinvestment at the macroeconomic scale in agriculture in terms of technology and at the microeconomic scale by investment by the individual in, for example, plant, equipment and intellectual property.
The Lock-in Trap has low potential for change, high connectedness and high resilience. High resilience would mean a great ability for the system to resist external disturbances and persist due to the depauperate ecological system. It can be deduced from resilience theory that some subregions or catchments of the WA agricultural region with the most productive soils and not prone to soil salinity will be adaptive and others may well get caught in one or other of the pathological traps through a combination of factors but ultimately through natural resource degradation.
Long-wave economic cycles cause build up and collapse in societies.
Records for ancient societies show that in some cases renewal from collapse was possible while in other cases recovery was not possible (Janssenet al., 2002). It is proposed that some societies may become fragile and vulnerable to collapse from a phenomenon known as the ‘sunk-cost effect’ (Janssen et al., 2002; Tainter, 1988). This phenomenon is attributed to a society that becomes highly interconnected and may not be flexible enough to react to unfavourable climatic events such as drought (Janssen et al., 2002). Such a society has lost its resilience to be able to respond to sudden changes and a threshold may be crossed. This event has also been described as a tipping point (Gladwell, 2002). Tainter (1988) developed an argument of diminishing returns to increasing complexity and ascribed to this cause the collapse of 24 societies. Tainter (1988) proposed that increasing complexity was beneficial up to a certain degree, beyond which the effects were detrimental. Tainter (1988) argued that the development of complexity was an economic process and that society evolved along the marginal return curve in a phenomenon known as ‘the law of diminishing returns’. That is to say, at a certain level of complexity the ratio of returns to costs diminishes resulting in negative returns to investment. At this tipping point a society may become extremely vulnerable to collapse.
to consider social systems and ecological systems as separate entities, as commonly managed as such in the past. Resilience theory proposes that the concept of the SESs that emphasises the integration of humans-in-ecosystems will help in our attempts to manage these social-ecological linkages towards more sustainable land management practices. There can be no neat separation into individual systems, which are artefacts of the human mind, not character- istics of the real world (Meadows and Robinson, 1985). Cross-scale dynamics, thresholds, stability and resilience are useful concepts to help explain organ- isation and change in SESs.
6.5.1 Cross-scale dynamics
We suggested that in the WA agricultural region human institutions have not responded adequately to the balancing feedback in ecosystems (that is, the natural resource degradation). Social and economic resilience may be created in the short term, but at the expense of loss of ecological resilience. For example, although the effects of clearing land were known in the early 1900s, the political arena ignored the unintended effects or detrimental externalities.
We suggest that the economic system, consisting of fast moving variables, over this 100-year period was linked with rural patterns of demography, another fast moving variable, but not linked with the slow moving hydrolog- ical cycle (a slow system variable). However, this position is now changing as the percentage of unproductive land becomes greater making it a political, social and economic issue. It is no longer reasonable to assume that envi- ronmental feedbacks are not a dynamic component of the economic system (O’Neillet al., 1998). Also at the global scale the extent of resource utilisation by society is increasing, impacting on the dynamics of the ecosystem and the ecological cycle is having an increased impact on the lives and activities of humans. This is now a well-documented concept and many papers in the literature identify the linkages between the socio-economic systems and the ecological system (Daly, 1991; Rosser, 2001; Costanza and Farber, 2002).
The scale of the area under investigation may influence the duration of the adaptive cycle, and may explain the differences reported between this regional study in Western Australia and the Goulburn Broken Catchment (Figure 1.2) study in Victoria, eastern Australia by Walkeret al. (2002). The duration of the two adaptive cycles in the WA agricultural region is inconsistent with those found for the Goulburn Broken Catchment. In a resilience analysis (Table 6.1) of the dynamics of the Goulburn Broken Catchment, Walkeret al.
(2002) identified four periods of major changes over 110 years (1890 to 2000) and suggested that a general pattern where 75% of a period occupies
the forward loop was typical for regional systems and is consistent with the adaptive cycle model. As described above, this finding of Walker et al.
(2002) is inconsistent with the pattern found in the WA agricultural region in which over the 116-year history in the region only 66% and 57% of the period was spent in the forward loop, or the upwave of the Kondratiev Cycle.
One possible explanation for the discrepancy in durations is the difference in spatial scales of the two regions; the Goulburn Broken Catchment has an area of 2.4 million hectares (Goulburn Broken Catchment Management Authority, 2002) whereas the WA agricultural region has an area of 18 million hectares, about 7.5 times greater. The smaller size of the Goulburn Broken Catchment may have resulted in a greater influence of more local events on the dynamics of the cycle; for example the influence of the depression of the 1890s, the regional drought and dust storms, and poor success of stone fruit as identified by the stakeholders in the study by Walkeret al. (2002). Further studies on regions of different sizes would be beneficial in support of this position.
6.5.2 Thresholds, stability and resilience
A key aim of resilience analysis is to identify thresholds, their nature and what determines how they prevent the system from moving into an undesirable configuration (Walkeret al., 2002). Ecosystems of renewable resources threat- ened by the interactions of economic and social systems may lose resilience (that is, the ability to absorb shocks and disturbances) and may suddenly break down and/or settle into a different system with less resilience (Gunderson and Holling, 2002). This implies that there are thresholds at which the levels of stress will lead to the disruption of the system, the first of the six assumptions ascribed to complex systems shown in Table 5.8 (Walkeret al., 2002).
We propose that factors involved with ecological buffering help a system’s ability to cope with surprise (Folkeet al., 2002) and prevent the system moving into an undesirable state. In the WA agricultural system, areas of native vegetation that once provided refugia for stock in times of drought have been lost, and loss of riparian vegetation has increased soil loss and reduced water quality. In other areas raised watertables have reduced the ecological buffering for episodes of greater than average rainfall, which results in flood events, such as was experienced in the Moore River Catchment in the northern area of the WA agricultural region in 1999 (Water Studies Pty Ltd, 2000) and in the Avon River Catchment in 2000 (Hatton and Ruprecht, 2001). In addition, the predicted changes in the annual total rainfall and distribution for the south-west of Western Australia, as a consequence of global climate change
(CSIRO, 2001), may create a crisis through increasingly extreme climatic events that could have an overwhelming impact on the SES. It is proposed that when there is little or no ecological buffering capacity the control mechanisms shift to regional economic, demographic or social factors (Gundersonet al., 2002a). For the WA agricultural region we hypothesise that the potential impact could be a retraction of the area under annual cropping with areas being abandoned and/or a threshold being reached in the carrying capacity of the number of farmers. Barr (2000) proposed that a major restructure in rural demographics is likely to occur, with the agricultural enterprises at the theoretical economic marginal return curve exiting the industry.
Agricultural intensification was a major feature of the second adaptive cycle. We suggest that agricultural intensification involving changes in tech- nology acted as functional reinforcement across scales (see Table 5.7) effec- tively masking the degradation of natural resources, and helping to produce the perceived stability in the system. The balancing feedback signals were either hidden or ignored. Novelty in technology effectively redefined the system and so prevented the ecosystem from crossing critical thresholds and changing states. By and large the scientific community has helped to perpetuate the illusion of sustainable development through scientific and technological progress (Ludwiget al., 1993). We suggest that this is largely because humans fail to build self-organisation or adaptive capacities into their technologies (Gundersonet al., 2002a); that is, there is no mechanism to automatically provide balancing feedback.
Technological advances make single variable interventions or create inter- ventions without regard for their impacts on other parts of the system. This has been described as humans’ propensity to focus on ‘single cause and effect solutions’, that is, ‘means–ends’ logic designed to solve a particular problem (Westley et al., 2002), ultimately with serious implications for continuing resource misuse. For instance, as a solution is found for each problem it will create other effects, referred to as side-effects or perverse and unintended effects. In economics, side-effects are often called negative externalities and a major theme of ecological economics is to estimate the value of these exter- nalities. The creation of new institutions (for example, policies and markets) is being promoted as one way to help to account for the full costs (both positive and negative externalities) to society of land management practices to ensure that critical thresholds are not crossed. Even with the ability to redefine the system by creating novel futures through technological advances, this system will rely on a continuous stream of new technologies, institutions or social adaptations to maintain resilience and the adaptive capacity of the whole system.
6.5.3 Policy responses
When faced with shifting stable states and effects that are perceived as crises, policy and management options fall into one of three general classes of response (Hilborn, 1992). The first is to do nothing and wait and see if the system will return to some acceptable state while sacrificing benefits of the desirable state. The second option is to actively manage the system and try to return it to a desirable state. The third option is to admit that the system is irreversibly changed, and hence the only strategy is to constantly adapt, in a world characterised by crises and changing states. All three of the responses were seen sequentially in the WA agricultural region. The problem of soil salinity was known early in the history of the WA agricultural region, and for economic, social and political reasons the government chose to ignore the scientific advice and released land for agriculture in areas known to be susceptible to soil salinity and in areas known to be marginal for agricul- ture because of climatic variability and poor soil characteristics. The second response was to put in place actions directed at fixing the symptoms, each new policy responding to the effects (side-effects or unintended effects) of the past policy (described in Chapters 2 to 4). This is a well-known phenomenon known as the ‘bite-back’ phenomenon in resilience theory of large-scale systems (Gunderson et al., 2002c), which is also described as ‘policy resis- tance’ in system dynamics (Sterman, 2000). For instance, many tree planting programs designed to alter the changing hydrological patterns failed and advice on where and what to plant changed as our scientific understanding of the hydrological system improved. The solutions were mostly directed at the symptoms as opposed to actions to address the systemic causes of the problem.
The third and current policy response contains a number of strategic actions aimed at adapting to the current situation. One approach currently being discussed is that of environmental triage (Hobbs et al., 2003; Hobbs and Kristjanson, 2003), in which it is acknowledged that some areas will not be able to be managed positively and no further public funds will be directed to these areas. The second strategy is the introduction of market-based instru- ments. This is based on the premise that many of the changes including biodiversity loss are caused by inadequate institutions, in particular ill-defined property rights (Hanna and Munasinghe, 1995) and the impact of this on resource use. The design of institutions such as property rights in conjunc- tion with market-based instruments and regionalisation is a major thrust in Australian natural resource policy. Young and McCay (1995) argued that by adding flexibility and renewable structures to property rights regimes they
can be adapted to incorporate social and environmental objectives, and this is one way to increase resilience. Critics of the proposed economic solu- tions argue that complications will arise from the coupling of equilibrium economic market-based solutions in a non-equilibrium world in which the system will usually rebound to the detriment of the natural environment;
‘A major challenge is to protect and conserve the natural environment in spite of the political/economic powerstatus quo, not to implement policies within the framework of, and reconfirming, thatstatus quo.’ (K. de Greene personal communication, May 2001). Therefore, the use of market-based instruments for natural resource management is in its infancy and further research is required to better understand the relationships between various property rights regimes and the dynamics of complex systems where the interactions between variables occur at different temporal and spatial scales.
Nonetheless, an important research question would be, ‘Are there phases within the economic cycle that provide times of greater leverage for different types of policy?’ In other words, is it possible to create policies that are most appropriate for the dynamics of the system, ‘Let the policy fit the time’. In the agricultural industry, times of rapid change and restructuring may be the most appropriate period to implement policies that create the greatest change to meet the desired objectives of society, for example, retiring severely degraded land, allocating land for conservation of biodiversity and the maintenance of ecosystem services. This may be particularly relevant if there is a trend away from the family farm towards increasing corporate farm ownership.
It is possible, with the use of new precision farming techniques, combining the new information system techniques of global positioning system, yield monitoring on harvesters and geographic information systems, to identify those areas with the highest productivity and those with low productivity that are not cost effective to crop (Passioura, 2002). The latter could be retired out of production to some other land use for increasing ecosystem services.
An alternative ‘system-fix’ approach would be in the form of social institu- tions such as supply and production limits, certification for best practices, and tax and payments based on stewardship that expand the goals of the natural resource economy to encompass more than the standard definition of efficiency (Sawinet al., 2003).