We’ve got grand plans of making this a more crowd sourced project next year with the help of our official webmaster Sandra Lauer.

In the meantime, stay safe over the Christmas period, and take some time out to contemplate the big things, a la Bill Waterson’s Calvin and Hobbs:

Culture Shock Philippines (though not the 1988 version) was actually the last book I picked up. It’s still prescribed reading for Aussie vollies in the Philippines, and it’s being stored in the now empty maid’s quarter’s where I stay when transiting through Manila, rejected by successive waves of young Australians who discover Filipinos can never be boxed into the ‘smooth interpersonal relations’ box that (Westernised) culture commentators insist on.

Small world marvelling has been the theme of my week, and the giggles that spread across the room when the Dean of Asia Pacific studies hauled out a ‘Kate and William’ tea towel from the mystery blogging box, reminded us again that our shared knowledge allows us to laugh at the same things like no other time.

I’m reminded again of Harvey Cox’s words ‘the comic, more than the tragic, because it inspires hope, and leads to more not less participation in the struggle for a just world’. So let’s laugh together, learn together and then drink Japanese beer together and make the most of the final two days of APW2011.

silhouettes of surburbia

constucting community

"Although scrappier and weedier in real life, the place had the same feeling of planned idyllic perfection as the advertisements."

Lifestyles for sale

People were coming and going, and generally very friendly. As I watched the tradesmen go in for their morning egg and bacon roll, I wondered what this place will be like in ten years time. The trees and vegetation will be established, the houses will be weary (some are already showing some signs) and I wonder how these shopping centres will fare. In some ways I guess they will be quite successful. It really is a long way to any other centre, yet I can’t help but worry how some of these things will survive with the absence of the building industry. But perhaps the shops will change, no longer takeaways for tradesmen, instead a cinema for teenagers, small businesses run by bored mums and services catering to the elderly. I wonder if they will ever become the empty shells that have been the fate of so many other small shopping centres in Australian suburbs.
That sense of energy in the place continued as I ventured past the school to another little shopping strip. An IGA, real estate, bakery, take away, Liquorland and a hairdresser. In an attempt to pick up some local gossip I enter the hairdresser and book an appointment. I’m overly conscious of my Birkenstock shoes and my inability to understand whether a blow wave just means drying my hair, or some kind of fancy styling. I leave feeling awkward and out of place, making a mental note to rethink my wardrobe.

And so I leave, looking forward to the travel time to think things through, and another chance to look at the oil refinery. I look forward to coming back and understanding this place more; untangling my sense of unease at the packet mix perfection this place seems to offer.
I end my first venture with a trip back to the mall and leave with some t-shirts designed to make me fit in with the locals. This place just makes me want to conform.

Mangroves, Simeulue Island, Aceh

Two years ago I brought over to Jogyakarta a copy of Walker and Salt’s “Resilience Thinking” , which had just been released in Australia. The book was enthusiastically copied and circulated around environmentalist circles (in fact, I recently saw a copy in the library of the Environmental Bamboo Foundation in Bali). One of the readers who came across the book was Ben Brown, formerly the director of Mangrove Action Project Indonesia. Just prior to encountering the book, Ben had been researching mangrove ecosystems and mangrove management in Indonesia, and was so taken with resilience thinking as a conceptual framework that he incorporated it into an awesome report that he wrote on mangroves as resilient ecosystems.

As Ben relates in the Foreword to the report,

“One year after the 2006 Yogyakarta Earthquake, I found myself poking around a friend’s house in Bantul, one of the regions most devastated by the quake. Approximately 200 of the 250 houses in his village were either destroyed or properly damaged. Most of the houses, one year after the fact, had been rebuilt, do to the fund-raising prowess of an ex-pat who runs Yogyakarta’s largest handicraft export business, and has resided in the same village for nearly a decade. Before this substantial aid found its way to the village, truckloads of community volunteers had already come pouring down from the Central Javanese highlands, laden with bamboo and free or cheap labor, to help in reconstruction.

I had not yet heard much of the term resilience, but seemingly, social systems in Yogyakarta (local community, government, non-government, and international) were by and large up to the task of rebuilding, at least to a greater extent than the 2004 tsunami disaster in Aceh. At any rate, this is not a paper on the resilience of disaster stricken communities, but my introduction to resilience thinking came during this time period. While at my friend’s house, I came across an unassuming looking paperback with the succinct title “Resilience Thinking.” What immediately caught my eye, was the photograph on the cover depicting a solitary, four-leaved mangrove seedling (Ceriops tagal), poking up from an uplifted coral head. By chance, I had just returned a week before from a mangrove restoration assessment on Simeulue Island, Aceh (see case study #2), from 6 sites which had undergone tectonic uplift of around 1 meter. I had in my, literally one hundred of my own photos identical to the one gracing the cover of “Resilience Thinking.” I borrowed the book, read it cover to cover, made eight copies, and now am re-borrowing (haven given away all eight copies) the book as a reference for this writing.

… I am not a true mangrover, perhaps more of an associate of mangroves. The best that can be said for myself and the staff of Mangrove Action Project in Indonesia is that we are very close to the fisher-folk with whom we work, and we probably have a better understanding of rural coastal community dynamics in Indonesia than most. …What we are attempting with this paper is the application of a wonderful way of thinking (resilience), to a system very dear to us (mangroves). Our hope is that at least a few readers will take up the challenge to learn more about resilience thinking and to apply it to current mangrove management efforts in their own regions.”

Ben made some interesting comments about resilience as a holistic, integrative paradigm. He says, “When we first heard about resilience thinking, we were stoked. The concepts were immediately familiar to us: to all of us working in mangroves, mangroves are a textbook example of a resilient ecosystem. What the book managed to do was make the concept of resilience clear and accessible. And it becomes a framework that allows you to manage the ecosystem for both the social and ecological paradigm: it gives you a methodology for putting the two together. It gives you an integrative scientific model, in which the social side becomes social science, instead of social work or development, which wasn’t thought of scientifically so much.” It was fascinating for me to hear, coming from a university course focusing on interdisciplinary human-environment problems; being a humanities student in the Faculty of Science. These kind of holistic approaches make sense to me, but there’s always the concern of how useful they are in practice. It’s great to see someone in the field attracted to these ideas in a similar way, and applying them.

Seismic Uplift on Simeulue (Kerry Sieh 2007)

The paper was published by IUCN (the World Conservation Union) and was read by mangrove researchers in Sri Lanka, Phillipines and Thailand; copies were also distributed to various government agencies in Indonesia. As Ben explains, much of the report aimed to present concepts of resilience thinking for dissemination in policy circles which might otherwise not have the opportunity to engage with these ideas:

“This paper intends to present the precepts of “Resilience Thinking” as they relate to mangrove management in Indonesia. The paper’s only real design is to provide mangrove managers with basic information on resilience, so that they may begin to think of mangrove forests under their jurisdiction as socio-ecological systems and begin to perceive management actions based on their ability to maintain or increase the resilience of the mangrove forest. Before going into the specifics of resilience and mangroves, we need a basic understanding of the concept of resilience as described by David Salt and Brian Walker, authors of “Resilience Thinking.” As opposed to paraphrasing the authors (and misconstruing their connotations), many of the key concepts on resilience are taking verbatim from the book “Resilience Thinking” and the Resilience Alliance website, not with the intent to plagiarize, but because so many mangrove managers in Indonesia will not be able to access the original, and also so that translation from English to Indonesia takes place with as little distortion as possible. Again, the main emphasis of this paper is to make a new mode of thinking accessible managers who have limited access to written materials.”

Download: “Resilience Thinking Applied to the Mangroves of Indonesia“, Ben Brown, IUCN & Mangrove Action Project, Yogyakarta, INDONESIA, 2007.

(sorry about the monster file size, I’ll upload a smaller file soon)

Deb Cleland is one of the rocking crew of students who completed Honours in Human Ecology at the Australian National University in 2007. Her innovative honours’ research took advantage of opportunities to work with the Modelling and Decision Support Working Group in the Coral Reef Targeted Research Project to carry out practical research on approaches to sustainable reef management. Deb worked with the MDS-WG to design interactive models and role play games to engage stakeholders in coral reef management and conservation issues. Deb has kindly allowed us to post her honours thesis on “Practice makes perfect? An iterative approach to participatory modelling for coral reef management” on the Human Ecology Forum website.

Deb studied a combined degree in Arts/Science, majoring in Development Studies and Human Ecology/Sustainability Science, after a brief taste of law. She took a series of courses on ecology, climatology, biology and environmental management before getting involved in the coral reef management project by accident after asking to do an introductory computer modelling course through RSPAS (Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies).

Deb went on going on to do an independent research project (a semester-long course) with the course coordinator, which led to an opportunity to focus exclusively on it for a year studying Honours. On the topic of finding great research opportunities, Deb says “students are a cheap way for overextended full-time researchers to get things done, so if you hear about an interesting project, it is always worth asking if you can participate in some way.”

For those of you not familiar with the Australian tertiary studies system, Honours is the final year of an undergraduate degree. Studying Honours in some programs may involve coursework, but programs such as Human Ecology are solely research-based theses, similar to Masters research programs, and as such can be a direct pathway to PhD studies.

“Practice makes perfect? An iterative approach to participatory modelling for coral reef management”

ABSTRACT

As human activities continue to devastate coral reefs across the globe, new and innovative approaches are needed to link government, communities and researchers to improve reef management. As these new approaches are developed, it is crucial to explore how effectively they are able to bring together diverse stakeholders to integrate knowledge and build relationships to support sustainable reef management. To this end, this thesis takes the example of companion modelling, a participatory modelling method which is associated with combining computer models and role-play games. Using an iterative methodology, it draws upon companion modelling work previously completed in Mexico to guide the design of a new model and role-play game ‘ReefGame’, which was presented at a one-day stakeholder workshop in the Philippines. This experience demonstrated that the companion modelling approach successfully supported social leaning in a participatory setting, by encouraging reflection and discussion among participants. However, it was not able to usefully build relationships across community, researchers and government. Building effective collaboration between these three sectors will require a long-term commitment to building a local mandate and integrating research into existing management, power and communication structures. This research process revealed two important lessons for implementing companion modelling for improving reef management. Firstly, a comprehensive understanding of local complexities is critical in developing models which can effectively engage local people in dialogue and learning processes. Secondly, and notwithstanding the central role of contextual detail, explicitly extracting structural similarities over differing social and economic contexts to draw out lessons for practice plays an essential role in improving outcomes in the field, both for reefs and the people who depend on them.

ReefGame workshop in the Phillipines

Please contact Deborah for a copy of her thesis. deborah dot cleland at gmail.

John Schooneveldt (Nature and Society Forum)

Traditional wisdom has long recognised that societal arrangements, beliefs, languages and cultures evolve over time but they do so rather differently to the way living organisms have evolved. In other words, while Darwinian evolution is widely accepted as explaining the evolution of our physical selves, including our brains, our minds seem to change in rather more mysterious ways.

In this Forum I argue against this dualism by going back to Darwin’s original work and earlier Greek ideas of causation to explore the possibility that contextually generated selection pressures not only offer an elegant explanation of biological evolution but the evolution and development of mind, culture, language etc as well.