Developing a panarchy model of landscape conservation and management of alpine-mountain grassland in Northern Italy

Ian David Soane, Rocco Scolozzi, Beatrice Marelli, Cristina Orsatti, Klaus Hubacek and Alessandro Gretter

No 1107, Openloc Working Papers from Public policies and local development

Abstract: This paper explores methods of applying resilience theory to a case study of natural resource management and the cultural landscape of upland and alpine pasture in northern Italy. We identify that the close interaction between alpine pastures and its managers offers a strong fit with the concept of a social-ecological system that maintains the cultural landscape. We first considered a descriptive approach looking historically at socio-economic development in the study area. We explored whether this can be related to resilience phenomena such as regime shifts, thresholds and/or regime stability through adaptive processes. However, we found it difficult at this overarching level to conceptually combine natural and social capital of alpine pastures and their managers in any quantitative way. We also interpreted our data through considering economic, social and ecological information as acting within separate but interacting domains. This led us to construct conceptual models of adaptive cycles to describe the alpine mountain grassland ecosystem of our study site and to conclude that a panarchy model can offer a powerful metaphor for its ecological dynamics. This has practical implications both for the management of Natura 2000 interest and the maintenance of the cultural landscape in which this Alpine interest occurs. We suggest that Resilience theory through its dynamic approach of interacting scales of adaptive cycles offers useful insights into the resource management (of valued cultural and natural attributes) but that care is needed in distinguishing between descriptive metaphor and predictive model or "real" system.

Keywords: natural resource management; natural and social capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M1 M4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis, nep-cul, nep-env and nep-tur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.openloc.eu/cms/storage/openloc/working_ ... bacekGretter2011.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.openloc.eu:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:trn:utwpol:1107

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Openloc Working Papers from Public policies and local development Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Francesco Rentocchini ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).