• Why do fisheries collapse in spite of widespread public support for sustaining them and the existence of a highly developed theory of fisheries management?
  
• Why does moderate stocking of cattle in semi-arid rangelands increase vulnerability to drought?
  
• Why does pest control create pest outbreaks that become chronic?
  
• Why do flood control and irrigation developments create large ecological and economic costs and increasing vulnerability?

In each case, a target variable (fish stock, meat production, pest control, and water levels) is identified and successfully controlled. Uncertainty in nature is presumed to be replaced by certainty of human control. Social systems initially flourish from this ecological stabilization and resulting economic opportunity. Paradoxically in each case success creates its own failure.

Paradox 1: The Pathology of Regional Resources and Ecosystem Management

Many of management problems can be analyzed from an economic and human behavioral standpoint. According to this view, resources are appropriated by powerful minorities who are able to influence public policy. Hence inappropriate measures such as perverse subsidies are implemented that deplete resources and create inefficiencies.  A fundamental cause of the failures is the political inability to deal with the needs and desires of people. That pattern is common and gives pause to any quick and easy predictions of collapse and disaster.

Observation: New policies and development usually succeed initially, but they lead to agencies that gradually become rigid and myopic, economic sectors that become slavishly dependent, ecosystems that are more fragile and a public that loses trust in governance.
The Paradox: If that is as common as it appears, why are we still here?  Why has there not been a profound collapse of exploited renewable resources and the ecological services upon which human survival and development depends?

Paradox 2: The Trap of the Expert

As part of the fundamental political causes of failure, there are, as well, contributing causes in the way many, including scientist and analyst, study and perceive the natural world.   Their results can provide unintended ammunition for political manipulation.  Some of this ammunition comes from the very disciplines that should provide deeper and more integrative understanding, primarily economics, ecology and institutional analysis. That leads to the second paradox : The Trap of the Expert. So much of our expertise loses the sense of the whole in the effort to understand the parts.

Observation: In every example of crisis and regional development we have studied, both the natural system and the economic components can be explained by a small set of variables and critical processes. The great complexity, diversity and opportunity in complex regional systems emerge from a handful of critical variables and processes that operate over distinctly different scales in space and time.

The Paradox: If that is the case, why does expert advice so often create crisis and contribute to political gridlock?  Why, in many places, does science have a "bad name"?

Unravelling the Paradoxes

These paradoxes can be unravelled by beginning with an examination of the obstacles that arise not just from multiple, competing scientific perspectives but also from disciplinary hubris.  The complex issues connected with the notion of sustainable development are not just ecological problems, nor economic, nor social ones but a combination of all three.  Actions to integrate all three typically short-change one or more.  Sustainable designs driven by conservation interests can ignore the needs for a kind of economic development that emphasize synergy, human ingenuity, enterprise and flexibility. Those driven by economic and industrial interests can act as if the uncertainty of nature can be replaced with human engineering and management controls, or ignored altogether in deference to market dynamics.  Those driven by social interests often presume that nature or a larger world present no limits to the imagination and initiative of local groups.

Compromises among those viewpoints can be arrived at through a political process. However, mediation among stakeholders is irrelevant if it is based on ignorance of the integrated character of nature and people. The results may be momentarily satisfying to the participants, but ultimately reveal themselves as based upon unrealistic expectations about the behavior of natural systems and the behavior of people. As investments fail, the policies of government, private foundations, international agencies and non-governmental organizations flop from emphasizing one kind of partial solution to another. Over the last three decades, such policies have flopped from large investment schemes, to narrow conservation ones to equally narrow community development ones.

Each approach is built upon a particular world-view or theoretical abstraction, though many would deny anything but the most pragmatic and non-theoretical foundations. The conservationists depend on concepts rooted in ecology and evolution, the developers on variants of free market models, the community activists on precepts of community and social organization. All these views are correct in the sense of being partially tested and credible representations of one part of reality. The problem is that they are partial. They are too simple and lack an integrative framework that bridges disciplines and scales.  Such integration is possible in a dynamic cross-scale multi-domain view - that is in a Panarchy.

(adapted by P. Bunnell, 2002 from C. S. Holling, L. H. Gunderson and D. Ludwig, 2002)

C. S. Holling, S. R. Carpenter, W. A. Brock and L. H. Gunderson, 2002, Discoveries for Sustainable Futures, p. 395-417 in Gunderson and Holling (eds.), 2002, Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems, Washington: Island Press.