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Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC, the Centre)
generates and applies new knowledge to address problems in developing countries.

The concept of a world system

A useful heuristic device to help one understand the present crises in their context is the notion of a world system (Cox 1978; Galtung 1980; Wallerstein 1980). This construct encompasses historical, structural, and functional features that make it possible to analyze and reassess changing global conjunctures, irrespective of the type of polarity found in the system. A world system is the type of dominant and integrated pattern of global production, distribution, and power that had its foundations in the 17th century and has expanded and consolidated in the last two centuries (Wallerstein 1980; Bergesen 1983). It involves an unequal and asymmetrical exchange between a developed core and underdeveloped semiperipheries and peripheries, in which systemic and subsystemic development and underdevelopment are functionally and historically, but not deterministically, interrelated.

Despite the use of geographical and spatial concepts, relations in the present system are not so much those between territorially defined centres and peripheries (nations, regions, or settlements) as among concrete social actors: groups, classes, and individuals living in the North or the South. Core and centre are distinct concepts. The core comprises elite socioeconomic groups already transnationally integrated. The centre comprises the developed geographical regions, which contain, as do peripheral regions, their own elite core and a nonelite social periphery. Development and underdevelopment are conditions experienced by people, not abstract aggregations that define the totality of a territory. The idea of developed and underdeveloped nations, First and Third worlds, North and South, obscures the fact that in any society a significant degree of transnational integration occurs among its dominant groups, as well as the effective marginalization of the bulk of its people. As an historical model, the notion of a world system avoids the more simplistic and often mechanistic applications of international-stratification and dependency theories and for that matter the neofunctional fallacy of global and complex interdependency. It also looks at the underlying logic that links cores, semiperipheries, and peripheries as parts of a single structure and process, both at present and in the wider historical perspective.

Regimes

A world system presupposes the existence of regimes, or mechanisms of governance with structures of decision-making, rules, and influence (Keohane and Nye 1975; Hopkins and Puchala 1978). Unlike institutions or “international organizations,” which presuppose the existence of differentiated, formally sanctioned norms and mechanisms of governance, regimes constitute the actually existing arrangements for handling a particular cluster of issues. Regimes are subsystems of the larger global system. Some are highly institutionalized, have clear boundaries, and enjoy a notable degree of concentricity. Others are loose and without a recognizable authority structure. Regimes also vary considerably in terms of how effectively they manage the issues in their areas of concern. I examine regimes in more detail in subsequent chapters.

Power and governance

One important empirical aspect of the analysis of regimes is ascertaining who governs, as real power structures are often neither formalized nor transparent. Power, understood as the ability of one actor or cluster of actors to induce compliant behaviour in others (Dahl 1970), is therefore the very essence of the global system and its constituent regimes. So is powerlessness. But such ability and inability are essentially dynamic and multidimensional. For one thing, power entails a fluid and changing relationship between ends (what for) and means (with what) and is much more than the sum of the resource capabilities, or even possible resource commitments, of an actor or an alliance. In the last analysis, effective power can only be assessed in terms of outcomes vis-à-vis objectives pursued and resources used. In this sense, authority in the Weberian sense of legitimated power (Weber 1947) requiring minimal amounts of coercion (or conversely, rewards) is an efficient and effective element in regime governance. Governance essentially involves both the government’s and the governed’s having the ability to manage conflict with limited use of violence or coercion.

Power and metapower

A second important aspect in the analysis of regimes is drawing the distinction between power and relational control, or metapower (Baumgartner el al. 1977). The latter is the ability to affect the outcome of decisions, nondecisions, actions, and inactions in a given regime by altering the rules of the game. Metapower can be associated with three fundamental concepts representing diverse intellectual traditions in political analysis. One is the above-mentioned idea of legitimation on grounds of tradition, charisma, or legal–rational calculation, as developed by Weber; the second is Gramsci’s notion of hegemony (Cox 1978); and the third is Crozier’s (1964) observation regarding the relationship between power and uncertainty. Very few actors at any given time possess legitimacy, can articulate hegemonic discourses, or have established control over the sources of uncertainty. More often than not, those who can affect the outcome of an interaction, both within specific functional or regional regimes and in the global system, are elite sectors within the core.

Table 1. The global system.
	Ecology (life)	Economy (wealth)	Society  (support of well-being, affection, respect, rectitude)	Polity (power)	Culture (knowledge, skill)
Context	Natural setting (biophysical surroundings of social action)	Styles of development (economic models)	Social expectations and traditions	Internal and external conflicts (capabilities and expectations of the elite and the masses; sovereignty and dependence)	Images of the physical and social world and collective experiences
Culture	Ecoculture (place of environment in cosmovision)	Economic doctrines (ways of understanding the economy)	Social doctrines (values, norms, attitudes; identity and modal personality)	Ideologies (function of the state and its relation to the citizen)	Philosophy (axiologies, teleologies, deontologies); moral and ethical codes
Structures	Resource endowment and spatial distribution (relation between environment and resources)	Economic units (consumers and producers; labour and capital)	Status and roles (social structures, groups, classes, fractions)	Brokers and institutions (interest groups, parties, cliques, governments, bureaucracies)	Formal and informal educational structures (schools, universities, learning institutions)
Processes	Depletion or regeneration of air, water, land, flora, and fauna	Production and distribution of goods and services	Interactions (cooperation, conflict, mobilization, demobilization)	Conflict resolution (consensus, repression, rebellion, stalemate)	Learning (building of consciousness, cognitions, basic values, procedures, teleologies)
Effects	Sustainability or entropy	Prosperity or poverty	Equity or inequity	Governance or violence	Enlightenment or ignorance

The dynamics of the system involves the actions and interactions (Holsti 1972) of actors pursuing goals and using resources in  — as well as having effects on  — a given context and the system’s internal configuration. Changing circumstances, in turn, generate feedback. Dysfunctions produced at the dominant core end up not only having negative impacts on subordinate actors but also generating a delayed and secondary reaction from the centre itself. Conversely, cumulative dysfunctions in the periphery are bound to flow upstream, increasing the uncertainty and instability of the centre and the entire system of global relations. In this sense, contrary to commonly held belief, an increasingly integrated world is also one of mutually assured vulnerability. More than a “zero-sum” game (Deutsch 1968), the possibility of the opposite of the prisoner’s dilemma confronts us  — a negative-score game in which all the players stand to lose.

Main Messages

Integrated responses intentionally and actively address ecosystem services and human well-being simultaneously. They are gaining in importance in both developing and industrial countries, albeit with mixed results. Although many integrated responses make ambitious claims about their likely benefits, in practice the results of implementation have been varied in terms of ecological, social, and economic impacts.

Integrated responses are closely allied to the concept and implementation of sustainable development. The interrelationship between ecological, economic, and social systems and the motivation to bring them together in policy and other interventions links the two.

Trade-offs and synergies are central to the development of integrated responses. Integrated responses seek to explicitly manage trade-offs and to identify positive and negative synergies between different objectives and between ecosystem services and human well-being.

Integrated responses occur at international, national, and sub-national levels. Examples at the international level include some multilateral environmental agreements, and international agreements such as the Rio Conventions. Policy integration is a growing feature of many national governments. This is evidenced through national strategies for sustainable development and many other initiatives. Integrated responses are perhaps more usually associated with sub-national and local programs, including multisectoral approaches such as integrated coastal zone management and integrated river basin management.

Many integrated responses occur simultaneously at multiple levels. Integrated responses may be ‘‘nested’’ within different discrete levels, for example, the embedding of Local Agenda 21 within national strategies for sustainable development, developed under the overall framework of Agenda 21. Integrated responses may also be of a multiple scale, and not related to distinct government or administrative levels, but to geographical units such as a watershed or a transboundary marine ecosystem.

Scale issues are critical in integrated responses, and cross-scale responses are necessary. Integrated responses are often deemed successful at a small-scale, or in a particular locality. However, their effectiveness is limited when constraints are encountered at higher levels, such as in legal frameworks and in government institutions. There appear to be limits to scaling up, not only because of these higher-level constraints, but also because of so-called ‘‘leakage’’ problems. These occur when interventions at a local level address only direct, rather than indirect, or underlying drivers of change. Examples might be where integrated conservation and development projects cause increased migration into buffer zones, or where a carbon forestry project shifts deforestation to another location. In these cases, the problems of ecosystem degradation are merely shifted from one location to another. Cross-scale responses may be better able to deal with both the higher-level constraints and leakage problems, and simultaneously tackle the regional and national, as well as, local drivers of change. Examples of successful cross-scale responses include some co-management approaches to natural resource management in fisheries and forestry, and multistakeholder policy processes.

Integration is also about getting a wider range of actors involved in policy processes and about different forms of intervention and action. Successfully integrated responses usually include the active participation of key stakeholders. Increasingly, they are associated with the application of multistakeholder processes and with decentralization, and they may include actors and institutions from the government, civil society, and the private sector.

Implementing integrated responses is resource intensive, but the potential benefits can exceed the costs. Integrated responses are inherently complex, often entailing a combination of actions in a range of domains and at different scales. This can be very costly and requires specialized skills and knowledge. For example, the costs of bringing stakeholders to the negotiation table and of employing participatory methodologies in decision-making are often high. However, if decisions command the broad support of stakeholders, they are more likely to be successfully implemented.

Politics plays an important role in integrated responses at all scales. As integrated responses require bringing together a variety of institutions and individuals with vested interests, and negotiating trade-offs between sectors and actors, collaboration and compromise play a vital role. Successful integrated responses often incorporate conflict resolution mechanisms and deliberative inclusionary processes into their decision-making and management procedures.

Integrated responses do not necessarily bring about more equitable distribution of benefits to stakeholders. It cannot be assumed that integrated responses are more or less likely to deliver their stated objectives than nonintegrated responses. In most cases integrated responses meet some of their objectives, but not all. Many integrated responses assume that there are synergies between objectives and fail to adequately consider and evaluate tradeoffs. This results in unexpected or unanticipated problems and costs, both to ecosystems and society. Generally, the distribution of benefits is not equitable, and this stems from an inadequate consideration of the social, economic, and political dynamics of society. In a number of cases, the failure to appreciate the heterogeneity of communities, property rights, and access to resources, power, and knowledge of different sectors within society are of critical importance and need to be fully understood.

Integrated responses require multiple instruments for their implementation. Integrated responses have a complex nature, because of their multiple objectives and often multiscale characteristics. Therefore, a single instrument is rarely adequate to implement them. Market-based and economic instruments are used with increasing frequency in integrated responses, for example, in river basin management and sustainable forest management, but they usually need to be accompanied by other instruments. These are likely to include redistributive measures and property rights adjustments (for example, when setting up new markets) and institutional development and capacity building. Integrated responses, therefore, require a careful coordination of multiple instruments.

Integrated responses are long-term undertakings not short-term projects. A review of the literature indicates that integrated responses cannot be treated as finite, time-bound projects, nor can they easily be added on to existing policies and interventions. They often require a longer timescale before impacts can be realized or a broad constituency of support can be established. Integrated responses, therefore, should be seen as intrinsic components of long-term changes in environmental governance.

Integrated responses require fundamental shifts in governance institutions in terms of skills, knowledge capacity, and organization. The experience of many integrated responses shows that the conventional organization of governance institutions militates against successful design and implementation of integrated responses, because the institutions are separated along sectoral lines. This is especially true for government organizations, in both industrial and developing countries, and creates barriers in the transmission of knowledge and information and collaboration across the boundaries of organizations. Within organizations, power and prestige is maintained and conferred by defending knowledge rather than sharing it, resulting in ‘‘turf defending’’ behavior, which needs to change in order to better support integrated responses.

Knowledge gaps are persistent and inhibit integrated responses. Knowledge gaps are prevalent in several different dimensions and constitute significant constraints to the more widespread successful implementation of integrated responses. Science itself is defined in disciplinary terms, and this undermines more holistic inclusionary approaches to understanding complex social and ecological systems. Furthermore, information needs to be shared and coordinated across disciplines and organizations.

Assessing integrated responses, assessing trade-offs and providing decision support requires multidisciplinary methods and techniques to capture the multiple impacts and assess multiple goals. Examples of good practice can be found in a number of multidisciplinary techniques such as Multicriteria Analysis. When used collaboratively within a multistakeholder process, these can help in the analysis of trade-offs, reconciliation of conflicts, and development of adaptive management strategies.

Ecosystems and Human Well-being: A Framework for Assessment

• Decision-making processes and institutions operate across spatial scales and organizational levels—from the village to the planet. Decision processes are value-based and combine political and technical elements to varying degrees. Desirable properties of decision-making processes include equity, attention to vulnerability, transparency, accountability, and participation.
• Strategies and interventions that will help meet societies’ goals for the conservation and sustainable use of ecosystems include incorporating the value of ecosystems in decisions, channeling diffuse ecosystem benefits to decisionmakers with focused local interests, creating markets and property rights, educating and dispersing knowledge, and investing to improve ecosystems and the services they provide.
• The choice among options will be greatly influenced by the temporal and physical scale of the problem or opportunity, the uncertainties, the cultural context, and questions of equity.
• Mechanisms for accomplishing these interventions include conventions, laws, regulations, and enforcement; contracts, partnerships, and collaboration; and private and public action.
• Institutions at different levels have different response options available to them, and special care is required to ensure policy coherence. Decision-making processes combine problem identification and analysis, policy option identification, policy choice, policy implementation, and monitoring and evaluation in an iterative fashion.
• A range of tools is available to choose among response options—from cultural prescriptive rules to cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis. In the selection of an analytical tool and in the evaluation of response options, the social, economic, environmental, and historical context should be taken into account.
• Policies at each level and scale need to be adaptive and flexible in order to learn from past experience, to hedge against risk, and to consider uncertainty. However, trade-offs between the responsiveness and the stability of the policy environment need to be considered.
• Intermediate indicators may be required to link policies and actions and their impacts on ecosystems and human well-being. Quantitative indicators make the trade-offs in policy-making explicit, but qualitative information is valuable where measurement is not possible. Traditional and practitioner knowledge are important sources in addition to science.
• “Boundary organizations” that synthesize and translate scientific research and explore the policy implications can bridge the gap between science and decision-making. Journalists have a similar bridging responsibility to ensure that science and policy information is transmitted to the public in ways that are both objective and engaging

• whether actions or policies were implemented,
• whether they achieved their intended results, and
• whether new factors have arisen, in which case the entire cycle is repeated.

• Understanding the factors that cause changes in ecosystems and ecosystem services is essential to the design of interventions that enhance positive and minimize negative impacts.
• A driver is any natural or human-induced factor that directly or indirectly causes a change in an ecosystem. A direct driver unequivocally influences ecosystem processes and can therefore be identified and measured to differing degrees of accuracy. An indirect driver operates more diffusely, often by altering one or more direct drivers, and its influence is established by understanding its effect on direct drivers.
• Decision-makers influence some drivers and are influenced by other drivers. The first are the endogenous drivers and the latter are the exogenous ones. Conceptually, decisions are made at three organizational levels: by individuals and small groups at the local level who directly alter some part of the ecosystem; by public and private decision-makers at municipal, provincial, and national levels; and by public and private decision-makers at the international level. In reality, however, the distinction between these levels is often diffuse and difficult to define.
• The degree to which a driver is outside the influence of a decision-making process depends to some extent on the temporal scale. Some factors may be exogenous in the short run but subject to change by a decision-maker over longer periods.
• Local decision-makers can directly influence the choice of technology, changes in land use, and external inputs but have little control over prices and markets, property rights, technology development, or the local climate. National or regional decision-makers have more control over many indirect drivers, such as macroeconomic policy, technology development, property rights, trade barriers, prices, and markets.
• The indirect drivers of change are primarily demographic, economic, sociopolitical, scientific and technological, and cultural and religious. The interaction of several of these drivers in turn affects the overall level of resource consumption and disparities in consumption within and between countries. Clearly these drivers are changing: population and the global economy are growing, there are major advances in information technology and biotechnology, and the world is becoming more interconnected. Changes in these drivers are projected to increase the demand for food, fiber, clean water, and energy, which will in turn affect the direct drivers. The direct drivers are primarily physical, chemical, and biological, such as land cover change, climate change, air and water pollution, irrigation, use of fertilizers, harvesting, and the introduction of alien invasive species.
• Any decision can have consequences external to the decision framework. These are called externalities because they are not part of the decision-making calculus. Externalities can have positive or negative effects. The effect of an externality is seldom confined to the environs of the decision-maker. External effects extend to other parts of the ecosystem and even to other ecosystems. It is possible for individually unimportant external effects to have dramatic regional and global consequences when many local decision-makers simultaneously take decisions with similar unintended consequences.
• Multiple, interacting drivers cause changes in ecosystem services. There are functional interdependencies between and among the indirect and direct drivers of change, and, in turn, changes in ecological services lead to feedbacks on the drivers of changes in ecological services. Synergetic driver combinations are very common. The many processes of globalization are leading to new forms of interactions among drivers of changes in ecosystem services.