Project: On the predictability of social-ecological transformations. An explorative study for further research

Project Head: Engelbert Schramm Project Team: Egon Becker Eric Sons Engelbert Schramm Cooperation: Andrea Scharnhorst, Science Center for Social Research Berlin (WZB) Funding: Federal Ministry of Education and Research Duration: 10/02 – 03/01   Field of research Research Area: Transdisciplinary Concepts and Methods   about the Institute

Social-ecological transformations affect society (including economy) as well as eco-systems and other parts of nature. In these structure-changing processes, socio-economic causes and environmental (and often ecological) effects are interwoven with physical causes and socio-economic effects. This leads to the fact that physical and social processes are connected in an inseparable way. Therefore it is dubious that conventional research approaches look upon physical and social aspects as independent complexes and thus treating them in separated physical and social research. To reach a comprehensive understanding of crucial society-environment interactions, disciplinary analysis must be complemented by interdisciplinary research - spanning the natural, social, behavioral, and engineering sciences. The complexity of relations between nature and society in social-ecological transformations affords transdisciplinary analysis. The prospective study deals with the needs of managing this complexity on the example of supply systems (especially water supply). Our starting point was the thesis, that - for a study of social-ecological transformations - physical system and social system are to be viewed as coupled systems. Physics allow to distinguish different types of coupling (weak coupling, strong coupling, and rigid coupling). Especially strong couplings will lead to hardly predictable non-linear effects. As a central result of the exploration, it can be stated that the socio-ecological transformation processes in the water supply can be grasped with the help of considering the couplings between society, supply system and natural system. Additionally there are modellists interested in modelling socio-ecological transformation with the help of a strong coupling perspective. These results are published in: Egon Becker, Engelbert Schramm: Zur Modellierbarkeit sozial-ökologischer Transformationen. ISOE-Materialien Soziale Ökologie, Nr. 16 (2001) (in German only. English publication forthcoming). (Orderform)