The Doñana case

A two-decade social-ecological research program — synthesis

For close to two decades, Doñana has been the ground on which I have learned to think about social-ecological systems. An estuary-delta on the lower Guadalquivir in southwest Spain, it is one of Europe’s most celebrated protected landscapes and, at the same time, one of its most chronically conflictual—a paradox that first drew me in and never quite let go. The case taught me that a coastal wetland’s ecosystems, agricultural landscapes, water resources and the institutions that govern them form a single, tightly coupled system, and dysfunctions of one cannot be understood apart from the others.

The Doñana case was never conceived as a single study but as a cumulative research program, designed to accumulate insight iteration by iteration under an adaptive inference protocol (Holling and Allen 2002). Each iteration carried forward what the last had learned, narrowing an initial field of competing explanations and descending progressively from the system level toward the fine grain of strategic behaviour, before abstracting back upward toward theory (Méndez et al. 2012, 2019, 2022, 2023). What follows synthesises that arc through seven interwoven streams.

1.  The empirical ground: a history of Doñana

Doñana’s present is sedimented history. Over the twentieth century the floodplain marshlands of the right-bank Guadalquivir were progressively drained, diverted, canalised and turned over to irrigated and rice agriculture, all under a persistent “hydraulic mission” (Molle et al. 2009) that treated water as something to be engineered rather than lived with. Conservation arrived, paradoxically, through the same command-and-control logic (Holling and Meffe 1996): the creation of Doñana National Park in 1969 protected a remnant while the surrounding hydrology was rebuilt around it, leaving the marshes dependent on an entirely artificial water regime. I first reconstructed this history as a systems narrative in the program’s opening iteration (Méndez et al. 2012). The rigid regime that emerged proved remarkably durable, surviving crisis after crisis—the waterfowl “botulism” die-offs of the 1980s, the 1998 Los Frailes mine spill that poisoned the Guadiamar, the failure of successive regeneration plans, and, from 2000, a contested megaproject to deep-dredge the estuary for maritime access to Seville’s inland port (Méndez et al. 2023). This long, conflict-laden history is the empirical spine of everything that follows.

2.  An iterative analytical apparatus: the IAD and its politicisation

To make this history legible I needed an apparatus that could grow as new questions emerged. I began with Elinor Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework (Kiser and Ostrom 1982, Ostrom 2005, McGinnis 2011), using it to select the relevant factors, relationships and levels of analysis. As the limits of a purely rational-institutional reading became clear, I moved to the politicised IAD (pIAD; Clement 2010, Clement and Amezaga 2013), which brought discourse and power into the frame—the recognition that discourses themselves carry power, conferring or draining legitimacy from institutions. A later iteration descended to the micro level, combining Networks of Action Situations (McGinnis 2011, Kimmich et al. 2022) with an agency-based polycentric power typology (Morrison et al. 2019) to reconstruct the strategic games among Doñana’s actors (Méndez et al. 2023). Finally, the apparatus consolidated into a deliberately pluralist neo-institutionalist approach, funnelling rational, historical (North 2005) and discursive (Schmidt 2008) strands through the IAD and pIAD, and adding concepts such as discourse inertia to explain why certain framings persist long after they have ceased to serve (Méndez et al. 2022).

3.  Reading Doñana through resilience: rigidity, lock-in, and sustainability pathways

The system-level diagnosis came from resilience thinking—Holling’s adaptive cycle and the panarchy heuristic (Gunderson and Holling 2002). Read through that lens, Doñana is a textbook rigidity trap (Holling et al. 2002): a system whose institutions have become so rigid, so committed to command-and-control, that they smother innovation, squeeze out diversity and erode the very resilience they claim to protect, all while appearing stable. I later mapped Doñana onto a landscape of stability domains with three basins: the rigidity trap it currently occupies, a deeper lock-in trap it has so far avoided (Allison and Hobbs 2004), and a sustainability pathway it might yet reach (Méndez et al. 2023). That framing let me read pivotal events counterfactually—the 1969 park creation as an event that arguably kept the system from tipping into lock-in, and the estuary dredging megaproject as a plausible push toward it. Traps, in this reading, are not accidents but emergent, historically produced outcomes (Méndez et al. 2019).

4.  A multi-tiered design: system, meso, micro

These pieces cohere because the case was built as a multi-tiered design. At the system level, resilience thinking and path dependence account for the deep historical trajectory (Gunderson and Holling 2002). At the meso level, the IAD, pIAD and neo-institutionalist strands explain aggregated institutional and discursive mechanisms—institutional entrepreneurship, increasing returns, hegemonic discourse (Ostrom 2005, Clement 2010). At the micro level, action-situation and power analysis recover the strategic behaviour of individual actors (McGinnis 2011, Morrison et al. 2019). The program travelled across these tiers deliberately: it opened at the system level with the long historical evolution of governance, then scaled down toward the micro grain of strategy, holding a productive meso-micro tension throughout (Méndez et al. 2012, 2019, 2023). Emergence runs both ways—micro interactions embedded in system trajectories, system-level structures shaping micro choices—and only a design that keeps all three tiers in view can follow that property.

5.  A parallel abstraction: the paradox of contingency

Working through Doñana forced open a first abstraction, and it began with how I handled path dependence itself. Rather than adopt it as a settled idea, I traced its conceptual phylogeny across disciplines—from the economic history of David (1985) and Arthur (1989, 1994), through the historical institutionalism of North (1990, 2005) and the historical sociology of Mahoney (2000), to political science (Pierson 2000) and organisation studies (Vergne and Durand 2010)—treating the concept as a lineage whose branches carry different, sometimes incompatible, assumptions about history, agency and equilibrium (Méndez et al. 2019, Méndez 2021). Objectifying path dependence this way exposed the problem at its core. Much of what the system did looks irrational against the efficiency baseline of neoclassical economics—rice grown in biophysically unsuitable conditions, hydraulic megaprojects pursued in the knowledge they were bound to fail. Path-dependence theory files such outcomes under “contingency”, yet, following Mahoney (2000), this creates an epistemological paradox: the lock-in is explained by the very neoclassical feedback mechanisms that the initial, “random” events contradict. Contingency, I came to see, is not one thing but a continuum stretching from pure randomness to full predictability (Eagle 2005). The task, then, is to modulate contingency—to treat an outcome that looks random under one framework as merely unpredictable, and then render it predictable under a richer one (Méndez et al. 2019). Used this way, contingency becomes a heuristic and an early warning that contextual or endogenous factors, invisible to the standard model, shaped choices deep in the past.

6. A second abstraction: ergodicity

Beneath contingency lay a deeper and rarely examined assumption: ergodicity. To call a system ergodic is to assume that the average of a single trajectory over time equals the average across all its possible states (Peters 2019)—that history, as sequence, can be set aside, and that the past reliably forecasts the future. Social-ecological systems are not like that. They are non-ergodic: shaped by endogenous novelty, irreversibility, and the fact that we cannot rewind and replay the tape of life. My concern is that mainstream economic models—including those steering global responses to environmental change—often carry a hidden ergodic view of the world (Crona et al. 2021), one that can quietly serve business-as-usual interests in a world that does not behave ergodically. Making ergodicity explicit, in dialogue with the emerging fields of ergodicity and complexity economics (Arthur et al. 2020, Peters and Adamou 2022), seems to me one of the more consequential things social-ecological research can do (Méndez 2021).

7.  The IAD as a metatheoretical device

These threads converge in the program’s most abstract move: developing the IAD beyond a framework into a metatheoretical device. Metatheory means examining the philosophy behind our theories, frameworks and models (Overton 2013)—the assumptions that quietly decide which questions we can even ask. Distilling two decades of Doñana into a set of middle-range generalisations (Merton 1949), I proposed a diagnostic device that aggregates the case’s pluralistic insights into three dimensions—historical, rational and power—and pairs them with reflective questions and visual heuristics. Its purpose is not to add another framework but to prompt analysts to surface the assumptions about ergodicity, contingency, rationality and power that underlie whatever theory they are already using. There is a fitting symmetry here: the IAD was itself first offered as a metatheoretical synthesis of institutional approaches (Kiser and Ostrom 1982), and this is where I return it to that vocation—as a canonical case whose deepest lesson is that seemingly messy, irrational outcomes become legible once we make our own analytical foundations explicit.

8. A spin-off iteration: blue uncertainty

The case's tools eventually travelled beyond the case. When COVID-19 struck, I recognised in the pandemic the same epistemic predicament Doñana had trained me to see: a world facing radical uncertainty (Kay and King 2020)—what we simply do not know, and cannot describe probabilistically—being managed as if it were calculable risk. In a Perspective written amid the crisis (Méndez 2021), I exported two of the program's instruments to the problem of Anthropocene risk (Keys et al. 2019): the adaptive inference protocol (Holling and Allen 2002), repurposed as a learning device for policy under deep uncertainty, and modulating contingency (Méndez et al. 2019), as an epistemic guard against premature assessments of the unexpected. To these I added a third, philosophical component, coining the term blue uncertainty: the residue of randomness inherent in the world that even the best blue-sky science may never eliminate from our causal theories and models (based on Mahoney 2000)—an invitation to keep solving the puzzles that threaten social and ecological wellbeing while staying honest about our fallibility. Together the three components—philosophical (blue uncertainty), methodological (adaptive inference) and epistemic (modulating contingency)—form an intermediary approach designed to resonate with the prediction-and-control mindset of current policy making, and so ease complexity thinking into it. As a spin-off, it closed a loop: what began as a way of understanding one trapped estuary became a stance toward systemic risk at planetary scale.

9. A cumulative, shared endeavour 

Taken together, these streams are why I treat Doñana as a canonical case. It is a place, a history and a conflict; it is also an argument: that patient, pluralistic, multi-level institutional analysis can convert what looks like chaos into explanation, and that doing so responsibly obliges us to examine the assumptions we bring to the work.

The Doñana case also informs the Doñana LTSER Platform within the eLTER Research Infrastructure. Two decades of work on the region's governance, institutions and power, supply the long-term, place-based social-ecological knowledge such a platform is meant to steward—complementing its biophysical monitoring, demonstrating a transdisciplinary method, and grounding research in the actors and conflicts that make it policy-relevant.

This synthesis is my own high-level reading of a body of work built collaboratively over many years. I led the case study throughout, all its iterations were developed with colleagues and rest on the broader Doñana long-term social-ecological research community. Where I have compressed nuance to hold the arc together, the original publications carry the full detail. None of this stands alone. This work is cumulative and informed by the work of many others (social-ecological scientists, ecological economists, geographers, anthropologists, historians...) who have studied Doñana's dense, complex history and its human-nature interactions—whose scholarship this research draws on and remains indebted to.

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