Selected works
Selected works
21.6.2024 - Workshop on the Ostrom Workshop 7 - At this year's WOW, held every 5 years at Indiana University (Bloomington, Indiana), I presented a metatheoretical perspective on the final synthesis of the two decades-long Doñana case study (see next post for details). The synthesis offers an approach to inform institutional diagnosis for transformative environmental governance in social-ecological systems, with a focus on designing policies to help resolving local environmental conflicts and systemic risks. This synthesis builds on a recent collaborative effort involving eLTER Research Infrastructure researchers from several infrastructure sites (LTSER Platforms), on how to avert the risk of lock-ins in social-ecological systems. Further, this line of work seeks to continue informing eLTER RI's capacity for environmental policy support, by exploring the role of long-term standardised observations to understand cumulative effects of local social-ecological lock-ins at biosphere level.
Forthcoming (2024) - The building of the Doñana case - One of my main research lines during almost two decades, the first phase of a Long-Term Social-Ecological Research program in the Doñana region comes to an end. Carried out through iterative research based on an adaptive inference protocol, the building of what I call "the Doñana case" will finalize with a synthesis of main philosophical, theoretical and methodological lessons. It will also include governance and policy recommendations for sustainability in the region. Meanwhile, you can know more about the case through its first, second, third and fourth research iterations.
15.2.2024 - Wetlands4Climate Conference - I have recently participated as keynote speaker in this conference, offering my vision on how to trigger systemic change towards regional sustainability in coastal wetlands affected by intricate water conflicts. With a focus on Doñana delta social-ecological system, and a recent politicized intervention to trigger a "green" transition in sectors overexploiting groundwater resources, I presented several mechanisms that must be orchestrated and coordinated at multiple levels and scales to escape difficult-to-reverse situations in the near future (lock-ins).
Forthcoming - Hunting for sustainability in social-ecological systems - A stepping-stone contribution in Spanish showing empirically how agentive power can be embedded in structural institutional analysis in combination with game-theoretic insights from the Prisoner's Dilemma-Stag Hunt conflict-cooperation continuum.
19.8.2023 - Averting lock-in risks in social-ecological systems - In this preprint, we offer a roadmap to guide innovative research to observe, understand, and ultimately avoid, processes that can induce lock-ins at multiple spatiotemporal scales in SES. Our roadmap is organized in three broad research areas: (1) general cross-cutting research themes; (2) policy, collective action and governance; (3) plurality of values and methodological pluralism. You can download the preprint here.
14.6.2023 - eLTER WAILS approach workshop for early career - Grateful for my recent participation as lecturer in this summer school focusing in-depth on developing eLTER's whole system approach (WAILS) - a holistic view on the ecosystem that combines bio-geo-hydro and social-ecological research.
1. Why are evolutionary processes important for biodiversity?
2. How can they be incorporated into better management practices?
3. Which kind of research can help achieving that goal?