Schedule: 3 hours
Limited to 30 seats
In this workshop we will elaborate on how coupled social-ecological systems (or coupled natural and human systems) have been described and analyzed as multilevel networks and the research questions that have been addressed. Further, they will take stock in recent research that has identified different possibilities and barriers for further developments of this line of research.
Critical issues such as what are nodes and links in a social-ecological system and how to accomplish some level of comparability across different study contexts will be addressed.
They will also discuss the range of problems (design, data collection, methodological) that many have encountered when doing this kind of synthetic research.
In addition, there will be practical hands-on exercises on how conduct and understand analytical results deriving from multilevel network analyses. The analyses will be utilizing the MPNet software (http://www.melnet.org.au/pnet), which should be downloaded and installed prior to the workshop. Since MPnet require Windows, an alternative software is Statnet (https://statnet.org/), although using Statnet, not all of the multilevel analyses will be possible to conduct.
All exercises and examples will be based on real data, and both patterns of social relations among actors as well as environmental interactions among biophysical components will be examined. The workshop includes the following elements:
1. Why a social-ecological network approach? What are the presumed benefits?
2. What is a node, and what is a link in a complex social-ecological system?
3. How to move beyond just describing a social-ecological system as a multilevel network to actually ask some challenging questions, and perhaps even get some answers?
4. Investigate how patterns of social- and social-ecological relations among resource users can be related to social- and environmental outcomes.
5. Gain exposure to commonly used software for studying multilevel social-ecological networks, i.e. multilevel ERGMs implemented in MPnet.
Prerequisites
Familiarity with the concept of networks (i.e. nodes and ties) as well as some experiences of network-centric analyses. Previous exposure to ERGM is valuable.
