Can recognising pluralistic worldviews in marine social-ecological systems help achieve sustainable scenarios?

Abstract

The complexity of social-ecological systems poses significant challenges to achieving global sustainability goals. Decision-makers can develop management interventions acting across political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental domains, but these interventions have the potential to interact and conflict in complex ways. Importantly, worldviews have the potential to influence how we perceive these interactions will occur and alter our engagement with them. This can lead to paralysis in deliberations about intervention implementation. By taking a coupled sociological-mathematical approach, we demonstrate that integrating qualitative socioecological system maps with quantitative analyses of the relationships within these maps can be useful to identify points of leverage to achieve sustainability. Using fuzzy cognitive mapping, we capture perspectives regarding the relatonships between political, economic, social, technological, and environmental (PESTLE) elements of a social-ecological system both now and into the future, from people with different worldviews. Qualitative Boolean analysis of the fuzzy cognitive maps showed that sustainability can be achieved for all worldviews when considering the presence of positive and negative interactions among the PESTLE elements of social-ecological systems. In contrast, using quantitative projections of the PESTLE networks that bring in data on the strengths of the relationships between the PESTLE elements, we show that not all worldviews expect sustainable outcomes, under which circumstances achieving sustainability could be challenging. However, simulating changes to the strengths of the relationships between a few of the PESTLE elements can lead to a sustainable transition in those failing cases, signalling that interventions in key parts of the system can allow the whole social-ecological system to approach a sustainable future with engagement across worldviews. We show that a pluralistic approach, increasing the positive influence of economies on environmental outcomes, can offer viable pathways to sustainability for people coming from different worldviews. This is particularly important in marine systems that, by their nature, are cross-boundary and require inter-cultural solutions.