E. Ostrom’s SES Framework to Understand the Factors of Successful and Unsuccessful Situation in the SES: A meta-analysis of community forests in Mexico

Abstract

The social-ecological systems are inherently complex and their destruction is highly due to a limited understanding of the processes that lead to their improvements in or deterioration. In an effort to respond to this problem, E. Ostrom and colleagues associated with the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University developed a Social-Ecological System (SES) framework. however, even if the importance of SES framework to enhance the sustainability of complex social-ecological systems is highly accepted, its implication to understand the functionality of the SESs which may leads to successful or unsuccessful situations is still lacking. In this paper, referring to the context of decomposability of complex systems, and using E. Ostrom SES framework theory and a meta-analysis of 31 case studies of community forests in Mexico, the importance of using this framework in the course of explaining variable interactions and configurations to achieve desired system outcomes is explained.