From concepts to comparisons: A resource for diagnosis and measurement in social-ecological systems

M Cox, S Villamayor-Tomas, N C.Ban, G Epstein, L Evans, F Fleischman, M Nenadovic, G A Garcia Lopez, F Laerhoven, C Meek I Perez-Ibarra, M Schoon. From concepts to comparisons: A resource for diagnosis and measurement in social-ecological systems. Environmental Science & Policy, 107, 211-216

A central challenge facing the study the environmental governance is the lack of commonunderstanding of
important concepts. Critical concepts such as social boundaries, property rights, and resource dependence are
selected and measured inconsistently across research projects and field settings, producing results that are difficult to compare. This stymies the accumulation of scientific evidence regarding the most effective ways to
address challenging environmental problems. As members of the Social-ecological systems meta-analysis database (SESMAD) project, we have addressed this challenge by developing a repository of variables associated with
many of the most important concepts across a range of fields related to environmental governance. In this paper
we describe the infrastructure behind the repository, the range of variables it includes, and how it can enable
scholars across a range of fields to more systematically select and measure the variables to include in their
analyses.

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