“Resource Dependency and Diversity: From

Findings to Metaphors (and Back Again?)”

Richard C. Stedman Department of Natural

ResourcesCornell University

Road Map… Building blocks: Bill’s work on resource

dependence and well being of rural communities

The evolution of inquiry Comparisons New indicators Methodological and definitional challenges Changing reality conditions in rural places Distribution issues: “moving beyond the mean” Definitions: well being + dependence

A couple of ‘half baked’ ideas

Some Key Pieces…

Social Impact Assessment (ARS 1986) Addictive economies (Rural Sociology 1992) Boomtown’s Youth (ASR, 1984) Criminal behavior in boomtowns (Rural Soc

1991) 40 years of spotted owls: (Sociological

Perspectives 1998)

“Well, duh…indeed??”

Here we go again…Enter the Marcellus

Shale…

Major Natural Gas Shale Basins

How is the Marcellus Different than Traditional

Gas Development? Deeper than historic wells Horizontal Drilling Non-traditional Formation Requires Hydro-fracturing

to allow gas to travel in rock

Takes longer, requires more people, more resources

Brand new boomtowns!

On the other hand…

Maybe we have made some progress after all…discourse

is broader

The Work Evolves Canadian Forest Service

Years… Convergence of RD/WB equation with

Montreal Process C&I and CCFM Initial curiosity re some basic questions

on forest-dependent communities Comparisons

Across industries Across regions Across indicators of well being: Over time Within communities

More…

Definitions Well-being

‘process’ indicators and subjective indicators of well being Locally derived indicators

Resource dependence employment in forest harvest/processing sector

Jobs versus income % versus base

Employment in non-timber sectors –non timber forest products, forest related tourism,

Non-employment dependence

Transitioning rural landscapes: tourism dependence?

At some point, this “evolution” started

spinning off into the “half-baked ideas”

stage

Half-baked idea #1…

Can resource dependence be

“positive” instead of negative?

The terms and findingsof resource dependence:

Terms: “addiction, reliance, craving” imply vulnerability or weakness

So do a lot of the findings, when Measured (mostly) via arms length economic

indicators: employment or income tied to the extraction,

processing, and distribution of natural resources. Conceptually and methodologically at

issue… dependence as “psychological state” conflated

with arms length aggregate indicators Who depends? Do counties (our usual unit of

analysis really “depend”? Or do people depend?

A positive dependence?

Another class of synonyms for psychological dependence: trust, confidence, belief, faith that imply something positive: dependence versus dependability?

Can this base of confidence--wherever it comes from--give a community a stronger sense of agency, and resilience?

Need to examine actions and

psychologies at multiple scales

.

A conceptual typology of dependence

Individual Community/Aggregate

Psychological(pos / neg)

Attitudes:

Negative: Risk aversion, unwillingness to change

Positive: attachment, biophilia

Social representations, community identity:

Negative: “we are” backward, with few other options, stuck.

Positive: shared vision, collective identity, community as special place

Behavioral(pos / neg)

Individual actions:

Negative: disinvestments in human capital based on faith in industry or lack of awareness of options

Positive: use “faith” in the resource as a launching pad for creativity, entrepreneurship, etc.

Secondary data: indicators of community action

Negative: disinvestments in alt development strategies

Positive: community-driven initiatives: resource based development strategies, CBRM

Core of emerging research…

What affects where in the typology an individual and/or a community is likely to fall?

Based on: What is depended on: characteristics of the

resource Level of analysis: a particular community, a

set of relations between communities; a region?

The type of indicator: social psych or secondary data?

The “type” of location: conduct research in a wider variety of settings that include the rural-urban interface and major metropolitan centers.

Variation within a level

Half-baked idea, #2…

Resource Dependence and Diversity…?

Economic diversity and rural communities

Diversity counter-posed to resource dependence, single industry towns (“resource curse” of overspecialization) “Resource dependent communities need to

diversify” Rural development plans…diversity assumed

to… Mitigate population loss, poverty during economic

downturn (general or sector-specific) Help achieve stability, growth, and/or resilience Contrary to economic theory of comparative

advantage and specialization?

‘Borrowed’ from Ecology: Diversity ~ Resilience?

In ecology, more diverse systems assumed to be better positioned to respond to unspecified system shocks Respond to “unknown unknowns”: diversity as

risk reduction strategy when uncertainty is high.

A few issues to discuss…That are pretty core to

science Measurement: even ecology hasn’t

settled on the ‘best’ way to measure diversity

Evidence: that diversity = resilience is a little sketchy, even in ecology

Translation: between ecology and social-economic systems

Parameters of Diversity in Ecology

translate in your mind a rough analogy between

ecological and economic diversity

Diversity at what level? Species level (most common) Subspecies level: genetic / phenotypical Beyond species: interactions/functional relationships

(emergent) What geography?

Alpha (within given habitat) Beta (diversity of habitats—landscape---transition zones

between habitats) Gamma (geographical: region or larger)

How to count? Richness: number of species present (‘counting’—doesn’t

take into account how distributed) Relative abundance (species evenness): how are the

individuals in a population distributed across species? Niche occupation Rarity/scarcity—not all species ‘count’ equally

Moving to Economic Diversity

subtitle… ‘fun with analogies’ “Richness” : total number of different

economic sectors represented in a given region

“Evenness”: relative distribution across sectors, of employment and/or income

Diversity versus Diversification: Most empirical work looks at the effect of

diversity (state) rather the process of diversification

Are diverse places different (vis a vis outcomes) than diversifying places?

Pushing the ecological analogies

a little farther… “Endangered” species/sectors: ecology privileges rare species: does this make sense for: Economic sectors? Types of communities?

“Exotic versus native” species/sectors We privilege species that “belong” rather than those

that have been introduced (or have expanded their range at the expense of another).

Analogy for economic sectors? seems that in community development, we usually call this

“innovation” and are supremely untroubled by it

Habitat boundaries and system ‘openness’ (species move through habitats)

What does the economic diversity

literature miss? ‘Distance’ or functional differentiation:

compounding versus offsetting effects: social changes producing linked effects

Hierarchies among species/sectors ~ trophic levels: obviously goofy to say there ought to be as many

grizzly bears as mice same (but less obvious) with economic sectors?

Ignore regional differences in the capacity to maintain diversity Some ecosystems “naturally” more diverse than

others (e.g., arctic vs the tropics); is the same true for socio-economic systems?

Another key difference: Community diversity: potential for better

calibration, are more diverse places “better” places by a wider range of criteria. Ecosystems = problems with endogeneity: survival,

expansion/encroachment: “better systems” manage to persist and expand their range

Similar criteria invoked re human communities: persistence and growth, economic indicators (income,

employment, population)

Subjective indicators Are more diverse communities ‘better’ communities?

Do people enjoy them more? Are they more eager to stay? Do they more fully participate in the life of the community? Which people?

Thanks Bill.