Complex causality : Bridging analytical sociology and social-ecological systems research

Sammanfattning: Understanding the complexity of social-ecological phenomena like climate change, ocean acidification, and biodiversity loss requires interdisciplinary collaboration. However, scholars that engage in interdisciplinary work face the challenge of grasping other disciplines’ causal reasoning. Without proper understanding of the presuppositions, theoretical commitments, and justificatory support behind other approaches’ causal claims, it is difficult to build systemic representations and to know how well they capture phenomena, which limits the usability both for further research and to inform action.   The overarching purpose of this thesis is to develop conceptual tools to navigate the diversity of causal reasoning in SES research, in general, and between analytical sociology and SES research, in particular. This is achieved in four essays. In essay I, me and my co-authors introduce Analysis of causal argumentation, a method to analyse causal claims and their justificatory support; we demonstrate its use by applying it to a selection of nine diverse and influential studies; we found that different forms of questions, data accessibility and justificatory support causal claims that vary in terms of the type of causal information they capture, strength and scope of generality, but no approach scores high in all. In essay II, we move from the rather methodological aspect of making causal claims to investigate how causal reasoning is shaped. We propose the framework Co-Map to explain how substantive theories, methods, accounts of causation, analytical foci, and causal notions, assemble different forms of reasoning. Through four in-depth studies, we show that researchers’ choices on these elements create path dependence that influence what each approach can capture; the case studies are analytical sociology, dynamic systems modelling, ecological modelling and the process-relational analysis. In essay III, we present the social-ecological Coleman’s diagram to facilitate integration between analytical sociology and SES research on the grounds of mechanism-based reasoning. Colemans diagram is a tool to think about micro-macro relations typically used in sociology; we show how it can be used for social-ecological phenomena. In essay IV, I move from abstract tools to a concrete attempt to link analytical sociology and SES research. In this paper, I bring together a model of behavioural diffusion from sociology and a model of population growth from ecology into Cod-rush, an empirically informed agent-based model that advances a generative hypothesis of opportunistic fishing that explores outcomes of fishery collapse and non-collapse.