“Resource Dependency and Diversity: From Findings to Metaphors (and Back Again?)”

1. “Resource Dependency and Diversity: From Findings to Metaphors (and Back Again?)” Richard C. Stedman Department of Natural Resources Cornell University

2. 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

3. 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)

4. “Well, duh…indeed??” Here we go again… Enter the Marcellus Shale…

5. Major Natural Gas Shale Basins

6. 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!

11. On the other hand… Maybe we have made some progress after all…discourse is broader

12. 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

13. 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?

14. At some point, this “evolution” started spinning off into the “half-baked ideas” stage

15. Half-baked idea #1…Can resource dependence be “positive” instead of negative?

16. 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?

17. 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?

18. Need to examine actions and psychologies at multiple scales .

19. A conceptual typology of dependence

20. 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

21. Half-baked idea, #2…Resource Dependence and Diversity…?

22. 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?

23. ‘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.

24. 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: thatdiversity = resilience is a little sketchy, even in ecology • Translation: between ecology and social-economic systems

25. Parameters of Diversity in Ecologytranslate 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

26. Moving to Economic Diversitysubtitle… ‘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?

27. Pushing the ecological analogiesa 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)

28. 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?

29. 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?

30. Thanks Bill.