Streams of inquiry

Once we have been presented by a mess of complaints, ranging from contaminated water to climatic change, and have begun to define our patient, how can we begin to make sense of it? How do we gather information so that we can make a diagnostic judgement and propose some solutions? What kinds of information do we need?

James Kay and his graduate students at the University of Waterloo, Canada, have proposed what has been called the ‘diamond schematic’ as a way of organizing our thinking about the kinds of information we need. Figure 2.1 shows one of several versions of this. It has been applied in a wide variety of settings – from environmental planning in Saskatchewan to adaptive watershed management in India – and appears to be both useful and robust.

The diamond schematic highlights the kind of information that is needed to effectively undertake an ecosystem approach, and suggests how that information can be organized or presented. In this chapter, I want to focus mainly on the top of the diagram, the two squares which come together to form a description of the eco-social system.

Describing an eco-social system involves both a scientific description of the ecosystem (plants, animals, soils, water, and how they relate to each other and to flows of energy and nutrients), and the creation of an ‘issues framework’ (which things are deemed important – either positively or negatively – by the people who live there), based on an understanding of the culture and values of the people who live in the system.