Rethinking Global Land Use in an Urban Era

8. Significance of Telecoupling for Exploration of Land-Use Change

8 Significance of Telecoupling for Exploration of Land-Use Change Hallie Eakin, Ruth DeFries, Suzi Kerr, Eric F. Lambin, Jianguo Liu, Peter J. Marcotullio, Peter Messerli, Anette Reenberg, Ximena Rueda, Simon R. Swaffield, Birka Wicke, and Karl Zimmerer Abstract Land systems are increasingly influenced by distal connections: the externalities and unintended consequences of social and ecological processes which occur in distant locations , and the feedback mechanisms that lead to new institutional developments and governance arrangements. Economic globalization and urbanization accentuate these novel telecoupling relationships. The prevalence of telecoupling in land systems demands new approaches to research and analysis in land science. This chapter presents a working definition of a telecoupled system, emphasizing the role of governance and institutional change in telecoupled interactions. The social, institutional, and ecological processes and conditions through which telecoupling emerges are described. The analysis of these relationships in land science demands both integrative and diverse epistemological perspectives and methods. Such analyses require a focus on how the motivations and values of social actors relate to telecoupling processes, as well as on the mechanisms that produce unanticipated outcomes and feedback relationships among distal land systems. Introduction Over the last decade, connectivity between processes of land change and actors, decisions, and activities has accelerated across geographically distant places. The 2007–2008 global food crisis, the expansion of biofuel production, and the global emergence of niche and “green” markets have had widespread and often unexpected outcomes on land systems in disparate geographic locations. These 142 H. Eakin et al. connections are associated with accelerated urbanization as well as the development of new markets and are motivated by emergent demands of consumers with increased agency and an intensification of information and knowledge flows. On the basis of this observed “connectivity,” we offer two propositions. First, nearly all land systems are now affected to some extent by these forms of connectivity, or telecouplings. Second, the increased significance of telecoupling for land change implies a need for integrating diverse epistemological perspectives, methodology, and analytical approaches that together complement the long-standing focus of land science on place-based research with a new focus on the networks and system interactions involved in land change. The telecoupling process links the diverse social, ecological, and economic outcomes of land change to specific, yet potentially diverse value systems held by different sets of actors—including scientists in disparate social networks. Research on telecoupling in land science is thus both embedded in the evolution of sustainability pathways for land systems as well as instrumental in the analysis of these pathways. What Are Distal Land Connections and Telecoupling? Teleconnections, as discussed in climate literature, have a specific reference to mesoscale atmospheric processes (e.g., ENSO) that have (concurrent) climatic consequences in geographically noncontiguous locations (e.g., Simmons et al. 1983; Trenbreth and Hurrell 1994). The idea of distal connections captures this essence of “acting at a distance”: an action, phenomena, or process of change in one location has implications in a geographically distant location. In some senses this concept can be interpreted as unidirectional and linear, essentially reflecting the idea of an exogenous driver acting on a distant system. This concept has been applied to land systems (Haberl et al. 2009; Seto et al. 2012b). The concept of telecoupling—preferred by this discussion group—captures the idea of two or more independently coupled, interacting social-ecological systems (Liu, this volume). In other words social-ecological interactions in one system generate mechanisms of influence over another. The process of telecoupling is different to the concept of coupling in that there is an element of social and spatial distance; that is, geographic separation between systems as well as a separation of social networks, institutions, and governance. The boundaries of the systems involved in the telcoupling are defined in terms of the placed-based social-ecological interactions as well as the potentially aspatial social networks, institutions, and governance structures that directly influence those interactions. There is no a priori assumption or understanding that these systems are integrally connected. They are assumed to be disconnected, and thus they are governed independently. Feedback processes, in some cases , may return the initial signal of change to the place of origin, provoking a change (in land use, policy, institutions, or behavior) in that place and causing Significance of Telecoupling for Exploration of Land-Use Change 143 a complete feedback loop. In other cases, differences in power and influence among the coupled systems may...