SES Framework

The social-ecological systems (SES) framework, set out by Elinor Ostrom in her 2009 Science paper, is a multi-tier diagnostic structure for analyzing why some coupled human-natural systems are governed sustainably and others are not. It treats a social-ecological system as the interplay of four core subsystems, a resource system, the resource units it produces, a governance system, and the users, all embedded in broader social, economic, and political settings and related ecosystems. Each core subsystem unpacks into second- and lower-tier variables, giving a shared, nested vocabulary of dozens of attributes that can be drawn on selectively for a given question. The framework extends Ostrom's earlier Institutional Analysis and Development work to tightly coupled human-environment systems and is designed to support cumulative, comparable diagnosis of sustainability, including the conditions under which users self-organize to manage a resource.