ZMT - Leibniz Zentrum für Marine Tropenforschung

Social energy manifests itself in the resolution, and perseverance of individual and collective actors in pursuit of a goal. Ideally, social energy supports  eventually self-organizing individual and collective efforts to meet challenges and opportunities in the organisation of resource use. Social energy is indispensable if change dynamics towards a common good are to prevail over the longer term.

The main objective of this research project is to identify what impedes and promotes social energy for sustainable human-nature relations over time. We focus on regions in which ZMT has long-term (a decade or more) direct involvement

Selected publications

Partelow, S., M. Glaser, S. Solano Arce, R. Sá Leitão Barboza, and A. Schlüter (2018). Mangroves, fishers, and the struggle for adaptive co-management: applying the social-ecological systems framework to a marine extractive reserve (RESEX) in Brazil. Ecology and Society 23(3):19.

Glaser, M., Breckwoldt, A., Carruthers, T., Forbes, D., Costanzo, S., Kelsey, H., Stead, S. (2018). Towards a framework to support coastal change governance in small islands. Environmental Conservation, 1-11.

Pires de Lima, A, Mathis A and Glaser M (in prep) The social energy concept in social-ecological systems analysis

International presentations on social energy

• University of Canterbury, Kent, UK February 2017
• University of the Liberal Arts Bangladesh, November 2017
• Universidade de São Paulo, Universidade Federal do Pará  November & December 2018
  
  Current activities
  
• Delfs Malin (in prep) Environmental Governance in Belize: People, Places, Protection (Master thesis)
• Pires de Lima, Ailton (in prep) Sustainable development in the Amazon: The dynamics of social energy in Marine and Coastal Extractive Reserves (PhD thesis)
• Further recruitment of MSc & PhD candidates
• Search for funding