Engaging With Human Identity in Social-Ecological Systems: A Dialectical Approach

Vexing problems of global environmental change call for better conceptual and analytical approaches for understanding human behaviors, factors influencing these behaviors, and the causal pathways through which these shape social and environmental outcomes. While human identity meanings provide key analytic objects in the interrogation of these dynamics, identity-based research has been truncated by a historic overemphasis on social factors and a lack of critical engagement with the ecological context of these processes. Adapting Giddens’s concept of structuration, we draw on recent advances in social-ecological systems scholarship and human structural ecology to propose a new conceptual approach for understanding human identity processes and their relation to social-ecological structure. Resituating the human person within complex social-ecological systems, we suggest some causal pathways through which ecological (in addition to social) elements are active in the emergence of human identity and, conversely, the ways in which identity-based behaviors interact dialectically with social-ecological structure to produce outcomes significant along both social and ecological dimensions. Finally, we explore some implications of this reframing for the interrogation of society-nature dynamics and for empirical research engaging with social-ecological change and resilience.