The environmental statehood of ecological restoration: An institutional analysis of three regulatory case studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
• Regulation hinders ecosystem recovery following ecological restoration. • Regulatory frameworks paradoxically seek to legitimise land degradation and environmental protection. • Applying the concept of environmental statehood assists in elucidating regulatory barriers to recovery. Throughout Australia, social-ecological systems are in decline. Ecological restoration has been identified as a key process for reversing this decline, but the recovery of social-ecological systems following ecological restoration is rare. As ecological restoration is a social practice as much as it is a natural science practice, regulatory frameworks have a key role to play in either promoting or impeding recovery. This paper investigates how institutions in the regulatory space for ecological restoration approach recovery and identifies the drivers for regulatory instruments through a multi-level institutional analysis of three regulatory case studies across Australia. The findings from the institutional analysis demonstrate a paradox in the regulation of ecological restoration as it shows that the regulatory frameworks are actually contributing to low recovery rates. Ecological restoration is often regulated by the same regulatory frameworks that regulate land degradation and the regulatory systems continue to articulate the value of land degrading activities, with ecological restoration a way of avoiding state liability. Drivers for regulatory reform are then often market orientated. These findings all demonstrate what has been called an environmental statehood; that is, the way in which modern states engage with social-ecological issues, only continues to reinforce land degradation. The role of the state, state institutions and regulation is often overlooked in studies addressing socio-ecological resilience and adaptation, despite the central role of these institutions in the management of socio-ecological systems. This paper adds to the growing scholarship that addresses this research gap by contributing an empirically informed analysis of the regulation of ecological restoration in Australia.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".