Understanding Agricultural Heritage Sites as Complex Adaptive Systems: The Challenge of Complexity

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1 Sept., 2013 Journal of Resources and Ecology Vol.4 No.3 J. Resour. Ecol (3) DOI: /j.issn x GIAHS Understanding Agricultural Heritage Sites as Complex Adaptive Systems: The Challenge of Complexity Tony FULLER 1 * and MIN Qingwen 2 1 College of Humanities and Development, China Agricultural University, Beijing , China; 2 Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, CAS, Beijing , China Abstract: In rural life, everything is connected to everything else. Seen as a complex adaptive system, the rural in most regions of the world has evolved over many centuries and is well known to have endured invasive predations and conflicts and to have adapted to changing conditions, both physical and human, many times. Such changes are recorded in the culture and in the landscapes which have continuously evolved and which characterize rural places today. These features of contemporary rural life economy, culture and landscape are the key elements of rural systems. Interestingly, they have also become the elements that attract tourists to rural areas. This theoretical paper, starts from the position that the rural world as a whole is complex and that systems adjust in the face of uncertainty, and a type of dynamism that is generated externally in the form of shocks and stresses. Complex Adaptive Systems theory provides an excellent opportunity to examine living systems such as Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) in China that can provide new perspectives on resilience and self-organizing capabilities of the system. The paper suggests that adopting such approaches in contemporary research will produce new insights of whole systems and stem the tide of mainstream scientific research that reduces systems to their component parts and studies them with micro-techniques, while mostly failing to reintegrate the component parts back into the system as a whole. By reviewing this approach in relation to GIAHS and by introducing tourism into the rural village system, as a perturbation, we can create new ways to understand the effects of rural development interventions in ancient landscapes such as those which cover many parts of rural China today. Key words: complex adaptive systems; tourism; villages; holons; theory; perturbations 1 Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) In this paper, we propose to explore the theoretical application of complex adaptive systems to the sites of Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) in China (Min 2009; Koohafkan and Cruz 2011). We will do this by posing the question of how tourism can affect what, in many ways, is a closed village system. Systems theory and research is that in which both human and physical components of the system are examined together to gain a better understanding of the system as a whole (Smit et al. 1998; Waltner-Toews 2004; Robinson and Fuller 2010; Connell 2010). There are two key subsystems in all agricultural heritage sites; the human system and the ecological system. Both subsystems have their own subsystems which we will call holons to distinguish them and avoid semantic muddle. For example, there are water and land holons within the ecological subsystem (Luo 2011) and there are village and household holons within the human subsystem (Sun 2010). In effect, these form a nested hierarchy of holons (Allen and Hoekstra 1992). Most insight into agricultural systems comes from analyzing the relations between the subsystems and among the holons at different scales and levels. For example, the land-use holon is of great interest as it depicts the outcome of relations between people and the land. It reflects the outcome of cultural traditions, technological levels and soil conditions as well as market prices and policy measures as interpreted by farmers and by science. A farming system is the sum, at any one time, of many subsystem and holon interactions. When systems are faced with changing conditions or interruptions (referred to as perturbations or disturbances Received: Accepted: Foundation: Chinese Academy of Sciences Visiting Professorship for Senior International Scientists (Grant No.Y0S00100KD). * Corresponding author: Tony FULLER. tfuller@uoguelph.ca.

2 196 in the Complex Adaptive Systems discourse) in the internal system (e.g., rapid population growth) or external environment (e.g., market or policy shifts), the whole system may be adjusted according to a mediated process between man and his understanding of the environment, as well as his interpretation of the changing subsystem or holon itself. This produces an adaptation of the whole system to suit the new conditions introduced through one subsystem. As all holons are linked together in various ways, a change in one will affect changes in many of the others. This is called adaptive capacity, the ability of the system to adjust to new circumstances emanating at first from one subsystem or holon and spreading to many others. Another related measure of this attribute is resilience, that capacity to return to normal after a serious change has taken place affecting many holons and the two subsystems (Birkes and Folke 1998). Changes themselves can be seen as either catastrophic or severe. In the first case they are called shocks and usually require drastic adjustment beginning somewhere in the whole system. A severe pressure on the system may be referred to as a stress. A shock is unexpected, while a stress is more long-term and knowable. An example of a shock would be an earthquake or forest fire, while a stress would be a drought which, over time, builds pressure on the whole system. The former requires an emergency response and subsequent adjustments, the latter is slower and can have predictable impacts such that plans to adjust over time can be strategic and are often more effective. Physical systems tend to adjust themselves to both shocks and stresses and are considered to be self-organizing. Physical systems, if left to themselves rarely return to normal and reach a new state which can be referred to as a new normal. Human systems are also resilient and can adjust to new circumstances, but in general demonstrate a stronger tendency to return to the old normal. This may be a key differentiating feature of the two sub-systems. With this brief description of the postmodern view of systems, it is evident that we are dealing with a high degree of complexity. However, complexity in this context Journal of Resources and Ecology Vol.4 No.3, 2013 means more than life being complicated. It means looking at problems in a different way and accepting that there are many things, connections and relationships, that we know little about. Research in this mode is about surprise and discovery, rather than prediction via reductionism (Robinson and Fuller 2010). As Connell (2010) points out: complexity means to look differently at the world; it is to no longer believe that we can understand the world better by collecting more information and doing better science. Each holon can be considered a system in its own right, and each holon is connected to all the other holons, either directly or indirectly. A farming system is eminently complex in that it brings the human subsystem into direct contact with the physical subsystem in the everyday life of farming. This is visualized in Fig. 1, the complexity of which is limited by its own two-dimensional representation. A change in one holon will eventually be felt across the whole system and in ways that are often unpredictable. As can be seen, there are endless alternatives and possibilities; in effect everything is connected to everything else. However, in reality many of these connections are mediated through the filter of the peasant farm household and village community which may have dealt with such predicaments before, and depend on their own knowledge, intuition, reference to deities and the help of friends and relations to reach a response to a problem. This makes systems analysis possible in that the complexity of the situation is reduced somewhat by our own inability to comprehend and analyze all the possibilities. In this paper we propose to consider applying postmodern systems analysis, theoretically, to the GIAHS in China and in this way demonstrate that it is possible to take complexity seriously. This is an alternative to the science method of reducing problems to ever smaller units of analysis, which mostly fail to integrate any new knowledge into the system, subsystem, or holon in which it occurs, as well as the system as a whole. The GIAHS represent a relatively closed farming system which partially reduces the complexity of the situation. By considering the potential and known impacts of tourism on village-level Education and research Culture Soil Landscape Transport Land holding The farming system Water Climate regime Policy Economy Human Politics Forest cover Physical Land use Fig. 1 A depiction of random holons in a complex farming system.

3 FULLER T, et al.: Understanding Agricultural Heritage Sites as Complex Adaptive Systems: The Challenge of Complexity 197 farming systems, we can examine, at least theoretically, the impact of tourism as a perturbation in the complex adaptive systems of GIAHS. In this theoretical treatment, therefore, we are dealing with two elements; the farming system called a GIAHS and the intervention into the farming system called tourism. These two elements will be discussed individually first, before they are considered together with the information that we have available on sample GIAHSs in China. 2 Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) A GIAHS is: Remarkable land use systems and landscapes which are rich in globally significant biological diversity evolving from the co-adaptation of a community with its environment and its needs and aspirations for sustainable development. Parvis KOOHAFKAN, et al This prestigious designation by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations of an official GIAHS has been bestowed on six sites in China and more are waiting designation. Some of these will be become Chinese provincial designations in the future and are important ways to bring attention to the special nature of these long-standing systems. GIAHS exemplify the intrinsic bond between man and nature though the timeold practice of farming in which knowledge and respect have been developed over centuries of trial and error. Such systems are found in different environments from remote landscapes to semi-urban locations where the threats and advantages for sustainability vary greatly. GIAHS are particularly well developed in mountainous terrains where conditions for agriculture are difficult, at best, and are a testimony to human ingenuity and patience. This is well illustrated when the many incursions of natural and manmade interventions disasters or perturbations are taken into account (floods, wars, epidemics, famines and migrations) and considering the high survival rate of such systems. It is important to note that although the GIAHS designation has been awarded to certain specific locations, the farming system itself is widespread. For example, rice terrace landscapes exist unheralded in many inhospitable areas of South China and include rice-fish and rice-duck combinations as the agricultural systems of choice. GIAHS cover a number of landscapes and land use types in China. The most common is the rice-terrace systems of central and southern China (Li et al. 2011) Although rice paddies are common in many areas, it is the mountain type with rice terraces to husband the water resources that adds a special dimension to the rice-fish-duck systems (Lu and Li 2006). There are also maize and root crop-based agroecosystems in north-central China, as well as nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoral systems in west China. If one adds to this coverage, the special situations of tea, dates, vineyards and nut trees, the conditions for village tourism are easily met in many locations (Min 2009 and 2012). The farming systems are unique, ingenious in many instances, and draw visitors to view attractive landscapes and experience ancient village cultures (Sun et al. 2011). 3 The advent of tourism Among all the privations and afflictions that have affected rural systems in the world, the industrialization of economies and the modernization of society have had the most impact. Industrialization is invariably urban based and as such draws labor from the countryside to power the production processes of the city. Rural to urban migration of migrant workers is the first order of impact on rural systems in China. In the process, the nonmingong (migrant labourerfarmers) become proletarianized as construction and factory workers, as wage earners and employees and their children become modernized within the culture of the urbanindustrial complex. This has brought about some profound changes to life and livelihood in rural areas as young adults go out and many leave behind their children, women and the elders in the village (Ye et al. 2010). This creates a structural change in the demographic composition of many rural areas. A cycle of exchange is completed by the remittances that are sent back home to assist with children s education, medical expenses for the elderly and to renovate or improve family dwellings. Many adjustments take place in village life during this process in the absence of working age adults. Agriculture is often feminized as women take over farm tasks and adjust the daily round to accommodate the new demands on their time for example. Grandparents continue farming until very old age and become the guardians of children. Overall, the fundamental relationship between human and ecological systems at the village level is adjusted over time. In terms of systems thinking, this can be called an adjustment to a stress in the original system. A second outcome of industrialization and modernization is the rise of travel as a consumer appetite among the newly created middle class. As citizens become established and have some disposable income, it becomes increasingly fashionable to take holidays and to travel to far off places to visit ancient sites and classical landscapes. Many of these are located in rural areas and as a result there is a second order of backflow of visitors and capital to rural places. Many of these places are villages. As a result, a further change has occurred in many village systems across the country where visitors have come to view, to experience and to enjoy the cultural activities of local peoples, many of them ethnic minorities. This represents a seasonal and occasional backflow of people to rural areas and although their intent is different from those who left, they are curiously interested in the agricultural and related cultural activities of the communities they visit and represent another form of re-balancing or adjustment in the local system. Rural village tourism can also be seen and studied as a response to a stress in the original agrarian system. Over

4 198 time tourism creates a set of new conditions that have to be accommodated or rejected by the system, the only other option being system collapse. We can examine these options further by focusing attention on rural systems that represent, before modernization, optimal conditions of system balance and sustainability. Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) have evolved over many centuries and combine the best sustainable elements of man and biosphere having withstood and adapted to many perturbations causing system shocks and stresses. GIAHS represent an approximation to a closed system and therefore can be studied theoretically to see what the impacts, adjustments and rejections might be in the face of the most recent external pressure, that of tourism. 3.1 Measuring the system impacts of tourism The introduction of tourism into a GIAHS village system and all the other villages not designated, but operating under essentially the same conditions, is an incursion. An incursion is a new event in the village system and one which probably follows the going out of some village workers. The effect of going out is one of absence, while tourism brings with it the effect of presence. For many GIAHS, it is the first time in over 1000 years that visitors have come to the village who are not directly connected with governments, armies, bandits or traders. If they are day visitors, they come to see the landscape, eat a meal and maybe talk with a local informant. They represent a different person than that which locals are used to. They might speak, dress and behave differently than locals, such that the first impact is cultural. Over time it represents a process of opening up, but at the village or township level. Such contact brings new ideas and possibilities, but also raises awareness of the outside world which might seem to villagers to be prosperous and desirable. This first impact has particular effects on youth and can consolidate their already forming desire to escape from the confines and work routines of village life. In many cases contact with outsiders is unsettling. Unfortunately, cultural impacts are hard to measure as behavioral change may only appear after several years and one cannot be sure that out-migration of youth for example is directly affected by the influx of tourists. Be that as it may, it is clear that with tourism, village life will begin to change. More anthropological work needs to be done to understand better the change processes that take place after tourists have started to come to the village. The most common way to measure impact is to calculate the money that visitors spend in the village. This however is controversial in many places as the bulk of tourism expenditures are taken by the travel agencies who organize the travel arrangements and have deals with some locals about where to park, what to see and where to eat. It is well known internationally that day tourists tend to bring their own supplies of food and drink and that what they spend in the village is minimal. The economics of village Journal of Resources and Ecology Vol.4 No.3, 2013 tourism informs us about the external costs and benefits of tourism, but says little about the economic impact of tourism on the village economy. In this respect, tourism is an assumed good. If we view village culture and economy as two holons, then the potential impact of tourism can be assessed in general terms, An example is visualized using Fig. 1. At the beginning, the early impact of tourism on village culture is slow and long standing. The impact on the local economy is also minimal at first as most of the expenditures are made externally and before the visit is made. Only when the villagers provide group meals for visitors and when traditional dancing and singing is performed for them, does any real money flow into the village. Visitors who stay overnight have an increased impact and begin to make a difference on what visitors spend and on the impact they have on local cultural activities. The type of village tourism (day tourism, overnight stays, ecotourism) is therefore important in the calculus of impact. Day tourism is passive and has minimal effects in the two holons taken as examples. Overnight tourism has a much greater economic benefit for the village, although this may flow to only a few of the more entrepreneurial households. Whatever the impact, the village takes on a new dimension in its daily life; a form of new normal. This introduces the importance of time. With the passage of time, tourism, once introduced will develop and make increasing demands on the time of villagers, on their resources and on their ability to accommodate increasing numbers of tourists. In the economic holon, increasing amounts of income may have different effects. Some households will invest the money on new and better tourism facilities, others will improve their farm life with new tools, technologies and chemical inputs. Some will save their money and eventually move to a new location. All three reactions can have deleterious effects on the farming sub-system. More land brought under cultivation will require more irrigation water and will potentially diminish the water resources in the area and stress the human system that allocates water and controls distribution. New and greater amounts of agrochemicals will increasingly affect the groundwater system and distribute chemical residues, as well as plastic, across the landscape surface. The opportunity for organic food production is diminished, ironically just as the demand rises, especially by eco-tourists, for more natural foods that are deemed safe and healthy (Altieri and Koohafkan 2004). Villagers who abandon their land, leave empty terraces, and unkempt canals. Paradoxically, these villagers are considered by some locals as winners in the system. With increased income there is the distinct and ironic possibility that the very feature that attracts tourists in the first place is slowly changed and often debased. No tourists want to see abandoned paddies, overgrown pathways and clogged irrigation ditches, nor empty houses or closed shops. The vicious circle of decline is easy to trigger with thoughtless

5 FULLER T, et al.: Understanding Agricultural Heritage Sites as Complex Adaptive Systems: The Challenge of Complexity 199 overloading in one holon and the under-resourcing of other related holons. 3.2 Tourism impacts: landscape The impacts of tourism can be tracked in several ways by examining the connected holons. If we begin with the landscape holon (Fig. 2), abandoned terraces and water channel maintenance can be the starting point which may lead to an adjustment in land use, land distribution, water management and conservation practices for example. A study of terrace abandonment might eventually lead to why the peasants have left their land, and then to the new opportunities, as perceived by the peasant family, presented by income from tourism or indirectly from some other business investment. For example, a truck or a van, perhaps purchased with income from tourism, will be used to develop a small transport business. In this process, farming is abandoned or left to the elders who may let it go later. Tracking such interconnected events which then become stories is an anthropological task involving narrative and ethnography as well as the knowledge we have in natural science. Of critical importance is to know what is adjusted in the system when a major change such as tourism occurs, both physical and human, and whether this adjustment is likely to lead to greater sustainability of the system or to some form of deleterious system change or even collapse. Tracing the cause and effects through the holons is a process of discovery as there is much we don t know about complex systems and how they adapt (or not) to such perturbations as the incursion of tourism. 3.3 Tourism impacts: forestry There is a much greater body of work on changes in upland forest cover and what this might mean for the water system in rice terraces in many areas of central and southern China. The conservation of water in such landscapes has also been studied in conditions of drought (Bai and Min, to be published). Drought is another type of perturbation that produces stress in the system. When upland terrace systems are compared to paddy rice in valley lowlands, the impact of drought is much less in the ancient upland areas where forest covers produce great water conservation effects (Li and Lai 1994). In this case the natural system is selfadjusting, although the medium to long-term effects of such adjustments are not fully known. Tracing what changes in the practice of water use in such circumstances as drought, in the terraces, in the village, in the forest ground cover, in the flora and fauna is all to be discovered. Most of what we do know is about change in crop yield in times of drought and the impact calculation is about rice yield productivity, and not about sustainability in the system. In drought conditions, some elements in the holons might be stressed beyond recovery, others changed, while many are only adjusted slightly. What also becomes evident is that systems often have to handle different perturbations at the same time, in this case tourism and drought. The issues are necessarily complex as the system itself, fine tuned over many generations of farming, is also complex. What we don t have is a manual of how the system works best and what the critical elements are without which the system would not work at all. What emerges from this theoretical discourse is that the GIAHSs offer an excellent opportunity to understand better the relations between human and physical systems. Given that tourism has been proposed and accepted as a potential solution to peasant system decline, it is opportune to examine the different GIAHS from a systems perspective in which tourism represents a perturbation. Tourism is slow moving and causes stress in the system, but not shocks. There is time to formulate man-made adjustments, while observing the self organizing changes in the local and regional ecology. However, a number of important observations must be considered to enable any such research to take full advantage of systems thinking. (1) A body of knowledge about individual elements already exists, but this tends to be fragmented and held in disciplinary cocoons. This knowledge needs to be catalogued and made available to the research community. Policy Land use Topography Geology Fig. 2 The holons that will affect and be affected by Landscape change. Regulatory agencies Forestry Transportation Settlement Landscape Soils Water regime Climate conditions

6 200 Most importantly, ways of combining these pieces of knowledge into greater wholes for understanding more about system dynamics is required. Using complex dynamic systems analysis is only one way to proceed in this matter. (2) A baseline is necessary to determine how the system operates when it is normal, that is before a perturbation occurs. In any recording of the baseline, analysis should tell us which parts of the system which holons are most vulnerable to natural and man-made perturbations. Identifying weak links that exist when the system is normal will help to understand how they perform when under stress or in conditions of shock. Surprises may well occur in this approach, and many often become important discoveries. (3) A fragmented approach to GIAHS will do more harm than good. Effective study needs generalists, as well as specialists in science and social science. The biggest research need is in relating parts of the system together to see the system as a whole or at least as sub-systems. Only farming systems research has done this in the past. (4) Dynamic research needs to be more fully developed. One of the reasons that a complex adaptive system is complex is because it is dynamic. Research studies need to reconcile this with new and better techniques for measuring change as it occurs, because complex systems are changing all the time. How this change occurs, at what level (which holons?) and which changes are beneficial in terms of system maintenance and sustainability is a critical avenue of future enquiry. Techniques that hold variables constant in order to study them more effectively miss the point that variables are adjusting constantly and in different pathways in relation to a variety of other variables. Key pathways that characterize change need to be developed and charted. It is also essential that these key pathways incorporate both human and physical components of the system. (5) Simple regressions are too limited to tell us anything useful about CASs. Even multiple regressions can only demonstrate associations between variables and are always constrained by the quality of the data. For many human decision-making factors there are only a few reliable measures yet developed, and so such key variables as satisfaction and trust are excluded from the analysis. A village that is dissatisfied or divided over the benefits of tourism because of a lack of trust (in the authorities, among themselves) has a very uncertain future, at least as far as village tourism goes. 4 Summary and conclusions In order to understand the Chinese GIAHS in a more full interpretation of their strengths and weaknesses and especially their resilience, we must learn more about taking complexity seriously. Reducing issues to a simple problem is a useful scientific technique, but is inadequate in understanding big picture situations and their multi-layered dynamics. Allen and Hoekstra (1992) point out that an exact, all inclusive definition of hierarchies is less important than the acknowledgement that scale and perspective, Journal of Resources and Ecology Vol.4 No.3, 2013 context and content are relevant to understanding nature, which is more complex than any of our models. Thus, research in this field requires specialists and generalist to work together in multi-disciplinary teams to piece together their understanding of the system and how it works, and how it is likely to respond to a stress or a shock. Frameworks for holding the data together so that inter-relationships can be measured, monitored and better understood are needed. Such starting frameworks can be refined or rejected as the result of feedback from focused research, but new ways of seeing and dealing with complexity are badly needed. Sophisticated models can be helpful as can narratives of village conversations. Visualizing GIAHS as complex dynamic systems has many advantages. It forces us try to see the system as a whole, to understand its many complexities and to focus on the unknown and surprising elements of the system. In this way systems study becomes innovative and we begin to ask different sorts of questions and seek to test new and innovative methodologies. Seeing heritage tourism in an agricultural village context as a disturbance changes the way we look at knowledge generation and the utility of our standard methods. We begin to ask questions of ourselves as well as of the system. All views represent knowledge. We must therefore enhance our scientific knowledge of system components with the views of different actors; people, governments and the private sector all at different scales. They may be considered stakeholders in a complex system in which the village is the node and its future is at stake. The private sector view that it represents an opportunity to make money from tourism, or the opportunity to attract investments for infrastructure by local governments can be moderated by the views of villagers. Unless the interests of the people who will maintain the system are taken into account, then the long-term sustainability of the system is at risk. Fuller (2013) and Sun et al. (2009, 2011) have written about the problems of engaging local people in tourism planning and management in the Chinese rural tourism context. The principle of multiple perspectives is of importance when trying to comprehend the way forward for any form of human or physical development. Landscapes are basically inert and await the decisions of man. What formulates the decisions to intensify, continue or abandon traditional practices is yet to be more fully understood and perhaps the use of complex adaptive systems thinking will help to clarify this and many related issues. As natural disasters increase and technology constantly alters our modes of interaction, the impact on our systems of production and livelihood are more frequently under stress. We must rise to this challenge with new and imaginative ways of comprehending how systems work and adapt (or not) to natural and man-made interventions. Studying the GIAHS with a systems approach will enable us to get closer to understanding systems, sub-systems or holons as a dynamic whole.

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