Social Indicators and the West Coast Marine Environment: Placing Community Social Analyses in a Transdisciplinary Framework

The holistic approach developed within social anthropology is valuable in examining community relationships to surrounding environments, particularly when these communities - fishing communities, for example - are dependent on local natural resources.  However, when the desired scale for the examination and assessment of a social-ecological relationship exists at the level of a large marine ecosystem like the California Current, social analyses likewise need to be scaled up such that multiple communities can be considered at once.  One means of scaling up is through the use of community-level indicators and indices, developed from existing data.  The use of community indices may serve two important research ends in this context:  1) they allow for a more directed ethnographic and social research approach later on and, perhaps more importantly, they 2) facilitate the placement of social analyses in a transdisciplinary framework.  Coastal community-level indices developed for the West Coast and presented here allow for analyses of primarily social vulnerabilities as well as analyses of connections that stretch across the metadiscplinary boundaries between the natural and social sciences.  Accordingly, the social indicators approach suggests possible benefits in tracking ocean-oriented climate change impacts and interactions as well as enhancing ecosystem-based management in general.