Ryan Plummer

Professor, Tourism and Environment, Brock University & Senior Research Fellow, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University (http:/www.stockholmresilience.org/)
E-mail: rplummer@brocku.ca
Office: MC C-423
Phone: +1-905-688-5550 x.4782
 

About Ryan

     Ryan Plummer is Director of the Environmental Sustainability Research Centre (ESRC), Professor in the Department of Tourism and Environment at Brock University (Canada), and is a Senior Research Fellow with the Stockholm Resilience Centre (Sweden). Additionally, he also holds Adjunct/Graduate Faculty status with the Department of Environment and Resource Studies at the University of Waterloo, the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, and the Department of Geography at the University of Guelph. 

     His multi-faceted program of research broadly concerns the governance of social-ecological systems. In striving to advance knowledge of collaboration and adaptation within complex systems, he has focused on the exploring their theoretical underpinnings and ethical implications, modeling their processes, examining the roles of social capital, and investigating the influences of social learning. Water resources are the context in which his research mainly occurs and he is a Faculty Investigator in the Water Policy and Governance Group. His program of research is primarily supported by a Brock University Chancellor's Chair in Research Excellence, the Adaptation and Impacts Research Section (AIRS) of Environment Canada, the Canadian Water Network, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

     Findings from his research have been published in leading international journals such as Ecological Economics, Ecology and Society, Environmental Management, Frontiers in Ecology and Society, Global Environmental Change, Journal of Environmental Management, Society and Natural Resources and the UN journal, Natural Resources Forum. In addition, he is the author of Outdoor Recreation (Routledge, 2010), and co-editor of Adaptive Capacity and the Making of Environmental Governance (with D. Armitage, Springer, 2010) and Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems: the Role of Learning and Education (with M.E. Krasny and C. Lundholm, Routledge, 2011). He serves as an Associate Editor for the Canadian Water Resources Journal, Ecology and Society, and Tourism and Marine Environments. 

     The scholarly quality of his research program was formally recognized in 2008 with the awarding of a Chancellor’s Chair for Research Excellence. In 2004 he received the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences Award for Teaching Excellence and in 2008 he was selected as one of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) Excellence in Education Award winners for Promotion of Sustainable Practices.

Research Interests

• novel governance strategies and social - ecological systems
• adaptive co-management
• adaptation and adaptive capacity
• community-based management
• integrated resource management
• social capital and social learning
• resilience and vulnerability

<b>How does your research relate to sustainability/ESRC? <br></b> Uncertainty, complexity and conflict characterize contemporary environmental challenges. Social-ecological systems emphasize an integrative perspective as human and biophysical systems are connected or linked. How society steers towards sustainable trajectories is a critical question. The sustainability science orientation of BESRU provides an ideal lens to study social-ecological systems and innovative forms of environment governance.