There's another interesting paper in the Ecology & Society Issue In Progress. This one deals with the difficulties faced by transdisciplinary teams seeking to apply complex systems thinking to socio-ecological problems.

Understanding the relationship between people and the environment requires that researchers on the ground simultaneously navigate multiple world views (Gadgil et al. 2003) and complex social-ecological systems (Scheffer et al. 2001, Berkes et al. 2003) characterized by cross-scale interactions, nonlinear feedback, and uncertainty (Gunderson and Holling 2002). Transdisciplinarity is often touted as the answer to the difficulties involved in understanding such systems. . .

There is, however, a lack of guidance and experience in adopting integrated approaches involving different world views, and few academic curricula address these challenges. In reality, this type of complex systems research allows for different conceptual and practical approaches, which can be confusing and disconcerting to researchers. . . By comparing two case studies from Peru and South Africa, where community-level assessments were conducted as part of the MA [Millennium Ecosystem Assessment ], this paper explores the different conceptual models used to deal with scale and complexity, the different methods adopted to deal with epistemology, and the different means of dealing with uncertainty in each study.

Scott Page and Lu Hong's work comes to mind. . . again, in that this can be seen as group problem solving by experts with diverse heuristics at the limits of functionality due to communication difficulty. They are sufficiently diverse that they have to work to understand one another.

It is useful at the outset to outline what is meant by complex systems research and some of the major factors that may lead to confusion. Theories about the relationship between people and the environment influence the ways in which natural resource management is understood and applied (Janssen 2002). Whereas early theories relied heavily on a dichotomy between people and the environment (Malthus 1798, Meadows et al. 1972), more inclusive approaches emphasizing systems thinking and human adaptation to environmental and social processes have gained currency during the past century. This has brought with it principles and ideas that emphasize complex system dynamics (Kay et al. 1999), linked social-ecological systems (Berkes and Folke 1998), nonlinear feedback at multiple scales (Gunderson and Holling 2002), and resilience to change in social and ecological systems (Holling 1986).

Ecosystem assessments such as the MA compel researchers to deal with complex system dynamics, including but not restricted to nonlinear processes, uncertainty, emergence, cross-scale interactions, self-organization, novelty, slow- and fast-changing variables, and a nested hierarchical structure (Walker and Abel 2002, Berkes et al. 2003, du Toit et al. 2004). Both natural and human systems exhibit characteristics of complex systems, and linked social and ecological systems are increasingly considered to be self-organizing, with a loose hierarchical structure (Gunderson and Holling 2002) and various emergent processes. They are furthermore subject to relatively sudden reconfigurations from one state to another (Scheffer et al. 2001). Natural resource managers and systems researchers face enormous challenges when confronting this complexity in their work (Walker et al. 2002).

I find it satisfying that researchers are becoming aware of how difficult these problems are both for ecosystems and societies, and that both must be dealt with in order to accomplish anything. Even today it is dead common to hear the subjects discussed in terms of the early dichotomous theories (Malthus, Meadows et al.) even though we have many examples of the failure of this type of thinking.

Though the paper doesn't provide easy and complete answers to the difficulties identified - it offers two case studies and some analysis of their experiences - it does a great job of stating the problem. Consider the issues of scale:

. . .despite recent comprehensive reviews of scale (see, for example, Schulze 2000), the disparate treatment that scale has received from the various disciplines makes it one of the most fundamental methodological challenges confronting researchers. For example, whereas systems ecologists might argue that scale is an explicit consideration when assessing any system (Levin 1992), geographers would place the emphasis on spatial scale (Wood and Lakshmi 1993), historical ecologists on temporal scale (Balee 1998), economists on emergent features (Martónez-Alier and Schlupmann 1991), sociologists on interactions between scales (Coleman 1990, Scheffer et al. 2002), and political scientists on institutional and conceptual aspects of scale (Ostrom and Hess 2000). This makes for an inconsistent theoretical landscape for researchers who seek to become transdisciplinary in their endeavor to come to terms with scale in complex social-ecological systems.

And just to make things especially fun. . .

Concomitantly, community-based assessments inevitably involve peer review by local communities, making the process even more complicated. Researchers thus, sometimes unknowingly, enter the equally varied theoretical landscape of epistemology while still grappling with scale and complexity. . .

Epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge. More specifically, it is a field of research that seeks to come to terms with what we can know, and the status of knowledge about a particular reality (Jones 2002). There is much disagreement about whether or not reality can be divorced from social experience, and therefore whether it can be objectively accessed by a particular knowledge system (Jones 2002). For this reason, debates about knowledge are often centered on power (Healy 2003), because logically the system of knowledge that is recognized as being able to tap into the “objective reality” holds greater sway than other knowledge systems. This has lead to tension about the validity of science vs. that of informal, sometimes also referred to as “local,” knowledge.

There are various approaches and rationales both for and against the integration of scientific knowledge and informal or traditional knowledge in natural resource management. Whereas some, such as the social constructivists, argue from ontological perspectives (Milton 1996, Macnaghten and Urry 1998, Jones 2002), others argue from ethical and even management standpoints (Gadgil et al. 2000, Berkes et al. 2003). Still others reject the very idea of integration and argue that communicating between knowledge systems may lead to further marginalization of the nondominant knowledge systems concerned (Latour 1987, Nadasdy 1999, du Toit 2004).

However, community-level projects are already underway worldwide (Barrett et al. 2001, Chakraborty 2001, Shackleton and Campbell 2001), and therefore knowledge systems are coming to heads, regardless of the arguments behind these varied perspectives. For this reason, methods and approaches need to be found to conduct community-level research and assessments that pay attention to the challenges outlined in this section. Comparative local-level case studies are a step in this direction.

Not optional. You must find ways to communicate with locals who have different ways of knowing, both to get their buy on on proposed interventions and to learn what they know. It's still hard sometimes for "experts" to grasp that they have only the most rudimentary knowledge of the systems they seek to modify and that locals probably know things that they don't. It's early days still. Our state of knowledge is still low though we are learning fast. It should come as no surprise that those who are intimately involved with the systems would have some useful evidence and analyses but that they have a whole different system of organizing and expressing that knowledge than academics. (see Habitat Management for examples). Learning to resolve epistemology differences between transdisciplinary team members may provide useful mechanisms for extending the process to include local knowledge as well. Well, OK, it's unlikely but it could happen.