Understanding Persistent Socio-Ecological Degradation in Biodiversity-Rich Landscapes: Feedback Loops, Socio-Ecological Traps, and Pathways to Transformation

Despite unprecedented investment in conservation, restoration, sustainable development, and climate adaptation, many socio-ecological systems still suffer ecological degradation, livelihood insecurity, biodiversity loss, and declining ecosystem services. Much work has identified the drivers of environmental change and tested interventions, but far less has asked why so many systems stay locked in undesirable states despite repeated efforts to improve them.
The idea that social and ecological systems can settle into self-reinforcing bad states is well established—reef fishery traps, historical socio-ecological traps, and rural development traps among them. Such traps typically arise from multi-scalar structural drivers beyond the local scale and show strong path dependence, with later dynamics shaped by initial conditions, even as recent work begins to map pathways out across fisheries, coastal, and rural settings.
This Research Topic builds on that foundation to advance understanding of socio-ecological traps that undermine both conservation and development. It aims to (1) extend trap scholarship to diverse ecosystems and rapidly transforming landscapes, and (2) examine how the erosion of traditional sustainable practices sustains these traps. We invite contributions from researchers, practitioners, and interdisciplinary teams with long-term engagement (five years or more) with landscapes, seascapes, and communities, and we welcome comparative, historical, or synthetic work drawing on well-documented long-term trajectories from secondary sources. Across ecosystems, conservation gains are often offset by interacting social, economic, institutional, and ecological feedbacks: declining biodiversity can erode livelihoods, triggering migration, loss of traditional practices, land-use change, weakened stewardship, and further degradation, while poverty, inequitable governance, market dependencies, demographic change, policy contradictions, and climate impacts reinforce one another into self-perpetuating cycles.
A key but underexplored dimension is the loss of traditional sustainable practices that once maintained ecosystem multifunctionality, resilience, and quality. In many regions, indigenous knowledge systems, customary institutions, rotational resource use, agroecological approaches, pastoral mobility, and community stewardship have weakened or disappeared, and the consequences for ecosystems, biodiversity, and community well-being remain poorly documented.
We encourage submissions that go beyond symptoms to identify the feedback mechanisms that sustain undesirable conditions—including cases where well-intentioned interventions (e.g., payment-for-ecosystem-service schemes) reinforce the very traps they aim to dismantle. Contributions may explore:
• What social, ecological, economic, political, or institutional feedbacks maintain socio-ecological traps?
• Under what conditions do conservation and development interventions fail to produce lasting change, beyond the structural and cross-scale drivers already documented?
• How do historical trajectories and path dependencies shape present-day outcomes?
• What role does the loss of traditional ecological knowledge and sustainable practices play in degradation?
• Which governance arrangements, incentives, or social processes block transformative change—and which have helped communities disrupt these dynamics?
• What pathways exist for escaping these traps and building more resilient futures?
Because many socio-ecological processes are poorly captured by quantitative data alone, we welcome qualitative and mixed-method approaches. History is often treated as background rather than cause; authors may draw on long-term observation, oral histories, local narratives, community memory, historical reconstruction, participatory research, ethnography, and field experience to identify patterns and generate hypotheses about the origins and persistence of traps, laying groundwork for future testing and intervention design.
This Research Topic seeks not only to document problems but to serve as a platform for hypothesis generation and learning. By bringing together evidence from diverse systems worldwide, it aims to reveal common patterns, barriers to change, and practical pathways to sustainable, equitable conservation—stimulating a global dialogue on why so many systems stay trapped in cycles of degradation despite good intentions, and how to break them to secure both biodiversity and human well-being.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Registered Report
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Socio-ecological traps Path dependence Traditional ecological knowledge Conservation-development feedback loops Transformative change / resilience

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.