Local Studies Manual: A researcher's guide for investigating the social metabolism of rural systems.

Full text

Simron Jit Singh
•
Lisa Ringhofer
•
Willi Haas
•
Fridolin Krausmann • Marina Fischer-Kowalski
LOCAL STUDIES MANUAL
A researcher’s guide for investigating the
social metabolism of local rural systems
S O C I A L E C O L O G Y W O R K I N G P A P E R 1 2 0
März 2010
ISSN 1726-3816

Simron Jit Singh, Lisa Ringhofer, Willi Haas, Fridolin Krausmann and
Marina Fischer-Kowalski (2010):
LOCAL STUDIES MANUAL: A researcher’s guide for investigating the
social metabolism of local rural systems
Social Ecology Working Paper 120, Vienna
Social Ecology Working Paper 120
Vienna, March 2010
ISSN 1726-3816
Institute of Social Ecology
IFF - Faculty for Interdisciplinary Studies (Klagenfurt, Graz, Vienna)
Klagenfurt University
Schottenfeldgasse 29
A-1070 Vienna
+43-(0)1-522 40 00-401
www.uni-klu.ac.at/socec
iff.socec@uni-klu.ac.at
© 2010 by IFF – Social Ecology

LOCAL STUDIES MANUAL
A researcher’s guide for investigating the
social metabolism of local rural systems

1
Contents
1. Introduction: The purpose of the manual........................................................... 2
2. The conceptual and methodological base ......................................................... 4
2.1. Sociometabolic regimes and transitions........................................................... 4
2.2. Linking social metabolism with functional time use.......................................... 5
2.3. Scale interactions............................................................................................. 7
3. Describing rural sociometabolic systems.......................................................... 9
3.1. The choice of an appropriate unit of analysis................................................... 9
3.2. Defining the system boundary of the focal social system................................. 9
3.3. Functional (economic) territory....................................................................... 11
3.4. Human Population.......................................................................................... 13
3.5. Life time/Labour time...................................................................................... 14
3.6. Other biophysical stocks................................................................................ 16
4. Methodological guidelines by empirical domains........................................... 18
4.1 Introduction..................................................................................................... 18
4.2 Establishing contact........................................................................................ 19
4.3 Human Population (stocks and flows)............................................................. 21
4.4 Human time use (flows) ................................................................................. 22
4.5 Functional territory (stocks by land use categories)........................................ 25
4.6 Livestock (stock) ............................................................................................. 28
4.7 Artefacts.......................................................................................................... 29
4.8 Material and Energy Flows.............................................................................. 30
4.8.1. Material flows........................................................................................... 30
4.8.2 Energy flows (incl. electricity) ................................................................... 39
5. Functional interrelations and headline indicators........................................... 40
5.1 Basic system description and system interrelations........................................ 40
5.2 Societies’ stocks (including infrastructure)...................................................... 41
5.3 The Material Use System................................................................................ 42
5.4 The Energy System......................................................................................... 44
5.5 The Food System............................................................................................ 45
5.6 Time Use System............................................................................................ 47
6. Post Script........................................................................................................... 48
References.............................................................................................................. 49
Appendix 1: Abstracts of selected publications..................................................... 53
Appendix 2: Prints of excel templates (blank)....................................................... 56
Appendix 3: Exemplary excel templates (filled)..................................................... 66

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1. Introduction: The purpose of the manual
This manual provides concepts, methods and variables to describe the biophysical
features of rural local systems. Based on the paradigm of social metabolism, we provide a
framework for conceptualising and operationalising society-nature interactions for a
sustainability analysis at the local level. In other words, the manual offers a systematic
understanding of the environmental relations of local communities in terms of their dynamics
and metabolic profiles. The emphasis here is on the ‘hardware’ (biophysical elements) side of
the social system, and not so much on the ‘software’ (cultural elements). This distinction is
based on the premise that social communities are not only cultural entities and systems of
communication, but also represent biophysical realities in the sense that they draw materials
and energy from the environment in order to maintain or reproduce themselves and their
(man-made) artefacts. This throughput of matter and energy is determined for any given
social system by the resource base, the mode of production, available technology and
lifestyle. They together determine a social community’s sociometabolic profile.
Looking at biophysical flows is not entirely new. Scholars coming from research
traditions such as cultural/ecological anthropology and agricultural economics have
conceptualised societies as socio-ecological systems organised around a flow of matter and
energy with varying goals. For example, looking at the energetic return upon investment to
show the efficiency of indigenous systems as well as to illustrate the dynamic equilibrium of
such systems regulated by culture (Rappaport 1968, 1971), or studying the subsistence base of
local systems vis-à-vis trade with other societies (Ellen 1979, 1982, 1990), or in gaining a
systemic understanding of agricultural systems with land, materials, energy, and labour time
as interactive variables (Rambo & Sajise 1984, Spedding 1988, Bayliss-Smith 1982, 2004,
McNetting 1993). However, in the context of ecological sustainability, analysing biophysical
flows have gained renewed relevance and are further developed through interdisciplinary
efforts within human/social ecology and ecological economics, both theoretically and
operationally (Fischer-Kowalski & Haberl 1997, Giampietro 2003, Fischer-Kowalski &
Haberl 2007a).
Apart from a theoretical introduction, this compendium provides tools to capture
biophysical constraints and opportunities which may serve as guidance for understanding the
potential impact of system interventions Taking the functional interdependence between scale
levels into account, such interventions may occur at the local level itself, or at higher system
levels, and often have unintended side effects as we demonstrate in some of our case studies.
On the other hand, research on the rural base provides first hand insights into the food
producing system of a national economy. It allows seeing how rural communities organise
their biophysical flows to sustain themselves and, to varying degrees, provide produce for
society at large, and eventually the world market. Methodologically, this manual is the resume
of a research tradition at our Institute during the past ten years. It pulls together the conceptual
and methodological insights and experiences of several scholars who have engaged in local
studies research in different parts of the world and varying contexts.
Pioneer work in this research tradition was done by Lyla Mehta (Mehta et al. 1997) on
a community in an area later to be submersed by the Narmada dam in India. Subsequently,
collaboration with scientists from the Amazon region (Brazil, Venezuela, Columbia and
Bolivia) helped to further develop the methodology (Amann et al. 2002; Grünbühel 2002) and

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refine it with an in-depth study of a community in Thailand: Sang Saeng (Grünbühel et al.
2003). Another European funded research programme “South East Asia in Transition” (with
partners from Laos, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam) provided us with comparable data
sets to better understand the notion of transitions in local rural systems (Schandl and
Grünbühel 2005). Trinket Island, part of the Nicobar archipelago in the Bay of Bengal, was
studied by Simron Jit Singh (Singh 2001; Singh 2003; Singh and Grünbühel 2003). Lisa
Ringhofer, as part of her Ph.D., provided another in-depth case from Bolivia (Campo Bello),
fuelled in part by her engagement in improving on her professional development work
(Ringhofer 2007).
Hence, the following chapters provide a step by step guide for researchers to undertake
a local study, starting with conceptual clarifications, choosing an appropriate unit of analysis,
defining system boundaries and identifying relevant biophysical variables and domains.
Chapter 4 and 5 explain how to generate biophysical data in the field as well as compute
relevant headline indicators for a sustainability analysis. Researchers following this manual
will create a dataset for local socio-ecological systems that can be compared to other case
studies following the same standard protocol. Templates (as excel sheets) are provided to
structure the key data that needs to be collected, and the indicators to be based upon them.
So this manual ultimately provides a common framework within which you can place
your own local study in a fashion comparable to other, similar studies. Such a common
framework, however, cannot consider all possible details or regional idiosyncrasies; it only
provides overall methodological and conceptual guidance. It cannot replace case study
specific data; what data in each case need to be recorded depends on the specific focus of your
own case study and the research questions to be addressed.
In the end, this manual ought to spur your interest in doing such a local study, and
facilitate its planning. Undertaking a local study can be a thrilling experience not only on an
intellectual level, but also personally. It is an opportunity to plunge into another culture, and
be intimately engaged for months at a stretch. There are several challenges worth taking: the
challenges to be accepted, to overcome cultural obstacles and initial frustrations, to firmly
establish legitimacy for being at a study site, and the challenge of engaging the local
population in your endeavour. In the end, it is a process of discovery, not only of the system
under investigation, but also of your self; one culture against another juxtaposed.
BOX 1
“It was not easy to make contact with the people on Trinket. I had the impression that the Nicobarese
avoided any eye-contact with me. Only the children seemed amused at my presence and constantly
giggled when I smiled at them. During the day, I would simply wander about the village watching
people’s activity and asking questions. Replies were terse and showed no empathy…My constant
measuring and weighing of food and materials became a source of amusement to the people. Yet it
seemed that they avoided close contact with me for fear of questions. It seems that the people now like
me and have gotten used to my presence, but they are scared of my volley of questions. They have to
think about things they never thought before…Martin is making copra. My questions confuse him.
They are a burden. How many coconuts? How much firewood? He refuses to say anything; simply
nods. After one hour of counting and weighing, I get answers. But I have to observe Martin for three
days to know more precisely the entire process” (from the field journal of Simron Jit Singh, 2000).

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2. The conceptual and methodological base
2.1. Sociometabolic regimes and transitions
When a society interacts with its environment, it does so by the (sometimes
unintended) exchange of material and energy and (intentionally) by means of applying certain
technologies and labour in order to increase the utility of elements of the natural environment
for itself. These activities generate impacts on the environment to which societies then have to
respond. It is in fact a co-evolutionary process, as societies become structurally coupled with
parts of their environment, leading to a situation in which both systems mutually depend on,
influence, and constrain each other. This situation is maintained by a particular way a society
interacts with certain natural elements - or, put differently – certain exchange relationship of
matter and energy between the social and the natural system (for more detail, see Fischer-
Kowalski and Haberl 2007). These typical patterns of biophysical interaction between the
social and the natural system which may remain in a more or less dynamic equilibrium over
long periods of time, we call sociometabolic regimes.
In the broadest sense, sociometabolic regimes in world history correspond to the
human modes of subsistence (see, for example, Boyden 1992; Gellner 1988), such as the
hunter and gatherer regime, the agrarian regime and the industrial regime. Beyond a historical
reading, these regimes share, at whatever point in time and irrespective of biogeographical
conditions, certain fundamental systemic characteristics. These characteristics take the form
of specific sets of resource use, the use of land and labour, demographic and settlement
patterns. Each regime is characterised by a certain metabolic profile that relates to a certain
set of impacts upon the environment (Krausmann et al. 2008, Fischer-Kowalski & Haberl
2007b).
Historically, changes – or transitions - from one regime to another have been so
incisive that they are referred to as revolutions: the Neolithic Revolution from the hunting and
gathering regime to the agrarian regime, and the Industrial Revolution from the agrarian
regime to the industrial regime. As to ‘why’ these transitions occurred in world history, we
draw from Sieferle (1997; 2001; 2003), who is considered the founding father of the theory of
sociometabolic regimes, the claim that a change in the energy system lies at the core of each
sociometabolic transition.To Sieferle, the hunters and gatherer regime, as there is no
deliberate intervention in transforming land cover (e.g. through farming techniques), has to be
considered as an ‘uncontrolled solar energy’ system. For hunters and gatherers, the only
sustainability threat they are exposed to is in the overexploitation of key natural resources.
Agrarian societies, on the other hand, can be characterised by a regime of ‘active or controlled
solar energy utilisation’ as they intervene in the process of solar energy conversion by means
of biotechnologies (forest clearance and creation of agro-ecosystems) and mechanical devices
(e.g. wind and watermills). The most pressing sustainability threat for this regime is coping
with population growth rates that may be exceeding the productivity growth rates of agro-
ecosystems (soil fertility). The presently dominant industrial regime, dating back less than
three centuries, is based upon the exploitation of fossil fuels. Its sustainability is threatened by
the limitations of its fuel resource base, on the one hand, and the transformations it prompts in
various natural systems – such as, most prominently, the world’s climate system. This regime
relies predominantly on non-renewable material and energy resources. Change – another
transition - is therefore bound to happen. In this sense, it is high time for searching transition

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pathways towards another sociometabolic regime that builds on sustaining society-nature
interactions with a lower burden for the environment.
To analyse the specific dynamics of society-nature interaction, two conceptual tools
are applied: social metabolism, on the one hand, and colonization of ecosystems, on the other.
Social metabolism: although the term metabolism originates in biology and ecology,
the metabolic idea has been taken onto another level to describe the interaction of human
societies with their natural environment. The concept is based on the premise that any social
system not only reproduces itself culturally but also biophysically through a constant flow of
materials and energy with its natural environment as well as with other social systems. The
size of flows is intricately linked to the biophysical stocks of the social system and determined
by the sociometabolic regime it belongs to: every sociometabolic regime has a different
metabolic profile, i.e. quantity and quality of materials and energy used.
Colonization refers to a society’s deliberate interventions into natural systems in order
to render them more useful. Colonizing strategies are intrinsically linked to the exchange of
energy and matter and depend on a society’s technologies, knowledge base and cultural
programmes. The larger the population and the larger its metabolic rates, the more ecosystems
need to be colonized in order to maintain this metabolism. But for the colonized state of
ecosystems to be maintained, societies have to organise a continuous input of human labour
(and typically also energy and materials). Thus a social system’s colonizing activities are
closely related to the amount and quality of human labour they directly or indirectly (by
producing and maintaining technologies) require. The more a society modifies its
environment, the more metabolic returns it may expect, but the more efforts it has to expend
to keep the relevant natural systems in the desired state – and this may create the need to
invest even more energy and working time. Besides, colonizing interventions are
interventions into complex systems – there is never full control and there are always non-
anticipated surprises and risks which have to be counterbalanced by engaging in further risks.
Thus, the colonization concept tries to capture the co-evolutionary dynamics that is unfolded
by any kind of society-nature interaction. This means that even in the most apparently
‘frozen’ and ‘static’ traditional socio-ecological system every observable present state has to
be viewed as one moment in a continuous reproduction and potentially transformation
process.
2.2. Linking social metabolism with functional time use
Human time has various metabolic characteristics. To start with, human time is
“created” by demographic reproduction. The higher demographic growth rates, the higher the
growth rates of human time available to a social system. The higher the individual’s life
expectancy, the higher the available time per human life. Human time is a limited resource but
– in the short run - evenly distributed among the members of a social system: everybody has
24 hours at his/her disposal. Especially in traditional social systems, the metabolic exchange
relations between the people and their natural environment are coordinated by certain time
norms (e.g. sexual division of labour) that are responsible for the functioning of the society.
How human time is used, therefore, serves as a key to understand the social metabolism of a
society. At the same time though, each human lifetime hour (from sleeping to wage work) can
only be sustained through a certain metabolic input (matter and energy). A society’s failure to
supply these inputs will lead to major tensions, and specific solutions need to be found (see
Fischer-Kowalski et al. forthcoming). These solutions may range from seasonal migration to
demographic growth restriction measures and often do not go without social conflict.
How can we then establish the link between human time and a society’s interaction
with its natural environment? The answer is through human labour time. In traditional

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societies, every kind of interaction with the environment is mediated by the use of human
labour (Krausmann 2004). For hunters and gatherers, for example, human labour is merely
applied to meet direct subsistence needs. If the amount of labour time available does not
suffice to satisfy the metabolic needs of the population, people will starve, social groups will
fall apart and members will try to migrate to more productive environments. At the same time,
as only human labour is invested in the interaction with nature, the extent of human labour
time is directly instrumental for impacts on the environment. Increasing this labour time (by
hunting and gathering more) beyond a certain threshold will tend to deplete the food base of
the society. Working time in hunting and gathering systems therefore tends to be low (see, for
example, Sahlins 1972) particularly for the reason that they do not colonize terrestrial
ecosystems. In agrarian societies, working time tends to be higher but strongly differentiated
by season and class (upper classes are freed from subsistence work). Agrarian development is
intricately linked to more work per unit area in order to obtain more agricultural output for
feeding growing population numbers (see Boserup 1965; 1981).
Concerning industrial societies, we need to distinguish between different phases. The
first phase of the Industrial Revolution there is an increase in working time. The second phase
reduces the demand for human labour; as fossil fuel based technologies substitute much of the
labour input required. Thus, under the industrial regime, we no longer observe a direct link
between the system’s disposable labour time and its impact upon the environment (see
Fischer-Kowalski 2007).
With human time use we follow the same systemic logic as with material and energy
metabolism. On the one hand, we treat human time as a key resource at the system level; the
‘stock’ of available time depending on population size and reproduction. Concerning the
‘flows’ of human time, we distinguish between flows serving four functional subsystems that
each need time for their reproduction: the person system, the household system, the
community system and the economic system (for more detail, see section 3.5). Such a
systemic analysis provides a clear picture of the amount of labour time available in the whole
local social system, thereby aiding our understanding of the specific opportunities and
constraints a society faces in its interaction with the natural environment. At the same time,
analysing the time invested in each of the functional subsystems according to age and gender
tells something about the functional differentiation and inequities within the social system, the
‘social burden’ a society (or some of its age/gender subgroups) is bearing.
The three concepts of social metabolism, colonisation and time-use are operationalised
using what we call the ‘Material and Energy Flow Accounting’ framework, abbreviated
MEFA. It is a toolkit to analyse the specific dynamics of society-nature interaction, or in more
specific terms, the exchange relations of material and energy flows between a social system
and its natural environment. Time use entails human population in its stock category, and
reproduction rates, life/labour time in its corresponding flow category. Within the local
studies, the MEFA toolkit gives a detailed metabolic profile of the system under discussion,
an analysis of the feedback loops shaping both the social and the natural system, and a clear
indication of the biophysical limitations the system is currently facing (in terms of material,
energy, land and time constraints). Thus, the MEFA framework is characterised by three
interrelated sets of relations that are compartmentalised as stocks and flows (fig. 2.1):

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Figure 2.1: The MEFA framework
2.3. Scale interactions
Today, even in the remotest corners of the world you will hardly find a society that still
lives an autochthonous, isolated lifestyle. Every local system, in one way or another, actively
interacts with or is at least influenced by outside (economic or political) social forces. This is
why you have to look at the different outside influences upon the local system you are
observing. So when you are in the field, you should have in mind the following possible
interventions from higher scale systems, as these are most likely to have an impact on the
metabolic profile and social dynamics of the local system under observation and ‘disturb’ the
ideal-type profile of the local sociometabolic regime:
 Provision of services: the provision of medical services is likely to have an impact
upon demographic dynamics. Women from Trinket, for example, willingly participate
in the Indian sterilisation programme, and this is a major reason for their low
population growth rate. Another common intervention is educational services. Or
think of the provision of legal services from higher scales that help the people to
defend their rights; you may find this particularly the case with indigenous rural
systems.
 Supply of fossil fuel based technologies: even if the local system under investigation
does not use fossil fuels, the industrial regime on higher levels often creates an impact,
for example by building transport infrastructure. Once there is a road or a ship line,
opportunities for marketing produce, buying commodities from outside, labour
migration, or any other exchanges with the outside world will greatly increase, and
this, in turn, will modify the local production and consumption patterns. Another,
probably more direct impact on food production is the supply of fossil fuel based
technologies. The provision of technologies for agriculture (e.g. machines or mineral
fertilisers) may be part of larger scale development policies that create some kind of

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‘hybrid’ of the local production system. A more indirect impact on food production
may be triggered by changing cultural conditions due to the inclusion of the local
system in an electricity network or the establishment of cell phone, radio, TV and
internet connections.
 Supply of specific aid and subsidies: even if food aid, for example, is supplied under
‘exceptional’ conditions only (in the aftermath of floods or droughts), it changes the
functioning of the local system. Your system may have developed its demographic
patterns in a long history of periodic extreme events and hence ‘adjusted’ to such
fluctuations. If the system now becomes buffered by outside intervention and
population reproduction patterns remain the same, unexpectedly high growth may
occur and offset the local carrying capacity, as may happen in Campo Bello (case
study from Bolivia) . In the case of pre-tsunami Trinket, for example, the main
produce copra used to be sold on a subsidised price that was far above the average
world market price. At the same time, the community would receive subsidised diesel
to run their boats to and from the marketplace where the copra was traded. In Trinket,
we saw that these subsidies had a huge impact on both the local metabolic profile as
well as on labour time patterns.
 Economic and legal framework conditions: world market prices may also influence
the production and subsistence dynamics of your system (e.g. rise in global oil price).
The same goes for legal legislation in the area of agriculture, natural resource use or
conservation. Legal framework conditions may indeed have a significant impact on
the general organisation and local subsistence conditions of your system under
investigation.

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3. Describing rural sociometabolic systems
3.1. The choice of an appropriate unit of analysis
In this section you will obtain an overview of how to choose a study area, delineate its
system boundaries and identify the most relevant biophysical variables and domains. First you
will be confronted with the choice of an appropriate unit of analysis of what we will term as
‘focal system’ in the following paragraphs. This is in fact a key decision to start with in any
‘local case study’ of the kind described in this manual. And these are the steps you should
consider in order to take a viable decision:
 Make sure the unit of analysis chosen may duly be considered a ‘sociometabolic
system’. This requires checking the potential unit of analysis against a number of
theoretical considerations explained more in detail in the further paragraphs.
 Make sure which territory, which population and which other biophysical stocks (i.e.
infrastructure, artefacts and livestock) ‘belong’ to the focal system. In other words,
establish the system’s boundaries towards (a) other sociometabolic systems and (b)
towards the (natural) environment. A proper definition of system boundaries is
absolutely essential for any study of biophysical exchange processes. Depending on
how the system boundaries are drawn, the empirical results will change. From the
perspective of the focal system, both boundaries – those vis-à-vis neighbours or higher
level authorities, and those vis-à-vis the environment - have to be reproduced and
defended.
 Once the focal system and its biophysical stocks are defined, you may proceed to
account for the flows associated with the respective stocks.
3.2. Defining the system boundary of the focal social system
Core point of reference for all kinds of analysis is the social system. Social systems are
conceived as hybrids, a structural coupling of a cultural system with certain sets of
biophysical elements. Our understanding rests on the notion that social systems need to
reproduce themselves culturally (via communication, see Luhmann 1984; 1995) as well as
biophysically. Social systems exist only as long as they reproduce themselves, and thereby
also reproduce their boundaries. It is this very procedural focus that guides our thinking.
Social systems can be differentiated laterally among each other (similar, analogue systems
existing side by side), hierarchically (systems nested within one another as subsystems), or
functionally (the very same elements simultaneously belong to various different systems that
reproduce themselves in different ways). A social system’s boundaries are always
defined/reproduced by the respective system itself via communication (what ‘belongs to it’
culturally and how this is to be handled) and biophysically via labour (which sets of objects
are reproduced and maintained in a desired state, see the notion of colonization). All those
sets of objects not reproduced culturally and biophysically do not ‘belong’ to the stocks of the
system; they belong to the system’s (natural or social) environment.
Societies are a particular type of social system. In the social sciences, there is no clear
consensus about the meaning of the term ‘society’, neither within the disciplines nor between
them. In sociology, this term commonly refers to a social unit consisting of a population on a

10
certain territory, integrated by cultural commonalities (such as a common language, a system
of legislation or a currency) as well as by political commonalities including shared procedures
of decision-making, ways to enforce decisions, shared mutual responsibilities, and a certain
guarantee of care in the case of need (see, for example, Giddens 1989). While in sociology the
idea of common governance (such as the modern nation state) is particularly important for the
notion of society, cultural anthropology tends to stress the functional aspect of mutual
interdependence and reproduction. According to the textbook definition by Harris, society is
an “organized group of people who share a habitat and who depend on each other for their
survival and well-being.” “Each society has an overall culture”, he adds, which, however,
need not be uniform for all members (Harris 1987: 10).
In social ecology, we too have a distinct way of viewing society. We conceive of
society as a social system functioning to reproduce a human population within a territory.
This definition distinguishes society from other kinds of social systems (such as a firm, or a
friendship network), but it does not necessarily determine the location in a hierarchy of social
units of a similar kind (for example, household, local community, state, federal state, or the
European Union). The scale level is not such an important issue as long as it is understood
that one (smaller) ‘society’ may be part of a (larger) ‘society’.
Autor | Event | Date | 2
A
B
local
societies
land area
population
A
B
state
confederation
respective territory
respective members
social
systems
Figure 3.1. Society: a social system defining and linking mutually a member population and a territory
It is important to remain aware that society, such as other social systems, functionally
relates elements that are symbolic and transmitted by communication between humans
(‘culture’), and elements of a clearly natural origin and character, firmly subject to the rules
of physics and biology (‘population’, ‘territory’). It should be clear that the population
boundaries and the territorial boundaries of the social system are in no way ‘natural’, but
culturally defined and reproduced by communication. This entails not only communication
within the respective system, but also communication with other social systems, on the same
level (such as neighbours) or on a higher or lower scale level.

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Nr. of
domains STOCKS FLOWS
1. Human population (number, weight) Natural reproduction
Migration
2. Life time / labour time
3. Livestock (number, weight ) Energy: in-out
4. Artefacts (weight; calorific value) Material: in-out
5. Functional territory (area) [Water: in-out]
Net primary production
(NPP)
Table 3.1. A society’s biophysical stocks and flows
We have already learned that the type and size of biophysical stocks ‘belonging’ to a
society are defined culturally and by the investment of labour. Or more precisely, which
people, animals and plants, infrastructure and durables, and which territory forms part of a
society, is always a communicative process within the focal system, but also in interaction
with other social systems. Admittedly, boundaries may sometimes be blurry and/or even
contested. So we see that this distinction cannot simply be drawn by natural criteria (such as
spatial parameters). Further down, you will find a discussion on how these distinctions are
drawn for each stock.
Once we are clear on the biophysical stocks that belong to the focal society, the
corresponding biophysical flows can be determined by ‘natural’ functionality: it is the sum
total of all those flows required for reproducing the respective stocks. This means that all
those energetic and material flows that are associated with the continued social use and
reproduction of the respective stocks have to be considered. These flows always involve
outflows to nature as well as to other social systems. This boundary crossing of flows brings
us back to what we learned before: that we consider societies as hybrid systems that always,
materially and energetically, function as open systems. Such a focus on a ‘society’ precludes
the choice of a unit of analysis that may functionally only very loosely be interlinked, such as
a watershed, a neighbourhood, or some kind of geographically defined region that does not
constitute a social and political unit.
3.3. Functional (economic) territory
We define a social system’s territory as a geographical area that is under legitimate
control of this particular social system. This means that the area is specified in biophysical
terms – it can clearly be positioned and mapped, but the delineations of this area are defined
and reproduced communicatively, and defended also physically, by the focal social system
(and eventually by other social systems it interacts with). So as a researcher, you are not free
to choose territorial boundaries! The meaning of legitimate control may sometimes host
ambiguities since legitimacy of territorial boundaries refers to a shared view among the
members and a certain degree of practical use by the social system. At the same time, it also
refers to the surrounding social systems (neighbours), who need to define their own territorial
boundaries in a complementary way (often not without a certain degree of contestation).
Usually, there is also a social system on a higher scale (a state, for example), which defines

12
and reinforces the legitimacy of territorial boundaries (see also figure 3.1.). Hence, legitimate
control of a territory always has a political and an economic component.
1. Legitimate political control refers to the existence of some governing body and its
ability to set and sanction standards for social behaviour within the territory. How far
these rights go, however, may vary substantially (basically depending on the degree of
political power in the hands of the local system).
2. Legitimate economic control refers to the right to economically exploit the resources
within the territory, the land / soil, the freshwater, the vegetation, the minerals, the rain
and groundwater, the deer and the fish. Legitimate economic control can sometimes be
a fairly complex issue. It may be limited in terms of resource use (for example,
hunting of deer, mining for minerals or extraction of groundwater may be subject to a
special permit granted by higher level authorities), or in terms of use of certain areas
(for example, land stretches along riversides may belong to higher level authorities, or
railways may be ‘exterritorial’). These limitations are typically defined ‘from above’.
Conversely, private property rights constitute limits for common use at the system
level, but may also imply territorial extensions ‘from below’.
You might come across some more ambiguities and operational problems you will
have to resolve in situ. With these theoretical guidelines in mind, you will have to search for
specific solutions of your dilemma. Here are some ambiguities we have encountered in
previous field situations:
 The focal society economically shares a forest with its neighbouring communities.
Politically, the forest belongs to neither territory but both communities make
economic use of it for hunting, gathering and/or collecting firewood.
Possible solution: divide the common resource by applying different ‘weights’. For
instance, you may divide it according to the total area used by each of the communities
involved, or by the number of people living in each of the communities. At the end of
the day, the main point is logical reasoning!
 There exists a large cattle farm within your system’s territory, which is politically
defined as native, community-controlled land. The cattle farm, however, is privately
owned and belongs to an international corporation. In terms of political control, the
farm’s land area is out of reach of the governing body of the focal society and does not
contribute in any way to the functioning of the community (not even through tax
payments). At the same time, the land cannot be accessed or used economically by any
community members (such as for gathering firewood) – legally though, the privately
owned land area is situated within the community’s administrative system boundaries.
Possible solution: exclude this land from the focal society’s territory.
 The focal society has clear politically defined territorial boundaries. Nevertheless,
members of this community own and regularly use stretches of land outside this
territorial boundary (e.g. possession or leasehold of rice fields elsewhere), while
members of other communities own and regularly work patches of land inside the
(politically defined) focal society’s territory.
Possible solution: as the social system’s metabolism refers to land a society (and its
population) is entitled to use, economic control bears more relevance than the
(somewhat deviating) political control. Hence, do include the land areas used outside
the political territory, but at the same time subtract the land within the political
boundaries used by outsiders.

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BOX 2
“Admittedly, the definition of the territorial borderlines of Campo Bello was no easy undertaking and
caused uncertainty, at least at the beginning stages of research. This was mainly because the official
land titling process was still ongoing at the time of research and the village headman had revised his
estimates of the community’s border upon my second visit in 2006. But there was light at the end of
the tunnel, and with the support of oral statements by many locals and the fact that demarcation posts
actually existed at some places (though hardly visible in the forest thicket), I was able to delineate the
village boundaries upon return in 2006. Accompanied by a small group of local men and GPS
technology, I was able to measure the distance between these demarcation posts. Once we had defined
the territory the people of Campo Bello are entitled to exploit, things eventually became much easier.”
(adapted from Ringhofer, 2007)
3.4. Human Population
We define a society’s population as the set of people defined as legitimate members of
that society. Once more, it is the social system itself (and not an outside observer) that defines
its members by a set of rules and practices. And again, you may find that the freedom to
define this membership is limited by (for example legal) definitions of social systems on
higher scale levels. Legitimate membership has three constituents that may - and usually do -
somewhat deviate from one another: a political, an economic and a practical
(presence/absence) constituent.
 Legitimate political membership refers to some (however limited) rights to participate
in the self-governance of the social system in question. This entails active and passive
voting rights for governance bodies, the right to participate in decision-making
processes, the right to voice an opinion and eligibility for being asked. Such rights,
however, in many cases are not a consequence of membership only, but also depend
on other characteristics such as age and gender. Thus membership of the social system
may first entail being a member of a smaller social unit (such as a family or a
household) that is represented by someone with political membership rights.
 Legitimate economic membership implies some degree of entitlement to the use and
governance of local resources (e.g. commons), economic support by the social system
in case of need, but also an obligation to economically contribute to the social system
(through tax payments, in public works, etc.).
 Factual presence relates to the amount of life-time actually spent within the
community, or in other words, the periods of presence / absence in the community’s
territory. Factual presence, on the one hand, implies a certain minimum use of
resources (space, air, freshwater) regardless of the legitimacy of this use. Factual
absence, on the other hand, can be associated with the economic contribution to the
community’s resource base (e.g. through remittances), as well as with the
consumption of community resources also during absence.
All this information becomes clearer once you have become more familiar with the
dynamics of the community you are in. In a nutshell, the key questions are: which population
is economically reproduced on the territory under consideration? Which population
contributes to reproduce the social system by its labour and decision- making? Some
examples from previous field experiences might help here. In the case of Sang Saeng (see

14
Grünbühel et al. 1999; 2003), for instance, seasonal labour migration is intricately linked to
the village economy, as migrants supply their families with monetary remittances and take
food (especially rice) from the village to their work location. These people and their foods,
even though the food consumption takes place outside the community, were included in the
metabolic profile of Sang Saeng. The issue of mobility is also discussed with the case of
Campo Bello (see Ringhofer forthcoming), where the peripatetic nature of movement
characterises the life of the indigenous village people. Paying short- and longer-term visits to
others outside the community is in fact a deeply ingrained cultural feature of daily life.
Methodologically, these members were still included in the stock account of the community
as it is common practice for families to pack their canoes with nearly all their belongings
including a variety of staple food stocks. Rather than living off other peoples’ food resources,
people tend to return home once their own food resources are depleted. Summing up: As here
we deal with socio-metabolic analyses, the economic membership, i.e. the entitlement to and
the actual use of resources, is the most relevant membership criterion.
3.5. Life time/Labour time
In this section we will take a closer look at each of the functional subsystems (person
system, household system, community system, economic system) along which you will
analyse the life time / labour time ratio at the system level. This classification does not differ
much from what is found in sociological time use studies, but the interpretations we are
interested in are somewhat different. Within local studies, we hope to attain a better
understanding of the possibilities and constraints the system is facing in terms of its time
resources. This empirical endeavour calls for a fine-tuned categorisation of activities which
you have to adapt to the specific structure of the society you investigate. The main functional
subsystems and their corresponding individual activity sets, however, do not change. Let us
scrutinise them one by one.
The person system functionally serves personal reproduction and includes all those
activities that are not subject to a division of labour. On the one hand, the person system holds
all the functions that are physiologically necessary for a person’s self-reproduction, such as
sleeping and eating. These activities can neither be delegated to other members of the society
nor ‘outsourced’ to specialists and are largely horizontally distributed in a population’s time-
budget. Apart from these basic functions for personal reproduction, the person system
encompasses functions for extended reproduction, such as studying, leisure activities or
idling. Breaking it down into single activities, the person system comprises sleeping (SL),
eating (ET), hygiene (HY), rest and idleness (ID), leisure activities (LE), and study and
education (SC). Hygiene may involve river bathing, the morning toilet or hair combing. The
category ‘rest and idleness’ generally hosts periods of inactivity, such as lying in a hammock,
resting in the shade or simply day-dreaming. Study and education entails the time spent at
school and the time for doing homework, vocational training courses or studying for exams.
Leisure, for our purpose of analysing rural local systems, refers to periods of deliberate self
entertainment such as playing with children or pets. Here it is sometimes hard to draw a
distinction to household activities (such as care taking of children) on the one hand, and
communal activities (such as festivities, ritual visits to relatives…) on the other. It is up to the
researcher to judge what he considers the main function of a particular activity to be.
The second functional subsystem is the household system. The household system takes
care of those personal reproduction functions of its members that need or allow for
collaboration and a division of labour. The household system is typically organised as an
exchange of unpaid labour according to the social norms regulating age and gender roles in

15
the local system. Time use for the household system contains the following sub-activities:
care for dependents (CC), food preparation (FP), house building (HB), repair/maintenance
work (MR), and domestic chores (D). Care for dependents involves child care as well as care
for the sick and the elderly. Food preparation subsumes all activities related to food
processing such as the disembowelling of game animals, the salting and drying of meat for
conservation, the smoking of fish or the husking of rice. House building hosts the fetching and
cutting of wood and other forest items for the construction of infrastructure, the gathering and
processing of palm leaves for roofing, the weaving of door mats to serve as walls, etc. Repair
and maintenance entails all activities required to sustain the physical household infrastructure:
the mending of clothes or sewing, the manufacture of household artefacts such as fans, pots or
floor mats, the fixing of the roof, etc. Finally, the activity set of ‘domestic chores’ considers
shopping, the fetching of food and water, firewood collection, clothes washing, restoring
order in the house and cleaning dishes.
On the next higher level of functional differentiation is the community system, which is
the reference system for activities contributing to the reproduction of services on the
community level, reciprocal relationships, social cohesion, culture and religion on the
community level. It contains public sports and games (PL), visiting friends and relatives (VS),
ceremonies and festivals (RI), communal work and political participation (PO). Public sports
and games may include a football match or sports competitions. Visiting friends and relatives
you may find a crucial activity in your system as traditional societies tend to pay particular
attention to reproducing the social cohesion within their community. The same goes for
ceremonies and rituals, which people might take extremely serious. The case of Trinket (see
Singh 2003), for example, illustrates the cultural importance of such rituals and describes the
elaborate preparation that goes into organising such events. The final activity set subsumes
the time invested in communal work (e.g. school maintenance, clearing/sweeping public
pathways) and political participation (e.g. political campaigning, council decision making).
There is, as said above, some difficulty to draw a distinction towards “leisure” activities; the
main criterion that may be used is the existence of a certain social expectation, a strong
normative rule at times, that individuals do participate in these activities. If it is leisure only,
they are completely free to choose whether they join an activity or not.
Beyond the confines of household and community, we deal with the economic system.
For local studies, the time invested in reproducing the economic system is what we refer to as
“labour time”. In general terms, the economic system implies and relies upon a social division
of labour beyond the confines of household and community, and it usually involves monetary
transactions. In subsistence societies, however, the functional equivalents of ‘going to work
and bringing home a salary’ or ‘running a business’ are not so easy to identify. The choice
taken for our purposes relies on the fact that the character of the activity itself is not so
different whether it is done to supply the household directly with the respective produce (say,
fish or corn), or whether it is done to supply (some of) the produce to a market, using the
income achieved for further commodities. The economic activity includes all preparatory
tasks for economic transactions (e.g. manufacture of working tools, repair of irrigation pipes,
handicraft for subsequent sales), as well as directly productive work (e.g. harvesting, fishing,
hunting). The following activities are distinguished: agriculture (AC)1, hunting (H), fishing
(F), gathering (G), trading (TD), wage work (W), kitchen garden (HG), manufacture of
handicraft (MF), and animal husbandry (AN). For Agriculture/horticulture (AC), the range of
activities included should reflect the entire agricultural cycle from land preparation to
cultivation, weeding and harvesting of crops. Hunting (H) and fishing (F) should only reflect
1 In some systems where you find an intended (and substantial) cash crop production component, you may
calculate the labour time invested in subsistence and cash crop agriculture separately and account for it in terms
of two different activities: subsistence agriculture (SA) and cash crop agriculture (CA). In local systems where
only agricultural surplus is traded on the market, you should account for agriculture (AC) only.

16
the actual time spent in the activity, whereas the manufacture of hunting and fishing devices
(bow and arrow, slingshots, hand-made fishing nets, etc) falls within ‘handicraft’ (see below).
The time for gathering (G) may sometimes be difficult to measure since especially men do not
necessarily engage in separate gathering trips but do gathering as a side activity during
hunting expeditions. However, in many societies, women and children usually set out on
specific gathering trips for seasonal forest foods or other forest items needed for the
manufacture of artefacts. Trading (TD) may involve the bartering of produce or monetary
transactions on the market. Wage work (W) includes all kinds of paid work, from short-term
to more permanent placements. ‘Kitchen garden’ (HG) subsumes all activities related to the
maintenance of the kitchen garden, from cultivating, watering, weeding and harvesting the
local fruits or vegetables (remember that the processing falls under ‘food production’). As
mentioned before, the activity set ‘manufacture of handicraft’ (MF) entails both, the
manufacture of tools for hunting, fishing or agriculture, on the one hand, as well as the
making of items for direct market sale, on the other. Finally, animal husbandry (AN) should
consider both, the direct (e.g. feeding or milking) as well as indirect reproductive activities
(e.g. building and fixing stables, fencing, etc.).
Travel time should normally be added to the activity it is associated with (see also
time use templates in the appendix). However, do not follow this advice rigorously if you feel
that it may distort your actual aim. If, for example, you are interested in calculating the labour
time per area (h/ha), then the inclusion of long travel times to reach the agricultural field may
misrepresent your results. The same goes for calculating the productivity of hunting or
fishing. In some cases, distances are quite negligible as fields or waterways are basically just a
stone’s throw away from the peoples’ dwelling. In other cases, distances to productive sites
may be much longer. So you see this issue may become quite a dilemma and we appeal to
your own ingenuity to find solutions to your specific problem. Carlstein’s (1982) book Time
resources, society and ecology may become a useful companion along the way as he has
given quite some thought to the issue of accounting for travel time in time use studies.
Finally, here is some general advice to you: you will know best how to distinguish
your local system functions and the meaning certain activities have. If you feel the need for
adding some sub-activities or simply rearrange some, then go ahead. In any case, most
activities are quite fixed and don’t need changing (e.g. sleeping will always fall within the
person system), while others may do (e.g. in some societies, hunting may be regarded as a
leisurely activity rather than a subsistence activity). The same might be true for fishing or
work in the kitchen garden.
3.6. Other biophysical stocks
While you should now be clearer on the human population (stock) and the associated
flows (time), we are now going to look at the other biophysical stocks to be accounted for: (1)
livestock, and (2) infrastructure and artefacts.
Livestock
In order to decide on which livestock to include and which not, the following three key
questions shall guide you: are these animals culturally defined as ‘belonging’ to (members of)
this society? Is the reproduction of these animals deliberately and to a far extent controlled by
(members of) this society? Is human planning and labour invested in their feeding, health and
breeding? In conclusion, the key here is the investment of human labour into the control of
animal reproduction. Operationally, this means that wild deer, for example, which does not
belong to the society or some of its members, should not be considered as livestock.

17
It is important to be clear on which animals belong to the category ‘livestock’ and which
don’t, since only their material and energy requirements (feedstuffs) are counted as flows
attributable to the social system (even if the animals graze in the wild). Also, the time
invested for the upkeep of these animals only should be included in the economic time profile
of ‘animal husbandry’. The template at the back gives you a detailed overview of the
livestock classification.
Infrastructure and artefacts
The definition of infrastructure and artefacts should also be guided by similar key
questions. Are these artefacts culturally defined as ‘belonging’ to (members of) this society?
Are these artefacts deliberately used and maintained by (members of) this society, and not just
leftovers from historical human activities? Operationally, this may become quite a fuzzy
endeavour, because the time frames of use and maintenance may be highly variable. On the
one hand, artefacts that are typically used up or out of use within a year are considered as
‘flows’, not as ‘stocks’. So these short-lived artefacts should not be included in the stock-
account. Artefacts with a longer lifespan (such as buildings, bridges, dams, paved roads) may
simply appear to ‘be there’ and be utilised, or might have received little or hardly any kind of
maintenance for a long time. If this is the case in your system, remember that the cultural
definition of ‘belonging’ or ‘needed’ makes the decisive difference. In contrast, abandoned
structures (e.g. abandoned buildings which are no longer used) are not accounted for as
artefacts, since they do not contribute in any way to the system’s metabolic turnover. Fields or
simple paths, even if they are regularly maintained, should also not be included in the artefact
stock account. The same applies also to more complex field structures where natural systems
have been massively reorganised by humans. One such example would be elaborate field
terracing techniques (possibly though the stone walls stabilising these terraces that need
periodic repair may be considered as infrastructure stocks).
Here is some general advice to you: be clear on the body of artefacts and infrastructure
belonging to your system’s stock account before you proceed to the accounting of flows. In
order to follow the social metabolic logic, only the flows (materials, energy and time)
required for the production and reproduction of these (previously identified) stocks are
relevant for your biophysical accounting.
Plants Following intensive discussions within the MEFA community, there was general
consensus not to include plants in a society’s stock account. This, however, is somewhat
arbitrary since in many respects plants may be reproduced by society, both in the sense of
planning and cultural definition, and in the sense of physical reproduction. Yet there are some
good pragmatic reasons not to include plants in a society’s socio-economic stock account: if
plants were considered stocks, then the flows required to maintain their growth would also
have to be accounted for. If this was the case though, one would have to include the uptake of
huge amounts CO2 and plant nutrients as an input, while crop harvests would present a flow
within the socio-economic system - and this would clearly obscure some crucial
characteristics of rural systems. There is yet another reason for excluding plants from a
society’s stock account: in practice, it is hardly possible to distinguish between plants that are
‘reproduced by society’ and those that just grow on their own device. The natural
reproduction of plants is much more difficult to control than that of livestock.

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4. Methodological guidelines by empirical domains
4.1 Introduction
In the preceding sections we have provided some general methodological guidelines to
assist you in the design of a local biophysical study. Now we turn to methodological
guidelines with respect to data collection and organisation. Depending on the specific research
questions you want to address in your study, and the local biogeographical and socio-
economic situation you will have to make decisions on which variables you want to consider,
how you organise your data and which indicators you want to calculate. There is no standard
way of doing this and we cannot provide a default protocol for data collection. We rather aim
at describing a set of key variables at a medium level of aggregation which should serve as a
common denominator for comparative analysis. The variables discussed in this section are all
included in the excel template accompanying this manual and are used for the calculation of a
set of important socio-ecological indicators (see section 5). Such a common denominator will
naturally not be able to capture all issues relevant in a specific case study and aggregation
always means that information is lost. Therefore, your case study specific dataset will most
likely be much more detailed than the variables discussed here. Nevertheless, the information
in this section will help you design your tailor-made set of variables and indicators
appropriate for your study site and questions.
At the outset we can say that for undertaking local studies we depend on a variety of
methods when it comes to data generation. The basic goal of social metabolism methodology
is its applicability on all social scale levels and across time. While for nation states public
statistics provide much of the data required, it is usually difficult to find existing official data
sets at small scales, such as for a village or an island. It is common to find aggregated figures
for larger areas comprising several villages that correspond to administrative units in a given
context. Secondary literature (scientific or grey) may be helpful to supplement official
statistics as well as your own data. While all this documentation is useful in several ways
(such as for cross-checks between your own data for a village with that of the region), you
still need to get more or less precise and disaggregated data on stocks and flows for the
system under investigation. And the data you need for your local biophysical analysis - just
think of the weight of building stocks, human artefacts and time use - you will more than
likely not find readily available. To thus generate your own data, one needs to use a
combination of established methods as well as ingenuity and creativity with logical reasoning
on the field.
Before we go on to present some methods that have been successfully deployed, there
are some general considerations that should be kept in mind. For estimating stocks and flows,
it is important to differentiate between ‘elephants’ and ‘mice’. You are confronted with a
large amount of variables but not all of them are equally significant. You should be careful
not to spend most of your limited time resources to collect data on material and energy flows
of little significance within the system (the ‘mice’), but rather concentrate on a limited
number of significant flows (the ‘elephants’). An ABC analysis can help to find out what the
dominant stocks and flows in your system are. In a first estimate, a very rough back of the
envelope calculation can provide information of the size of different flows relative to each
other. Begin your empirical work with the most important flows (these are often, but not
exclusively, the largest flows in terms of mass) or flows of particular interest with respect to
specific research questions or with respect to other variables. Then work yourself down to less
significant variables.

19
For example, if the amount of hunted animals is small, but the time that is used for
hunting is large, it might be useful to try to quantify the amount of hunted biomass. Besides
direct measurements, there exist a variety of ways for how one can arrive at estimates: use
measurements from other studies in similar contexts, design sampling procedures and
extrapolate results to the entire system, use established factors for calculations, and engage in
cross-checks and fine tuning of data using secondary sources.
Finally, never forget to carry a notebook with you on your daily rounds. We would
even recommend two notebooks, one as your official field book for primary data, containing
all your field jottings, diagrams, interviews and time-space-maps. The second notebook could
serve more as a personal memo book and contain any peculiar observations, quirky notes, ‘off
the record’ contemplations, and field diary entries. The advantage here is to keep the first and
‘official’ notebook fairly orderly and uncluttered with extraneous field notes.
4.2 Establishing contact
Undertaking a local study is an exciting journey both for yourself and for the people
you are going to share a part of your life with. It likely will be a journey to a far-away world
you may not be familiar with. Thus, besides the scientific endeavours, there is an additional
challenge of bridging two cultures and being accepted by the community. It is a narrow path
of wading through several layers of complexities: social, cultural, administrative and political.
A successful study does very much depend on how the people perceive and accept you and
allow you to witness their everyday lives; at times, a rather intimate process. In the end, it is
usually a rewarding process and it may turn out that you remain connected to the region and
to the people for the rest of your life in some way or the other. That is usually the fate of
dedicated and passionate anthropologists. Local studies of social metabolism ask some
different questions than cultural anthropologists, but the process of becoming part of the local
community and the ability to sensitively undertake your investigations are similar. It is about
taking off your own shoes and stepping into and accepting another culture and way of life.
All this requires a great deal of preparation. From looking up various sources of
information about the region and the people, speaking to those who have been there, obtaining
references, finding out the need for necessary permits from the local authorities, making a list
of what you might need when living in a village where what is basic for you may be
considered quite a luxury. Don’t forget to take some symbolic articles that give you a sense of
home far away and some photographs of your life back home (home, family, friends, pets,
landscape) to show it to the people on a suitable occasion. People open up when they see
more of your context and become curious. When you do finally arrive, there is the need to
make some important decisions. If you have not got a local contact (which could be the local
leader, school teacher, nurse, etc.), then try to find a point of entry2. Usually, it is not a good
idea to stay in a nice hotel or drive around in a hired taxi if you are visiting a poor region. It
tends to distance yourself from the people and it would take much longer for you to be
accepted. Sometimes being associated with the government may also be a disadvantage. So
once you overcame the bureaucratic hurdles and have the necessary permits, try to remain
neutral in your relationship with officials. Avoid favours such as the use of their guest house
or a vehicle. It is necessary to be as modest as possible and to come as close to the lifestyle of
2 In her field research with the indigenous Tsimane’, Lisa Ringhofer’s point of entry was the Tsimane’ Council.
As the political authority of the Tsimane’, they had to formally grant permission on any kind of research that
would take place in their territory. Also, they were helpful in the selection of a village and the general logistics
and accompanied her to the community in order to formally introduce her to the villagers.

20
the people as possible. Eat local food, ride local transport, wear simple, make efforts to pick
up some of the local language, and always smile!
Arriving in a village for the first time can be overwhelming both for you and for the
community. It is important to respect the local leadership and hierarchy. You should not come
across as a threat to anyone who can perceive you as one trying to change the order of things.
It is important to establish you as a student or researcher who has no motive but to learn how
they live and what their relationship to nature is. Show respect for their lifestyle and try not to
give an impression of them being inferior in any way. It is you who wants something from
them and not the other way round. And above all, do not raise expectations or make false
promises - this can be very counterproductive. One should rather soon (but carefully) try to
find out the dynamics in the community, such as internal conflicts, alliances, preferences and
hierarchies. It is essential to avoid being stigmatised as being part of one group or against
another. There is no real formula for this, but how you establish yourself as neutral with a
sound relationship to the majority of the population requires reasonable social skills,
diplomacy, and a good sense of dealing with human relationships and their dynamics. It is a
risk one has to take but being cautious and self-reflective is certainly an asset. And don’t
forget to rely on your feelings!
BOX 3
“In the early hours of a clear September morning, Everisto from the Tsimane’ Council and I finally
took off on his motorbike to Campo Bello. Leaving behind the urban infrastructure of San Borja we
followed a dirt road that slowly turned into a continuously more rugged and narrower forest path as we
reached the banks of the Rio Maniqui. Upon reaching the first Tsimane’ dwelling in San Antonio, a
neighbouring community of Campo Bello, we were greeted with a friendly Najjoi’ (good morning).
Upon catching sight of us, passers-by would exclaim ‘Hana mura mi’, where are you going? It is an
expression that I learnt quickly, as it was of common usage upon any sort of casual encounter with
others. We managed to move forward slowly on the back of the motorbike until the narrow forest trail
suddenly gave way to the sprawling river… After reaching the other river bank, it was still a half-hour
walk before reaching the community hut and the school premises, both of which somewhat represent
the village centre. When we arrived, a couple of people had already gathered there, seemingly
expecting the stranger (I later found that the Tsimane’ Council had announced my visit via their daily
radio programme). Everisto introduced me as a researcher who wanted to stay among the community
members for the six months to come. After explaining the broad goals of my research, the villagers,
though seemingly fairly indifferent to my presence, gave their consent to participate in the research.
Shortly after, the local teacher, known by everyone simply as the profe, pointed to an old kitchen
structure, a mere four-legged wooden shelter with no walls but a thick palm-thatched roof. There I
could fasten my hammock. The building had long been abandoned; only its rooftop occasionally
served as a resting place for poultry. A little later, Everisto embarked on his return to San Borja and I
was left to my own devices” (adapted from Ringhofer, 2010).
After you have settled down, probably in some cheap accommodation nearby, or at a
local inhabitant’s home (after having made sure that this person is not controversial), take a
walk around the village. You can learn a lot by just observing! How the people live, what they
live from, what they own, how they go about their daily chores, what their main activities are,
how the division of labour is organised, what the extent of land they use is and how they use
it, etc. You need this time to observe and get a feeling for the system before you go about
collecting data. In any case, it would be too quick to start questioning, measuring and
weighing soon after you arrive. You might intimidate the people. So the first couple of weeks
should be used to familiarise yourself with the social and the ecological system by mere

21
observation, to establish rapport and get accepted before you pull out your scales, notebook
and local studies manual.
4.3 Human Population (stocks and flows)
As mentioned before, the human population comprises the most important stock for
any social system. We need to know the system size in terms of numbers, composition by age
and gender, and weight, as well as flows in terms of births, deaths, and migration. It may be
that demographic statistics for that area are available, but not necessarily. In that case, there is
a need to generate ones own data. Having walked around the village for a couple of weeks,
and becoming familiar with how things work, you would have already gathered an impression
on how households are organised. They may be nuclear or extended. Try to find out through
informal discussions what comprises a household for this society. Equating the number of
families (as defined by marriage bond) with the number of households might be misleading,
since you may well find two or three families living in the same domestic unit. At the same
time, the number of dwellings is not an indicator either. In some societies, a household is a
family system with their own kitchen, or a joint land holding. So there may be a cluster of
huts with grown-up children and their families but if they share a common kitchen, or share
the same piece of land for subsistence, it is considered as one household. Sharing of meals at
other’s houses (especially in the case of children) is common in traditional societies, so be
careful not to double count. Other useful information is to find out how decisions are taken in
the household, who is the head, how the division of labour is organised, etc.
It may be time now to pull out your notebook and take a census of the village, but
carefully. Usually, in traditional societies people are intimidated when you take notes since
they do not know how this information is going to be used, for or against them; for good
reasons, of course. Once you are confident that you have established a good rapport with your
research subjects, it may be a good idea to begin with a human census using the form attached
with this manual (can also be combined with the livestock census by asking questions; we will
come back to this later). The head count of a family is usually discussed with the head of the
family. It may be difficult to get the exact age of a person as in traditional societies people do
not keep record of birthdays. But with some discussions, this can be well estimated. In any
case we need age groups by sex (0-5, 6-15, 16-60, >60). One can begin with a family tree of
those living in the house; from the oldest person in the family one can go down to the
youngest siblings, those married in and married out as useful information. Then try to
estimate ages of these people in relation to each other. In difficult situations it might be useful
to provoke your interview partner with questions of past events, or whether he/she was born
before the neighbour’s child, etc. New births and deaths are easy to record as they are likely to
be within the frame of a year or two. This is important information for accounting for flows to
which we shall now turn to. Before, however, once the stock account is established, you need
to calculate the peoples’ respective weight (in metric tons). You may literally weigh a small
sample of residents (may be a fun event, especially for children) and extrapolate their average
body weight onto the entire village population; or you simply resort to estimates.
Flows for a human population mean the number of births and deaths taking place each
year, as well as migration patterns (seasonal, annual, permanent). This is a tricky issue. You
may not have readily available statistics on this, but it is worth a visit to the local hospital or
dispensary, the mid-wife or the church (if any). These usually have records of the births and
deaths taking place in the village. For reproductive histories, supplement this data with local
school records (teachers tend to be a good source of information about the whole
community!), a recent municipal census as well as by asking each household the number of
births and deaths that have taken place in the last one year and to whom (including infant

22
mortality)3. From this one can calculate the population growth rate, the death rate, infant
mortality, and the fertility ratio. To understand migration patterns, one has to ask if there are
members of the family that work elsewhere, permanently or seasonally. This has to be taken
note of, including information on what they take with them (particularly in the case of
seasonal work) and what they bring or send back (in all cases). At this point it might be useful
to deviate from the topic of census (your interview partner would be getting impatient by
now; they are not used to sitting long hours and answering questions) and go into the socio-
economics of migration. So to say, what the need for migration is, what are the benefits, how
much income does it bring, is it prestigious, does it have an influence on the local society and
culture in any way, how does this influence the introduction of new goods, social and cultural
behaviour into the society and how is it received, and so on and so forth. Obviously, you have
to show deep interest in the lives of the people there, and genuinely so, because if you do not,
it is felt and you may not receive the answers with similar enthusiasm.
4.4 Human time use (flows)
By now, your initial rounds through the village and household visits have certainly
provided you with first insights. You have surely gathered an impression on how life within
the household is organised, and gained an idea about the age and gender allocation of labour.
Generally, our methodology for recording time use is not yet as well elaborated as our
methodology on social metabolism and land use, but there are basically two approaches to
data collection: (1) self-reported assessments and (2) direct observation. Both methods
contain a variety of sub-methods which you will best learn from anthropological literature
such as Bernard’s (2006) detailed account of direct observation methods or Howell’s (1990)
ironically titled publication Surviving fieldwork (again, literature from cultural anthropology
can help a great deal in how to go about your investigations). But before you decide on which
method to opt for, let us have a look at the pros and cons of each of these approaches.
Self-reported assessments, on the one hand, generally resolve most ethical issues,
since the informant decides which behaviours to report and which not to mention. Another
point in favour is its time-saving character for the researcher. One of the major drawbacks,
however, is the problem of reliability as people tend to remember their own behaviour only
selectively. This is not necessarily deliberate deception but a consequence of cultural models
for the significance of activities. Especially when reporting on agricultural labour time,
farmers may well underestimate the total hours invested in productive tasks. There are two
reasons for so doing. (Particularly) male household heads may simply underestimate the
involvement of children or elderly people in the productive process as, culturally, their effort
does not get the same consideration as the labour invested by (male) adults. Also, as we have
learned previously, people may have a different perception of the concept of labour and the
distinction between working and non-working activities for them is not so clear. Also, think
of the concept of a ‘working day’. Whereas in Western societies we may think of an 8-hour
working day, traditional societies accommodate their physical working day around
natural/seasonal cycles (e.g. work in the field tends to drop sharply when the midday heat
becomes unbearable). In some cases, you may also consider the use of a time diary, which has
a higher degree of reliability (obviously depending on how committed the informants are).
But do remember the general constraints that come with it: the need for literacy levels and the
3 In Bolivia, Lisa Ringhofer experienced that families tend to leave out newborn babies when asked about their number of
off-springs. This, as she found later, was culturally motivated as newborn babies are not considered full household members
and are hardly ever given names in their first year (in case they may not be strong enough to survive). Only when a baby
seems fit for life, it is blessed with a name and becomes a fully integrated member of the family.

23
use of watches to record the duration of individual activities. Both aspects may be lacking in
the rural system you work in.
BOX 4
Shortcomings from self-reported assessments: some facts to consider
In his time budget study in rural China, Pastore et al. (1999) note that their results – based on self-
reported assessments only – may suffer from limited validity for two reasons: First because of a
sensible involvement of children and elderly in productive activities – work carried out by both sub-
groups does not get the same consideration as time invested by adult members. Second, in households
were the opportunity costs are low (as this may be case in many traditional rural households), the
distinction between working and non-working time is not always obvious.
In a study of rural women’s time use and after having collected both kinds of data simultaneously,
Scheper-Hughes (1983) found that women failed to report 44 percent of their work as recorded by
direct observation.
Being a woman also has an impact on the information you obtain. (1) It limits your access to certain
information; (2) it influences how you perceive others. An interesting anecdote comes from De Walt et
al. (1998) who together with two other women spent months investigating the nutritional strategies in
two rural Kentucky counties. Their informants never said a word about the use of alcohol in the
community; only when a male sociologist joined them on one of their field trips, the local leader
opened up and began to talk freely about the community values concerning alcohol use. He felt it
would have been inappropriate to discuss the issue with women.
In order to overcome the shortcomings just discussed, direct observation in many
cases provides a much more reliable picture. This research method can basically be done by
either following the subject around all day or by using spot checks. It is about immersing
yourself in the household/village dynamics and, in so doing, gain entry into the ‘backstage’
life of the social system. You will gradually learn about the meanings of different activities,
intentions, events and situations. The drawbacks with this method concern mainly sample size
and distribution. One issue is time distribution: are there strong differences according to the
days of a week? Do your data account for the varying seasons of the year? Similarly, be also
careful to achieve an appropriate sample. Samples have to be large enough to cover the
different age/sex groups of the social system, different migratory backgrounds and household
composition. Also make sure you also cover the various social strata of the society under
consideration (if any). You may find the latter problem less prevalent in your society as many
(predominantly indigenous) traditional societies have a rather egalitarian social structure. As a
rule of the thumb, you should have 5-10 observed person-days for each age/gender subgroup
(or any other group you consider relevant) in order to do reliable estimates for the group and
(through weighing by demographic structure) for the community as a whole. Seasonal
variation and rare events (such as longer sickness or extended festivities) have to be taken into
account separately.
On the downside, direct observation may be seen as intrusive behaviour as you are
basically ‘shadowing’ a person for a certain period during daytime. We appeal to your
sensitivity on what is socially and personally ‘acceptable’ and what is felt as invasive
behaviour. Spot checks, if culturally more appropriate, are indeed a good alternative to a day-
long accompaniment of an individual person. The trick with spot checks is to catch a glimpse
of people in their natural activities before they see you coming on the scene and before they

24
have a chance to modify their behaviour. Data from spot checks also require good sampling
and sophisticated statistics to be able to generate a comprehensive picture.
BOX 5
In her study of Campo Bello, Lisa Ringhofer (2007) had originally asked 20 people (mostly from
befriended households) to be followed around for a 14-hour daytime period (six a.m. to eight p.m.),
however, two decided to withdraw from the time study. In order to obtain information on the age
groups now left out of the 14-hour shadowing, she decided to conduct additional spot checks and
thereby arrived at two more full person-days. For this endeavour, a non-random person was selected,
who was visited four different times throughout the same daily round, and discrete notes were taken of
what he/she was engaged in for a 15 minute period each time. In so doing, a time allocation period of
one hour could be documented. This sample method was then repeated for a total number of 14 active
adults and 14 children, from which an additional 14-hour person-day could be derived. For toddlers
and the elderly population (the latter was more apprehensive in participating in time use studies), she
resorted to estimates which she cross-checked with interview data and general, but more informal,
observation.
Simron Jit Singh (2003) opted for a different approach. In his study of Trinket Island, his time use
account focused on labour time only. He recorded certain tasks (such as renewing a roof, feeding a
certain number of livestock, or planting rice) repeatedly and in great detail: what kind of persons
participated, for how long, and in which intensity. In order to arrive at system level data, the frequency
of these processes across the year had to be estimated and used for weighing. Wherever possible,
there was an effort to enhance data reliability with cross checks using interviews and
metabolic data. For example: for how long do large groups go out for fishing every day
(observation of samples); interview question: how much was the catch the last time you went
fishing and how many people and for how long were you out at sea? How many kilogram of
fish are being consumed annually (metabolic data)? Are both annual estimates congruent?
Hence, depending on the local context as well as on the nature of your research
question, you will have to decide on the time recording methods you apply. What is crucial to
remember though is that all methods are sensitive to the choice of season of recording and
you will need a large enough sample to cover the various parameters (age, sex, social strata)
prevalent in your studied system. Always make sure to enhance data reliability with cross-
checks using interviews and other metabolic data.
When you are in the field, you surely will be confronted with different obstacles along
the way. Here are just some which we have so far experienced in previous study situations:
 Night time sampling may be culturally inacceptable, seen as intrusive behaviour or
simply too dangerous.
Possible solution: resort to grounded estimates for the remainder of time not covered
by direct observation, you may also have the chance to observe night time behaviour
from afar (see BOX 6)
 Engagement in multiple behaviours. People tend to engage in several overlapping
activities. In Campo Bello, a common scene was that women would tend the fire while
at the same time breastfeeding their babies.
Possible solution: the probably most straight forward solution would be to credit half
of the total period to each activity. Another possible solution is to decide which
activity to consider the dominant one and account for the primary activity only. The
latter solution though involves a great deal of subjective judgement.

25
 Distinction between economic food provision and food preparation. This may
especially be the case when activities are performed out of the usual surrounding (e.g.
when a manioc tuber is peeled directly in the field where it is uprooted, does this count
as food preparation time or as part of a woman’s agricultural activities due to its in situ
performance?) or when commodities are manufactured which are used for both, the
household as well as the socio-economic system (e.g. the manufacture of a mortar and
a pestle for husking rice, part of which gets sold at a later stage).
Possible solution: Regardless of the spatial performance of tasks, any task related to
food processing (i.e. a woman’s peeling of tubers in the field) should be accounted for
as belonging to the food preparation process. As to the manufacture of household
items for direct food production (such as a mortar, for example), the time invested
should be subsumed under the household system (despite eventual partial selling of
rice). Only the manufacture of directly productive hunting or fishing equipment, as
well as handicraft clearly destined for later selling, should hence be subsumed within
the economic system.
BOX 6
“[In Campo Bello] visiting others after dark meant not only engaging in perilous travel through the
forest, but was simply seen as intrusive behaviour. Life though, does not stop when the sun goes down
and the hours of darkness not directly observed could not be simply equated with ‘sleeping’. Luckily
though, two neighbouring households were situated close-by, whom I was able to observe from my
dwelling. On many nights, therefore, I would simply sit out in the dark and lean against the wooden
beams of my home, where I had found a perfect place to unwind from the day’s events. These night by
night observations provided some estimates on how the hours of darkness are generally spent. Rather
than simply coding the nocturnal cycle as ‘sleeping’, time for hygiene, eating, resting and sleeping was
allocated for men, whereas the women’s activity profile comprised also childcare in addition to these
activities4” (Ringhofer, 2010)
4.5 Functional territory (stocks by land use categories)
In this section we will explain how to account for the different functional land use
categories within the territorial boundaries of your system under investigation. The territory
most likely entails different land use categories, meaning that each category is subject to
different economic uses for different purposes. In most cases though, a significant share will
be devoted to the extraction of biomass: land is used to grow crops, graze animals and extract
wood and other types of food and raw materials. Another, albeit usually much smaller,
fraction of the land will be covered by settlement areas, buildings, roads and foot paths as
well as other infrastructures, while parts of the land area may even be (largely) untouched
(e.g. nature protection zones, sacred areas, etc.).
Often though, a simple allocation of a plot of land to one of these land use types
(biomass extraction, grazing, etc.) may not be that straight-forward as changes in land use
over time may occur. Also, you may find that land is subject to multifunctional use due to
rotational cycles that change their use during the course of one or several years. This is the
4 For men, the following estimates per night (8 p.m. to 6.a.m.) were applied: 30 min for hygiene, 60 min for idleness, 30 min
for eating and 480 min for sleeping. For women, the following estimates per night (8 p.m. to 6 p.m.) were applied: 15 min for
hygiene, 120 min for child care, 15 min for eating and 450 min for sleeping.

26
case with fallows. In short fallow systems, land is left fallow for a period of up to one year,
while in long fallow systems, cropland is not ploughed for several years. During a fallow
period cropland may be used for animal grazing, wood and/or other biomass extraction, or
simply remains untouched. Multifunctional types of land use comprise, for instance, agro-
forestry, cropland used for animal grazing after harvest, or woodland used either for animal
grazing or the extraction of feed and bedding material. Operationally, the rule of thumb is as
follows: assign a plot of land to the land use type which matches the use of this plot in the
year you are collecting the data. There are, however, exceptions. Some land use types,
including for example long term rotation cycles, should be classified according to a more
long-term perspective. Clear-cut forest land, for instance, that is bound to be reforested,
should be allocated to woodland for wood production; also, land in short rotation, but not
cropped in the specific year you are there, should still be accounted for as cropland.
Our functional territory/land classification entails various land cover classes, which
are primarily differentiated according to the prevailing vegetation type. Within these land
cover classes, different types of land use can be distinguished. These classifications
correspond to the ones listed in the attached template.
(1) Woodland
The term ‘woodland’ is defined in a broader sense, as it also combines all types of
scrublands, mixed grassland/woodland as well as land in early stages of succession after being
clear-cut and left for reforestation. More specifically, we distinguish between four types of
woodland:
 Woodland for wood production: land that is predominantly used for the extraction of
wood (firewood or timber) including clear-cut land that is bound to be reforested or
left for natural succession, fall within this section.
 Grazed woodland/shrub land: this land use class refers to all types of frequently
grazed woodland or shrub land.
 Succession woodland in shifting cultivation: woodland from shifting cultivation with
fallow periods longer than one year (all land not sown and cropped in this specific
year) should be accounted for in this category. In some cases, this may also include
land not yet covered by trees or shrubs. Make an annotation in the attached template if
this land is grazed or used for wood extraction.
 Woodland not used for grazing or wood extraction: woodland not used for wood
extraction or animal grazing belongs to this section. Woodland only used for hunting
and gathering should also be reported here; in this case you should also take note of
the hunting/gathering intensity.
(2) Grassland
 Meadows: all mown grassland used for the production of freshly cut grass or hay falls
within this category. This includes also areas used for animal grazing after the cutting
of grass. In this case, you should take note of the duration/intensity of grazing.
 Cultivated pastures: in this category you should include only grazing land if it is
subject to cultivation practices like irrigation, drainage or fertilisation.
 Rough grazing: here you should account for all land with predominantly grass-type
vegetation that is used for grazing animals but not subject to cultivation practices.
Beware that it may be difficult in some cases to differentiate between rough razing and
grazed woodland/shrub land – in this case an annotation should be made.

27
(3) Cropland
Cropland equally refers to the area actually planted with crops in the year of
consideration, as well as short fallow cropland. Short fallow, in this context, refers to cropland
that is fallowed for one year only or less. All other types of fallow (i.e. long fallow areas left
for regeneration in shifting cultivation systems) are subsumed under woodland. You should
indicate if land is harvested more than once a year and provide information on cropping
intensities (share of cropland harvested more than once; number of harvests per year).
 Cereals to fibres: allocate according to the predominant crop type and make
annotations on the major cultivars used (e.g. types of cereal sown). In case of a mixed
cropping system, make an allocation according to the dominant crop and take a note of
the mix of cultivars used.
 Other crops: here you should specify which other crops are cultivated.
 Fallow: this category includes both fallow lands as part of the crop rotation cycle and
idle cropland which remains fallow for purposes other than crop rotation. Take a note
of the length of fallow and the major crops grown.
On a general footnote, it should be borne in mind that allocating cropland to different
cultivars needs to be consistent with the allocation of harvested crops to biomass categories in
section 4.8.1.1. For example, harvests from land allocated to cereals should also be allocated
to cereals. In the case of mixed cropping, when a consistent allocation of land and crops is not
feasible, the land can be split according to the harvested amounts of crop.
(4) Permanent cultures
All land largely used for growing permanent crops, fruit trees or other plantations falls
within this category. This covers a wide variety of cultures including vineyards, palm trees,
orchards, tea, coffee or banana plantations. Please specify the type(s) of permanent cultures in
the annotations.
(5) Built up land
This includes all land occupied by buildings of any kind (homes, farm buildings,
communal and commercial buildings), paths, roads and any other built infrastructure. In
addition, all land associated with buildings or infrastructure, such as yards and shoulders, and
vegetation-covered recreational gardens or embankments (if not used for biomass extraction)
should be subsumed under this land use category. Kitchen gardens used to grow spices or
vegetables, on the other hand, should not be accounted for under this section but belong to
‘cropland’, grazed areas to ‘grassland’ and orchards to ‘permanent cultures’.
(6) Water bodies
This is a rather heterogeneous land cover class as it comprises all types of rivers,
ponds and lakes but also marshes, swamps, beaches or coastal land (e.g. mangroves). You
should provide further information on the specific types of water bodies prevalent in your
case study.
(7) Non productive land
Any kind of land not allocated to any of the above-mentioned categories is thus
considered unproductive or unused land and should be accounted for in this category. There
are two more issues to consider when you account for the different land use categories. First
avoid double counting of land areas. The sum of all land use types should be coherent with
the total area size of the functional (economic) territory. This means that every plot of land
can merely be allocated to one of the above-mentioned land cover categories. Also, land
harvested more than once a year (multi-cropping) should be accounted for only once (see

28
cropland). This takes us to consider the second issue at hand: multifunctional land use. In case
you are confronted with a multifunctional land use system (agro-forestry), you have to make a
decision on the allocation to the individual land use categories. Your decision should be based
on either the quantitative (mass of harvest or the economic value of different harvests) or the
qualitative significance (local peoples’ views) of the different types of use, or on both. In this
case, you should provide detailed information on the characteristics of your land use system.
Accounting empirically for the different land use categories is again an endeavour that
calls for a creative mix of methods. In a first step, you will probably have to gather a great
deal of secondary information and documentation to obtain a first rough idea on the different
land cover classes. You may be lucky to find statistical data from previous land use surveys,
agricultural censuses, municipal development plans or cadastral records at the community or
even individual plot level. Moreover, detailed regional land cover and land use maps, aerial or
satellite images may also be a useful device for estimating the ratio of different land use
categories.
In a second step, you will have to dare the descent into local empiricism at the
community level. The range of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA)5 methods may provide
useful as you will obtain a substantial amount of information in a relatively short time.
Community or resource mapping, for example, provide such method when you call for a
village meeting and ask the participants to create a map, a representation of their territory,
showing places that are important to them (the marketplace, sacred areas, the school, etc.) and
including features of interest to you (e.g. location of agricultural and fallow plots). Once the
individual plots and the kitchen garden area are located, you can proceed to manually measure
their size using a measuring tape and eventually GPS (you will again be grateful for an
assistant or two); the same goes for the housing area which in many cases includes not only
the physical infrastructure (which was already measured for the stock account), but also the
clearing around the house. We also advise you to make parallel cross-checks through
qualitative household interviews or short surveys. Asking household heads on the species
cultivated in kitchen gardens, the number and size of active fields, fallows and the cropping
cycle will certainly provide useful complementary information.
4.6 Livestock (stock)
Quantitative information on domesticated animals is important for the quantification of stocks
and for the calculation of feed demand and agricultural production. The template distinguishes
between 12 types of animal species. What is requested here is information on the average
number of heads for each of the main livestock species recorded during one year as well as
their respective average live-weight.
Head: You should provide annual averages for the year under consideration, since
within the timeframe of a year considerable fluctuations may occur. Please remember not to
provide cumulative numbers, i.e. if a pig is fattened for six months and then replaced by
another pig (turnover period 0.5 years), account for one pig only. But do provide a separate
note on the turnover periods of certain animals. In some cases the average number of animals
present during one year maybe difficult to estimate and only numbers of head present at the
time of data collection is available. This should be mentioned in your annotations. However,
our experience is that villagers usually know how many heads of cattle or pigs they own. In
5 See, for example, Chambers, R. (1983) ‚Rural Development: Putting the Last First’ or Narayanasami, N.
(2009) ‘Participatory Rural Appraisal: Principles, methods and application’

29
order to obtain an idea on the reproduction/vending cycles of domestic livestock, quarterly
household surveys may serve useful.
Weight: The average weight of animals changes during the course of a year and may
differ according to the individual species. What you should hence provide is a rough estimate
only of the average weight of each species included in the stock account. Large animals like
cows, cattle or horses usually range between 200 and 600 kg, grown up pigs between 70 and
200 kg, sheep and goats between 40 kg and 80 kg, poultry and cats around 1.5 kg, and dogs
between 8 kg and 15 kg.
Livestock can be accounted for in two acceptable units: (a) livestock weight: the sum
total weight of the livestock in a society, also calculated per capita by dividing the total mass
by number of inhabitants. (b) livestock unit: The livestock unit, abbreviated as LU (or
sometimes as LSU), is a reference unit which facilitates the aggregation of livestock from
various species and age as per convention. In this text we refer to livestock units at 500 kg
live weight. In other words, one livestock unit equals 500 kg.
4.7 Artefacts
Accounting for artefacts can be challenging (at times embarrassing), but exciting. It
requires a great deal of ingenuity and creativity. Your research subjects may even find you
peculiar that you want to weigh all the houses, infrastructure and belongings in the village.
But if you don’t take this personally, it might turn out in your favour. You might as well take
the role of a clown and provide some humour and jest in the lives of the local people. They
will come out and observe you, smile at what you are doing (with all seriousness of mind) and
use you as a source of gossip in the village. This can be good and can help in deepening your
rapport with the people, to take you more lightly than they did, to further remove the fears of
a stranger in the village.
But before you actually set about weighing all that, there is some essential information
you should have from simple observations in the village during the first couple of weeks. You
should by now know how the different structures in the village look like and what are they
used for. You should also know what artefacts the people own in their households that remain
longer than a year (such as sewing machines, bicycles, boats, furniture, tools, etc.). Next, try
to figure out a reasonable typology (or categories) of the houses, buildings, and infrastructure
in the village. You should look for similarities between the architectural style and materials
used in the constructions; usually certain types of buildings are used for specific purposes, but
not necessarily. Your classification may look something like this: residential houses, kitchen
huts, out-houses for storage, animal stalls or enclaves, pathways, school, dispensary, wells,
etc. To do this task effectively, it might be useful to have an assistant or two (under
European or Western conditions, this may not be possible though) as well as a long measuring
tape and a spring balance that can weigh heavy materials. What you need to do is to find out
the weight per square metre (or foot) for each of the construction types, and then multiply this
factor by the total area of that construction type in the village. As a first step, observe the
different types of materials used in a representative construction type. Try to find lose samples
of them in the village (wood pieces, bricks, wooden poles, grass, bamboo, etc.). Measure them
and calculate their volume, then weigh them, and finally calculate how much a certain
material type weighs per cubic metre. Once you have this, all you need is to calculate the total
volume of each material used in your sample house, then multiply the total volume of each
material type used with its factor weight. Your assistants will help you find the lose pieces in
the village, or even dismantle a part of the house (if it is not dangerous or offensive to the

30
owners), and in holding your spring balance while you record the weights and in stretching
out the measuring tape to the other end.
Repeat this exercise with all the construction types in the village. Having done this, you
now have a representative (factor) weight per square metre of each construction type in the
village. Next, you have to measure the area of each of the construction types in the village to
derive at a total area of each of these types. Finally, in order to derive the total weight of the
built stocks in the village, you have to multiply the total area of each construction type with
the factor weight (or per cubic metre), and sum the results of the weight of all the construction
types. There you have it. It takes a few days to get this done though, and some amount of
patience and ridicule (and mathematical intelligence to deal will squares and cubes!).
Besides buildings and infrastructure, stocks also include household artefacts that remain in
the house for longer than a year. Make a list of them, and take a count of each with respect to
every household. Next, try to estimate the weight of each of the artefacts. Some of them can
be directly weighed by hooking them onto your scales, and for others a reasonable estimation
must be made. It is assumed that after so much of weighing and measuring you would have
gathered some idea on how much something could weigh by looking at it, or by trying to lift
or push something. Once you have the estimated weights of each of the artefact types, simply
multiply these by the number of each artefact in the village to arrive at a total sum.
4.8 Material and Energy Flows
4.8.1. Material flows
In MEFA it is a standard to present flow data as the sum of flows over a period of a
full year (be it a calendar year or any other full period). This is why you have to consider
seasonal fluctuations, especially when you collect your data just at a certain point in time
(what is usually the case). The consumption of firewood for heating and cooking, for instance,
may vary considerably between the summers and winter months. Hence, in order to calculate
annual firewood consumption you need to obtain information on the specific seasonal
consumption needs, either by interviewing or consulting secondary literature.
4.8.1.1. Biomass flows
In rural local systems biomass usually accounts for the most significant material. It is
required for feeding the local human and livestock population and for cooking and heating
dwellings. It is also used as building material and for generating income by selling biomass
products on the market. Usually, rural local systems are characterised by a combination of
subsistence and market economies; this means that a fraction of the primary or secondary
production is for internal household use only, whereas the remainder is sold on the market. In
some systems, certain crops are produced for the market only (cash crops), while others are
grown for household consumption only. Whatever the case in your village, it is first important
to get a qualitative understanding of the general patterns of local biomass flows. What are the
main crops cultivated? How are they used? What are the estimated proportions entering the
household, grown for the market, or used as livestock feed? What are crop residues used for?
etc. All these flows need to be accounted for separately, and we advise you to go about the
MEFA logic as follows: first we look at the biomass supply (domestic extraction of biomass +

31
imported biomass – exported biomass), then at the biomass use. Biomass use splits the
consumption of biomass into different domestic use types (food, feed, energetic use and other
uses incl. losses). This means that we are interested in what and how much people eat, how
much goes into livestock feeding, what is produced by domestic livestock and how much
biomass is contributed for the generation of energy and income. Besides supply and use, there
are two further distinctions: primary production and secondary production. Primary
production includes all types of vegetable biomass and biomass from hunting and fishing
(equal to domestic extraction - DE). In contrast, secondary production refers to all products
from local livestock who are fed on primary production (or maybe also imported feed). In so
doing, they convert primary production into secondary biomass products, such as eggs, milk
or meat. While these products are not part of the DE account (as this would lead to double
counting of animal feed and the mass weight of animal products), quantifying these flows
provides us with insights into the contribution of the livestock system to local food and raw
material production.
The biomass flow template is organised according to the supply and use distinction:
there are three columns which record the domestic extraction and secondary production of
biomass, imports from and exports to other socio-economic systems. This information is used
to quantify domestic consumption (i.e. local supply). The consumption of biomass is then
split in different domestic use types (food, feed, energetic use and other uses incl. losses). The
template also contains the distinction between primary and secondary production.
(1) Biomass supply
Primary production
 Primary crops: ideally, primary crop harvests should be recorded at their ‘as is
weight’ (incl. their moisture content) at the time of harvest and after threshing or
husking (‘gross harvest’). Primary crop harvests also include the fraction used for seed
in the next season.
 Used crop residues: primary crop harvests are often associated with large amounts of
crop residues. These residues are not included in the weight calculation of primary
crops and typically include stems (e.g. cereal straw), leaves or branches. One fraction
of the available residues may be subject to further use by the local population or even
exported. Most commonly, however, large parts of the crop residues are used for
animal feed, as bedding material for livestock, as roofing material, fuel or any other
kind of local relevance. Please note that in this category you should account only for
the used fraction of all available crop residues. The remainder therefore - unused
residues left on the field for compost, ploughed into the soil for fertilisation, burnt or
discarded elsewhere - should not be included. You should also note that residues from
the processing of primary crops are considered by-products and do not belong in this
section either. Typical by-products include residues from milling (bran, oil cakes),
sugar production (bagasse), pomace, or fruit and nut shells (coconut shells). You will
find that in many cases primary crop by-products are subject to further use. Hence,
their mass weight should be allocated to the specific use fraction the primary crop is
put to (that is food, feed, energy or other uses).
 Fodder crops: this section entails all types of crops that are exclusively grown for
livestock feed. It includes all types of roughage biomass produced on cropland, such
as leguminous fodder crops, clover, grasses, fodder beets, or other green crops used as
roughage (e.g. whole maize). Primary crops that are potentially edible for humans but
used in the local system for livestock feed should not be included here (e.g. cereals),

32
but form part of the primary crop category. However, if this is the case, make a clear
annotation in the template.
 Grazed biomass: this section includes all biomass grazed by domestic animals.
Grazing may not be limited to pastures, but entails a variety of land use types (see land
use section). If possible, the amount of grazed biomass should be assigned to the
specific land use type where grazing takes place.
 Wood: this section includes all timber (for construction and manufacturing), fuel wood
or wood for charcoal production. All types of branches, leaves, tree bark, or litter
collected from woodlands should be accounted for under the category ‘litter’.
 Fishing, hunting, gathering: the total mass of annual fishing, hunting and gathering
yields should be subsumed here.
Secondary production
 Milk: includes all milk produced in the local system, regardless of further use or
processing.
 Meat: the carcass weight of all slaughtered domesticated animals (including poultry)
should be reported under meat. Carcass weight excludes all parts which are not
primarily used as food (e.g. offal) but may include fractions which become waste at
later stages of processing. By-products such as hides or horns should be accounted for
under the category ‘other’.
 Eggs: here you account for all eggs produced for human consumption or export.
 Other: all other animal products such as wool, hides or bones used for non food
purposes should be subsumed here. Make sure you avoid double counting of products
accounted for under the ‘meat’ category.
Biomass imports and exports
The import and export categories include all primary and/or secondary biomass
products (raw or processed animal and plant-based products, live animals) which are brought
in from other socio-economic systems (imports) or are transferred to other systems (exports).
They may be purchased or sold, bartered or simply given away. Imported raw materials or
semi-manufactured products can easily be allocated to the items listed in the biomass flow
template in the appendix. Please note that imported and exported processed biomass products
should be accounted for under the corresponding raw material section. Bread, for example,
should be allocated to cereals, cheese to milk, jam to fruits and beer to cereals. While some
processed items may easily be disaggregated, others may not. All these should be subsumed
under ‘processed foods’.
(2) Biomass use
The biomass supplied in the rural local system can be used for many purposes. The
most essential use of this biomass is for human nutrition (food), but considerable fractions
may also go into livestock feeding (feed) and/or the generation of energy (energy). All other
usage (e.g. for manufacturing, construction, seed) as well as losses and wastes are subsumed
under the fourth category ‘other uses’. You will often find that biomass items can exclusively
be allocated to one of the possible use categories: all fodder crops and grazed biomass, for
example, are most likely used as feed, while all wood fuel may exclusively go into the
provision of energy. Other biomass items may be used for more purposes. Take cereals, for
example. They may primarily be used for human consumption, significant fractions, however,

33
might go into animal feed or are used as seed. Crop residues, to take another example, may be
used for livestock nutrition (feed), as bedding material (other uses) or simply as fuel (energy).
In other cases, the use maybe split between a primary and a by-product. Oil crops may serve
as an example for illustration: while the oil fraction may be used for human nutrition, the oil
cake and other residues are likely used as feed or for energy generation. Before it gets too
complicated though, here is our advice: remember the ABC method we described earlier and
do not get entangled in too many (insignificant) details. Only if you feel the size of these
flows is substantial for the functioning of the local system, then you should certainly consider
the different use categories the item is put to.
The template distinguishes between four types of biomass use:
 Food: all biomass which is used for human consumption in the local system. It is the
sum total of all food consumed in the individual households.
 Feed: all biomass (primary harvest, crop residues or by-products from processing)
which is used to feed the local livestock population.
 Energy: all biomass which is used for the generation of energy (in most cases for
combustion).
 Other uses: this includes (a) the use of biomass as a raw material for manufacturing
and construction (timber, crop residues for roofing and bedding, fibres, containers,
wool, hides and bones etc.); (b) the use as seed; and (c) all losses and unused wastes
that occur during processing. Additional information on the nature of ‘other uses’
should always be provided in annotations.
The sum total of all four biomass use categories should equal the indicator domestic biomass
consumption.
Practical considerations for data collection on biomass flows
Biomass flow data at such a disaggregated level is hardly ever readily available and
you are most likely to generate it manually by weighing, interviewing, estimating, observing
and other ingenious field methods. In a first attempt we advise you to get an estimate of the
area under crop production by crop type in the village you are investigating. Sometimes you
may find some of this information at the local agricultural or statistical office. If you are not
lucky then there is no way round to physically measuring the fields. Using a pedometer can be
extremely useful. Once you have gathered this data, you need to calculate the yields for each
crop. Again, you may find the data readily available at one of the local offices. If not, estimate
yields per unit land for each of the crops by observing actual harvests if possible, or by
interviewing households. Household heads usually know how many tons of crops they sold in
the previous year, or the income they generated from a given area of land. From the market
price per ton, you may possibly estimate the mass. Get familiar with local units such as bags
or bundles, and find out the actual weights of these. Try a variety of methods and estimates to
cross-check your findings on yields.
Once you are familiar with the yields, you will need to estimate the ratio produced for
the market and for household consumption. To arrive at household consumption, weighing
food samples may be a useful method. Once you have established a good rapport with the
villagers you may find a number of households let you take part in their private meal times for
about three days, weigh their food (before cooking) and observe internal food distribution
within the household. In doing so, make a list of food items consumed, including those
purchased from the market. Do not forget to account for the firewood, kerosene or any other

34
energy carrier that is used for the cooking6. At the end of this food sampling activity, you will
know how much of each food type is consumed by individual household members, the
fraction of primary and secondary products ingested, the amount of hunted, fished or gathered
foods consumed, and the kind of imported foods consumed. Additional interviews should give
insights into seasonal variations which need significant consideration within your accounts.
To estimate the amount of livestock biomass consumption, you need to become
familiar with the diet composition of each farm animal, using a combination of direct
observation, actual weighing of feed and interviews. Note what is imported and what is
locally produced as fodder, or simply a by-product of some crops. Consumption by grazing
can be estimated by counting the number of bites per hour. There exist a number of secondary
sources on biomass consumption for cattle in most parts of the world, which may be used for
reference and cross-checking. Once you have a notion of how much is consumed by each
farm animal, you simply multiply the amount with the total number of livestock species in the
whole village.
Secondary production from animals is again calculated using a combination of
interviews, observation, weighing and measuring, where necessary. Here are some questions
you may ask: how many eggs are laid by a chicken in a week? How can the fertility and
slaughter cycle of the different farm animals be described? How many litres of milk are
produced daily by the local cows? If you stay in the village for a few months, you will
possibly get the chance to observe all of this yourself, and also be able to account for these
flows manually. Of the total secondary production, you can estimate how much of each type
is sold on the market if you subtract the household consumption of these products from
estimates derived in the household food sampling method described above.
4.8.1.2. Non-biomass flows
The main material flows that occur at the local level are intricately linked to the
system’s dominant economic activity. As we are focusing on local rural systems, agriculture
is likely to be the most important economic activity and biomass, in terms of quantity, the
most important material flow. Having said this, however, you may also find significant
amounts of minerals that are domestically extracted or imported and used. We have generally
found the most important mineral flows to be related to construction (cement, sand and
gravel), the provision of energy (fuel), and durable consumer goods (imported tools and
machinery). But remember that it is your personal research question which determines which
material flows you should focus on. Once arrived in your community, a first quick scan of
individual households and the whole village provides you with some first ideas about the most
relevant local non-biomass flows.
The main material categories of non-biomass flows are (1) metal ores and processed
metals, (2) non-metallic minerals and processed products, (3) primary and processed fossil
energy carriers, (4) other products of complex composition, and (5) imported or exported
waste for final treatment and disposal. Each of these categories (if, of course, relevant in
terms of mass) needs to be calculated along the following lines: the quantities domestically
extracted, and the quantities imported and exported. The attached template provides a matrix
for all the possible flows and stocks at the aggregate level you may come across in your
system. You may of course introduce more detailed sub-categories, in case you need them.
As we are dealing with rural systems, however, the most significant material
categories you will find in the field are probably non-metallic minerals (cement, sand and
gravel, bricks and stones for the construction of buildings and infrastructure), fossil energy
carriers (mainly fuel for transport, gas or coal for cooking and heating) and other products
consisting of a range of different materials. These include all types of tools, vehicles and
6 What you need for your analysis are some per capita figures on household energy consumption.

35
household appliances. In order to guide you the best way possible, we will discuss some of
the empirical difficulties concerning the flows for artefacts, consumer goods and fossil energy
carriers.
Flows for artefacts
Accounting for these flows can be quite demanding and requires some analytical
efforts in problem solving. The most striking problem is the fact that many products are
purchased rather infrequently with sometimes long intervals between two purchase moments.
This has obviously got to do with the fact that many artefacts like durable goods or
infrastructures may have a life span of various years. So, depending on your sampling period,
you may record large flows (e.g. when a new house is built) or none at all. Both scenarios,
however, are not representative for the general dynamics. To deal with this issue, we suggest
two ways of approaching the estimation of annual flows for artefacts; both of which may be
driven by different motivations (again, what is the research question) and actually lead to
fairly different results:
(1) Actual flows
Here we are interested in the actual flows occurring during a specific year, irrespective of
the fact whether it is a peak year or a year of low purchase. This requires the measurement or
estimation of only those flows occurring in this particular year. If a house is built you have to
estimate all materials extracted or imported for the construction of these flows and if one or
more vehicles are bought you account for the mass of these vehicles as an import of metal in
this particular year. For better illustration, let us look at the example of ‘constructing a stone
building’ which may help explain better the two different ways of estimating flows:
 Direct estimation of flows:
You can interview people directly on the flows. This means that you ask for imports and
domestic extraction. In many remote rural systems you will only have limited alternatives
on how minerals are imported. One option is to look at the travel frequency of a truck with
a certain cargo capacity. From this you are able to calculate the (more or less) exact stone,
brick or cement supplies needed for the construction of the house. Additionally you may
cross-check your data with interviewing a key person at the stone pit on the amount
extracted. Sometimes, the extraction of construction minerals may not be formally
organised but informally within the household. Hence, get a clear picture on the situation
first and find some knowledgeable people to ease your concerns!
 Indirect flow estimation via stocks:
The other method is the investigation of the building itself, followed by a subsequent
calculation of flows. You can measure the square meters and thickness of the walls and
find out about its material composition (bricks with plaster made of 75 percent sand, 25
percent cement). Then you calculate the total volume for each material and multiply it
with the density. As soon as you arrive at the weight of the house you can proceed to
interview the people on the origin of the materials used; which were imported and which
were extracted locally.

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We advise you to use both approaches for the purpose of cross-checking (if appropriate).
Figure 4.1. Schematic demonstration of the two ways for estimating flows
(2) Discounting approach
Here we are interested in the long term averages of these flows. This requires a
discounting approach where you estimate the weight of the stock (see indirect flow estimation
via stocks) and the average lifespan. Combining this information (dividing mass by lifetime in
years) yields an average annual flow. A simple example may serve as a useful reference: take
a simple stone house with 5 by 6 meters floor space outside dimensions. The walls are 50
centimetres thick and on average 2 meters high. The doors and windows you have to deduct.
The floor is just a tamped bottom. The roof is a pitched roof with wooden beams and roof
tiles. The stones account for approximately 47 tonnes, the tiles for 1.7 tonnes, and the wooden
roof structure for 1.3 tonnes. Altogether this simple house weighs 50 tonnes. Suppose that the
house has an average life span of 40 years. The average annual flow can therefore be
calculated at 1.25 tonnes7.
The house example shows that a dwelling contains both non-metallic minerals (stones
and tiles) as well as biomass (wooden frame). In the template, wood needs to be accounted for
under biomass. However, the method described here is appropriate to estimate the quantities
via an estimation of stocks. This can be cross-checked with your estimation of the annual
harvest from forest, in case the wood is extracted locally (see chapter 4.8.1.1 on biomass
flows). Keep in mind though that buildings and infrastructures may vary considerably
between different cultures and tailor-made solutions may be required for specific problems.
Houses in Europe, for example, are likely built of stone with an age of a few hundred years. In
the case of Theyern approximately 10 percent of the buildings were built between 1700 and
1900, 25 percent between 1901 and 1960 and 65 percent of the buildings were built after
1961. It is therefore quite challenging to estimate the average lifespan for buildings, as it
seems to be more a consequence of changing needs than a mere physical wear-out. Contrary
to this we find different housing structures in rural areas of Asia or Africa, where dwellings
are primarily wooden structures with grass or palm-thatched roofs. As they comprise organic
7 Please note that this discounting approach can be used for all artefacts since we have defined artefacts as items
that have a life span that is greater than one year.
Imports
Extraction
Direct estimation
of flows
Indirect estimation
of flows via stocks
Social system
Domestic environment

37
matter only, they need to be renewed more frequently. Hence, finding out the average lifespan
of these houses may probably constitute less of a problem.
So far we have provided you with some orientation on how to deal with flows related
to the construction of houses and infrastructures. But the flows related to maintenance are just
as important. Since these flows happen quite infrequently, what you need is to get an
overview. Let us think of the roofing of a house that needs repair. You would have to look at
the different roofing types and find out when the roofing material was last replaced or how
many square meters of the roof had to be repaired at what intervals. Estimate these flows and
decide if you want to record actual flows or discounted flows.
Consumer goods
Contrary to durable artefacts, consumer goods are purchased frequently during the
course of a year. Since they tend to last for less than a year, no discounting approach is
necessary. Non-biomass consumer goods entail a wide range of products and some of them
may be of marginal relevance only. Again, stick to your research interest! Sometimes you
may want to understand certain changes over time, especially if you are interested in
documenting the transition process from locally produced biomass-based products to
processed mineral-based products. Examples for consumer goods in rural contexts are salt,
fertiliser, consumer batteries or wrapping for food and beverages. The easiest way is to look at
the supply structure. You may be lucky to find just one shop where you could interview the
owner or observe the buying frequency for a couple of days. Or, there may only be a few
transport vehicles which import such products. You will generally find it quite easy to get
estimates on what the whole community buys during the course of the week or month. From
there, it is just a matter of multiplying the number in order to obtain the flow account for the
whole year.
Another, yet more time-consuming (and at times culturally inappropriate) method
includes the production of consumer diaries by the members of a household (see table 4.1.).
Consumer diaries are tables that help people record the purchase of the most relevant products
during a given period. Since income levels and household size are usually influential factors
for the per capita consumption, we advise you to create homogenous households clusters and
depending on the needed accuracy involve a 10-30% sample of households. Once done the
sample, you will have to find out about the composition and weight of these goods in order to
estimate the flows for that period. With this information and some knowledge on the annual
variations you will arrive at the annual flows.
Week: Name: Household:
Products Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday
Salt
(1 kg) 1
Fertilser
(50 kg) 7
Soft drinks
(1 litre glass bottle) 8 6
……
Table 4.1. Example of a simple consumer diary
This method was originally developed for consumer expenditure surveys at the national level,
but now also serves as an aid for calculating the purchase of non-biomass flows. You may

38
even generate data on biomass consumption that way (food, beverages, furniture, etc.) by just
additionally tracking if the product has been imported or extracted. These figures can then be
cross-checked with the data generated from agricultural production. Of course, instead of
setting up your own consumer survey you may also base your estimates on national consumer
data, if available and feasible.
Fossil energy carriers
Fossil energy carriers include a range of products from diesel, petrol, kerosene, coal
and gas. These are used for transport, agricultural equipment and other machinery, lighting,
cooking and heating. Data on fossil energy carriers are meaningful for understanding the
degree of dependency on imports, for getting the ratio between renewable and non-renewable
energy sources, and for understanding at which point of the continuum the local system is
positioned in its transition process from one regime to another. Accounting for fossil energy
carriers has a nice attribute too: it is a fairly easy undertaking and the data you obtain are
usually of high quality. Here we will present just a few of the several approaches for
generating this data:
First get an overview on what types of fossil energy carriers are used for which
purpose. Get an idea of the purchasing channels: find out, for instance, if single households
organise their purchase from outside or if there is a local supplier (petrol station, general
dealer, etc). Sometimes you may find it easier to get information on import flows rather than
on consumption. In most cases you will have to find out consumption patterns, which almost
always equal import flows (be aware if a local dealer provides fossil energy carriers to outside
residents of your local system; if this is the case, you will have to record the relevant share as
import/export).
The most straightforward way to survey fuel consumption is to interview car or truck
owners on their annual fuel consumption. In some cases people import several barrels a year;
so they probably know. However, you may also be less lucky. A quite common method
therefore to generate data on fuel consumption of vehicles is to take stock of the fleet (brand,
model, power, diesel/petrol version, year of manufacture, average consumption per km) and
ask for the annual mileage. You should be able to get this information with a few interviews
only. You can quite easily check consumption per km by asking the manufacturer. And
finally, do not forget to convert your litres (volume) to kilograms or tonnes (mass).
For agricultural equipment like tractors, tillers or also boats you may choose the same
approach. In many cases, however, you will have to ask for the operating hours instead of the
mileage. Kerosene for lighting and cooking is often best to be recorded via the number of
jerry cans (mainly 5 or 20 litres) purchased throughout the year. In case of use of liquefied
propane gas (LPGs) the number of refills or number of purchased containers in combination
with the loading capacity (best in kg) allows you to calculate the annual consumption. If fossil
fuels are used for heating, most people have a good knowledge of their annual household
consumption due to specific storage capacities and just very few refills throughout the year.
Coal might be known by the number of bags purchased per year. Just check what kind of coal
it is since there are big differences in factor weight and upper heating value.
Note: Since you might have to make estimations on stocks anyway (see chapter on artefacts)
it would be quite efficient to gather additional information on the energy consumption as
described above. By doing so, most of the information needed for the calculation of the fossil
energy carriers will then be readily available.

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4.8.2 Energy flows (incl. electricity)
Both, the material and energy dimensions of social metabolism usually have large
overlaps; due to the application of different measuring units (mass vs. energy content),
however, they both provide different insights. In socio-ecological studies concerned with the
social metabolism of local systems, we have a broader perspective on energy than e.g. in
conventional energy balances. While conventional energy balances often consider commercial
forms of energy only, the way we generate energy flows, such as food for humans and feed
for draft animals and firewood, provides us with important data on what are often considered
the most important energy flows in local rural systems (see Haberl 2001 on the basic concept
of energy flow accounting).
In our energy accounts we consider all energy-rich materials (all materials which can
be burned, that is, which have a heating value) as primary energy, regardless of how these
materials are used. This means that all domestic extraction, imports and exports of biomass
and fossil energy carriers are accounted for as energy flows. In addition to these flows which
have both a mass and an energy component and thus are also included in the material flow
account, imported or exported electricity and locally used wind and hydropower also need
consideration as energy flows. With the exception of these flows we can use the data collected
for the material flow account to calculate energy flow data. This is done by applying material-
specific and appropriate (with respect to moisture content) gross calorific values (upper
heating values) to convert mass flows into energy flows. This is done automatically in the
energy flow template. In case of electricity imports (which are not included in material flow
account), a simple and feasible way is to ask households about their annual electricity bills.
Since it is easy to get price information from one household or the electricity supplier you can
easily calculate the kWh from the annual cash spent on electricity (just use conversion factors
to get kilo joules). Sometimes you can get overall information on the electricity consumption
directly from the power supplier.

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5. Functional interrelations and headline indicators
5.1 Basic system description and system interrelations
Before we speak of indicators, it might be useful to remind ourselves once again of the
objectives of such a local study. As spelled out in the introduction, an important goal of this
manual is to help scholars obtain insights into the biophysical variables of a local rural
system, their interrelations and dynamics for a sustainability analysis. In other words, the aim
is to know how societies organise material and energy flows with nature and other societies
for their sustenance and reproduction, how they colonize land through the use of labour and
technology, and the consequences this has for sustainability (environmental and, to some
extent, also social). These insights are not only of interest for scholars, but may also prove
useful for development practitioners in order to design appropriate interventions into a social
system.
To this end, we might first want to remind ourselves what a ‘system’ is and what their
emergent properties are in the context of sustainability into which we want to intervene. In
section 3.2 we defined a social system as a hybrid between the cultural and material realm,
whose existence depends on its ability to constantly reproduce itself and its boundaries. In this
sense, a social system is in fact a ‘socioecological’ system that consists of “a group of
interacting components, operating together for a common purpose, capable of reacting as a
whole to external stimuli” (Spedding 1996). So to say, a systems approach recognises the
inter-linkages of the system’s components and processes that affect each other.
Let us take the example of a tree as a system whereby its components such as roots,
leaves and branches interact with each other for the common goal of sustaining and
reproducing the tree. The root, for example, would not exist on its own were it not for the
others. However, damage to the root will affect the other parts and inevitably the entire tree.
Thus, it is not sensible to look at one component by itself without recognising that what it
does and what happens to it will affect the other parts of the system or the whole. Having said
this, it would equally not be meaningful to classify the physical parts of a system as ‘sub-
systems’ since rarely any of these provide an independent function that could exist on their
own. Rather, relevant system functions cut across more than one physical component. This is
why a more meaningful way of classifying sub-systems might be based on their functional
differentiations. Thus, in the context of a tree, to look at the ‘water-transportation system’ or
the ‘energy system’ as functional subsystems would be more appropriate.
Similarly for social systems, we prefer a functional differentiation and classify the
systems as follows: resource use system, energy system, food system and time-use system.
While all of these relate to each other and offer an important function to the survival of the
whole social system, they can also be studied in their own right. An additional advantage of
such a functional classification is its direct usefulness for development practitioners. Rather
than focussing on individual (at times seemingly disperse) parts of the metabolic profile of a
society (though interesting for academia), our functional classification facilitates a more
practical understanding of the interrelation of system dynamics.
Higher level interventions - often in the form of regional development programmes -
aimed at improving and expanding the local infrastructure (such as roads, bridges, dams) are
prone to increase the annual throughput of resources even after the intervention ends, as
materials are needed for maintaining these infrastructures. At the same time, all kinds of
interventions, though to varying degrees, have an impact on the functional systems of the
community. For example, introducing transportation infrastructure into a village may bring

41
the market closer to the local people. This might fuel the production of cash crops for which
in turn more imports (e.g. fertiliser, machinery, etc.) are needed. Also, a growing dependence
on exports is likely to intensify the food production system which in turn will affect land use
and increase the need for more labour. With growing population trends more resources will be
required from the same territory; encroachment into new areas and eventual emigration will
be the consequence.
From the above description it might appear that socioecological systems are stable,
static and predictably following simple cause-effect patterns. One has to bear in mind that
here we are only focussing on the biophysical variables and their dynamics for a sustainability
analysis in ecological terms. However, in reality a socioecological system is rather complex
since, besides material and energy flows, it also includes information flows processed by
human “agents”8 and their institutions such as norms, practices and rules. Similar to
biophysical components, institutions create and maintain themselves dynamically through
processes of communication. Communications are not subject to the thermodynamic principle
of conservation; they create and maintain shared meaning, understanding and expectations,
including the societies’ own physical survival and well-being by a defined and organised flow
of matter and energy. Thus, in reality, socioecological systems are complex - manifested in a
combination and interaction of all these flows - biophysical and non-biophysical - across
temporal and spatial scales. In other words, the complexity and emergent properties of
socioecological system derives itself from the dynamic “set of interacting cybernetic
relationships and described in terms of stocks and flows, linked by (positive and negative)
feedback loops with different rates and different time delays between them” (van der Leeuw
& Aschan-Leygonie 2005).
However, this manual is not intended to support researchers capture all the dynamics
and emergent properties of complex socioecological systems. Our goal in this manual is to be
able to define a characteristic metabolic profile (see section 2.1) of a given social system in
terms of its stocks, material and energy use, and in the way they allocate their labour time
(across age and gender) to relevant subsistence and reproductive activities. Below we describe
briefly some of the relevant functional sub-systems mentioned previously along with
suggestions on a few useful indicators and the interpretative power they hold for sustainability
studies. The lists of indicators we present below are rather extended and they do provide
interesting insights on the systems biophysical organisation. However, some of them are
highly relevant when it comes to describe a society’s metabolic profile, such as population
density, livestock density, Domestic Material Consumption (DMC), Domestic Energy
Consumption (DEC), share of biomass in the total energy use and time in agriculture and food
production.
5.2 Societies’ stocks (including infrastructure)
We begin with a description of societies’ stocks that require to be reproduced by the
different functional systems. In section 3, we have discussed that the four main categories of a
society’s stocks are human population, livestock, territory and man-made artefacts. Every
society consists of a certain human and livestock population and is entitled to exploit a
spatially explicit territory, either through customary rights or legal entitlement. At the same
time, humans also accumulate artefacts and construct infrastructures such as individual
dwellings, buildings, streets, machines, boats, tools, wells, etc. All of these need to be
8 “Agents” reach far beyond “human actors”. Agents may be defined as an entity complex enough to have self-
governing features that is not only an internal driver - action loop but also a reflexive loop taking into account
other actors and being able to learn.

42
maintained at times and reproduced with the continuous investment of materials, energy and
human labour. The larger the stocks account of a social system, the higher the material,
energy and labour requirements. In this sense, the amount of a society’s stock account is also
indicative of the metabolic rate the system must organise for regular maintenance and
reproduction activities (see sections on resource and energy use below).
Here are some indicators for accounting for society’s stocks, both in its size and flows:
 Human Population is the total number of humans in the rural system, and disaggregated by
gender and age categories.
 Share of agricultural population (in percentage) is useful to understand the level of
dependency on land and agriculture as a source of income in relation to the non-agricultural
population.
 Population growth rate (in percentage) is the annual increase in population based on the
number of births, deaths, in- and out-migration. Additional information such as infant
mortality and total fertility rate are useful.
 Territory (in hectares) is the total area a society is entitled to exploit either by customary rights
or legal entitlement. It is useful to provide disaggregate figures on the territory according to
land cover and land use.
 Share of cropland from total area (in percentage) is an indicator to understand the land use
pattern and preference, and helps to calculate productivity.
 Population density (number/km²) per unit of area measures the pressure on land, and thus on
resources.
 Livestock (tons per capita) is calculated from the total weight of livestock owned by the
society and divided by the total human population.
 Livestock unit (number per unit area) is an indicator for available land for fodder production
per unit of livestock, and informs us of the scope to meet the fodder demand.
 Artefacts (tons per capita) is the weight of all artefacts, including individual dwellings, streets,
buildings, machines, etc. and divided by the total human population.
 Built up land (hectares per capita) is the area of land used up by construction (housing and
infrastructure) and divided by the total human population. It is an indicator for development in
terms of infrastructure.
5.3 The Material Use System
As mentioned previously, any social system relies on its environment for a continuous
inflow of materials for its maintenance and reproduction and for the absorption of outflows
such as wastes and emissions. The extracted materials provide societies with the necessary
nutrition, heating, cooking, and infrastructure. By and large, no rural society can subsist
entirely on the material inflows extracted domestically; they depend on imports, and thus on
trade. Usually, rural systems are a hybrid of subsistence and market economies, exporting

43
agricultural surplus or cash crops, and importing commodities not available or produced
locally.
We characterise the resource use system of a society by its metabolic profile. The
metabolic profile comprises of a number of key indicators which describe the quantity and
quality of annual resource flows. The corresponding metabolic rates refer to the quantity of
resource throughput per capita per year. By and large, rural systems live predominantly of
agricultural production; hence the share of biomass as a percentage of total resource
consumption is usually high as compared to other materials, and an indication of the level of
direct reliance on land and water bodies. The share of imports in the total domestic resource
consumption conveys the level of dependency on the outside world, and may also be
indicative of food security. Higher level interventions, development programmes, welfare
services and subsidies can alter the composition of materials and their ratios in any given
system with implications on medium and long-term sustainability.
Here are some useful indicators for understanding the resource use system and their
dynamics, all accounted for in tons per year:
 Domestic Extraction (DE) (per capita) of various material types (minerals, biomass including
fish and hunted animals) is an indicator of the level of activity in the primary sector for
subsistence and for the market.
 Domestic Extraction (DE) (per unit area) is a productivity indicator for various categories of
biomass (agricultural crops, fodder, fish, etc.).
 Imports (per capita) is the total quantity of incoming materials the society organises via trade
to meet its metabolic requirements.
 Direct Material Input (DMI) (per capita) is the sum of total imports and DE and indicative of
the total volume of resource throughput the social system requires in order to maintain its
metabolism.
 Import dependency (in percentage) is the share of imports per DMI and conveys the level of
outside dependency on trade for necessities.
 Exports (per capita) is the total quantity of materials (agricultural crops, dairy products,
livestock, handicraft, etc.) a society trades on the market as part of its metabolic arrangements
with other societies.
 Domestic Material Consumption (DMC) (per capita) is the material metabolic rate for the
actual consumption of materials in a society. It is calculated by subtracting exports from DMI.
 Share of biomass (in percentage) in DMC as compared to other materials used by the social
system. It informs us of the system’s level of reliance on land and renewables.
 Share of industrial products (in percentage) in DMC informs us of the system’s reliance on
manufactured commodities that must be obtained through imports.
 Material burden on the environment (DMC per unit area) is an indicator of the environmental
pressure a system creates due to its metabolism. Any kind of resource throughput must either
be extracted from the domestic environment, or is discarded as waste onto the domestic
environment, causing pressure on the available land.

44
5.4 The Energy System
Energy constitutes the basis for all life on earth, and the one single source is the sun.
Through the process of photosynthesis, solar energy is transformed into plant biomass which
then is consumed by animals across trophic levels in a complex web of life. The amount of
energy stored in plants is called ‘net primary production’ and is appropriated by all life forms
for their existence. Conversion of solar energy into plant biomass not only takes place on
land, but also in the oceans and other water bodies which gives way to marine life.
For most of the period of human existence, biomass was the single most important
source of energy, be it in the form of nutrition, or wood for cooking and heating. This way of
energy utilisation was the central feature of hunters and gatherers as well as pre-industrial
agrarian societies (see Sieferle 2001, Krausmann et. al.2008). While hunters and gatherers
drew their energy directly from the natural ecosystem around them, the agrarian
sociometabolic regime actively managed terrestrial ecosystems to increase the output of
useful biomass and energy, drawing on animal power for transportation, tilling, or water
harvesting; but that too in essence was dependent on animal fodder and feed. In this sense,
land and human labour was a limiting factor since it determined the quantity for the
production of biomass. Thus, human activity was based on renewable sources of energy and
had its limits when it came to extensive and intensive use of the environment. On the other
hand, it was a necessity to maintain land fertility so that the flow of plant biomass (energy) for
the needs of humans and livestock would continue. From the eighteenth century onwards,
humans discovered fossil energy (coal and petroleum), a formation of plant biomass trapped
under the earth for millennia that provided an additional source of energy to humans, a source
that was not area-dependent. Thus land and labour was no longer a limiting factor for
accelerating human activities to draw more and more resources and services from nature. The
biosphere did no longer constrain energy availability, but fuels could be drawn from earth’s
submerged biotic history. This allowed the development of advanced technical devices to
replace human labour and set most people free from food production.
Thus, an understanding of the energy system in rural local systems is highly relevant.
Some interesting questions in this context would be: how is the energy system organised? To
what extent does the local system depend on biomass and land for their energy supply? Where
do the other sources of energy come from (for lighting, mobility, running of machines)? How
vulnerable is the system to future energy supply shortages?
Here are some useful flow indicators for this domain, in Gigajoules (GJ) per year:
 Direct Energy Input (DEI) (per capita) is the sum of energy imported and domestically
extracted and is indicative of the total volume of energy throughput the social system requires
in maintaining its energy metabolism.
 Imports (per capita) is the total quantity of energy imported via energy carriers such as fossil
fuels, electricity, kerosene, etc. (subsidised or not).
 Import dependency (in percentage) is the total share of imports per DEI and conveys the level
of outside dependency for its energy metabolism.
 Electricity consumption (per capita) is indicative of the level of modernisation and the
dependency on electrical appliances and lighting.

45
 Exports (per capita) is the total quantity of energy contained in certain materials (agricultural
crops, dairy products, livestock, etc.) the society must sell on the market as part of its
metabolic arrangements with other societies.
 Domestic Energy Consumption (DEC) (per capita) represents the energy metabolic rate for the
actual consumption of energy in a society. It is calculated by subtracting exports from DEI.
 Share of fossil fuels (in percentage) of total DEC as compared to biomass or animal power
used by the social system. It is indicative of the systems’ dependency on non-renewables.
 Share of renewables (in percentage) of total DEC conveys the dependency on biomass for its
energy source.
 Technical Energy Supply (Total Primary Energy Supply) (per capita) comprises all technical
or commercial energy carriers (coal, oil, gas, fuelwood, electricity).
 Energy density (DEC per unit area) is an indicator of the environmental pressure a system
creates due to its metabolism. It is calculated by dividing the total DEC with the land area
available to the system.
5.5 The Food System
Analysing the strategies of food provision is central to the study of rural local systems.
For a better grasp of the entire functional system, we suggest to differentiate between two
functions: ‘food production’, on the one hand, and ‘food consumption’, on the other hand.
Food production and food consumption may refer to different system boundaries. For food
production, the relevant system boundary is the territory and eventual water bodies from
which food may be drawn. All food produced or directly consumed by animal livestock
within these system boundaries is counted as part of food production – even if it is finally
exported. It is important to avoid double-counting: only the plant biomass extracted by
livestock or humans should be counted, plus the harvest of wild animal biomass. Animal
biomass from livestock is not to be counted as a primary resource, but as a transfer flow
within the system. As for food production, some of the facts we are interested in are: what is
the fossil fuel input in the production of the key staple food? How much labour is invested per
unit area? What is the relative size of the crop system versus the livestock system? What is the
relation between food hunted/gathered versus produced by agro-and-horticulture (in weight,
calorific or protein terms, in time investment?
Here are some useful indicators on food production that are accounted for per year:
 Food production constitutes the entire production of edible plant and animal-based biomass
and is calculated in GJ.
 Share of animal products in total food production informs us of the significance of the
livestock system in food production. It is accounted for in GJ.
 Cropland per capita (hectares per capita): two variables are of interest here; the amount of
cropped area per year (net area) , on the one hand, and the cropped area incl. fallow land, one
the other hand (gross area).

46
 Cereal yield (per hectare) refers to the production of cereals (wheat, barley, etc.) per unit of
sown area. .
 Animal conversion efficiency is the total output of animal products per total feed intake. It is
accounted for in GJ per GJ.
 Food production from hunting, gathering and fishing refers to the calorific production of all
productive/extractive activities practised in the local system. It is calculated by adding the
nutritional energy from hunting, gathering and fishing to the food production energy. It is
accounted for in GJ.
 Food exports relative to food production, incl. hunting, gathering and fishing (in percentage)
is the share of nutritional energy exported from all the nutritional energy produced within the
system. It is calculated by dividing exports by the total calorific production.
 Land productivity (GJ per hectare) is calculated by dividing the annual agricultural production
by the entire agriculturally used land area..
 Labour per area (hours per hectare) is the amount of labour time invested in agricultural
production divided by the agriculturally used land area.
 Total food output per unit of agriculturally used area. It is accounted for in GJ per hectare.
 Labour productivity (MJ per hour) is an efficiency indicator of agricultural labour input. It is
calculated by dividing the entire food production by the amount of agricultural labour time.
 Biomass extraction per capita of the agriculturally active population (in GJ per capita).
 Food output per capita of the agriculturally active population relates to the edible biomass
ratio only.
Food consumption, on the other hand, refers to the demand side of food, whether it is
produced locally or imported from elsewhere. The system boundary is determined by the
human and livestock populations, respectively. Usually, human food consumption needs to be
accounted for separately and will include also “intermediate” flows such as milk, cheese or
meat from livestock.
Here are some useful indicators, which are always calculated in capita/day:
 Food consumption is the average amount of food consumed by the people in the local system.
 Share of nutritional energy from agriculture (in GJ) is the percentage of consumed nutritional
energy derived from local agricultural food production (incl. permanent cropping, fallow
cropping and kitchen gardens, if any). It is indicative of the system’s self-sufficiency and
calculated by dividing the nutritional energy consumed from agriculture by the total
nutritional energy consumed by the system.
 Share of nutritional energy from hunting, fishing and gathering (in GJ) is the percentage of
consumed nutritional energy that comes from hunting, fishing and gathering activities. It is an
indicator of the relative importance of non-agricultural food procurement and its calorific
contribution.

47
 Food imports (in GJ) is the percentage of consumed imported nutritional energy and indicative
of the system’s market dependency/self-sufficiency for meeting internal nutritional demands.
It is calculated by dividing the nutritional energy derived from imports by the total nutritional
energy consumed by the population.
5.6 Time Use System
Adding the time component to the MEFA framework reveals in fact two interesting
insights: first, in historic agrarian regimes we could see a direct link between the amount of
(human and animal) labour invested and land colonization. Still today, there exist some local
rural systems which apply human (and animal) labour only for agricultural production and
thus interaction with their natural environment. Therefore, investigating into the use and
intensity of agricultural labour gives us some idea on land pressure. A second and probably
more straight-forward insight we get from the Time Use System are the ‘social costs’ a certain
metabolic regime has to bear in terms of human labour and possibly uneven labour
distribution (particularly in terms of child labour and women’s labour burden). For all time
use indicators, distributional features are as interesting as overall flows.
Here are some indicators for this domain, which are all calculated in hours per capita
and day:
 Time invested in the person system across gender and age categories represents the sum total
of the following activities: sleeping, eating, rest and idleness, leisure activities, and study and
education.
 Time invested in the household system across gender and age categories represents the sum
total of the following activities: care for dependents, food preparation, house building, repair
& maintenance, and domestic chores.
 Time invested in the community system across gender and age categories represents the sum
total of the following activities: public sports and games, visiting friends and relatives,
ceremonies and festivals, and communal work and political participation.
 Time invested in the economic system across gender and age categories represents the sum
total of the following activities: agriculture (or subsistence/cash crop agriculture), hunting,
fishing, gathering, trading, wage work, kitchen garden, manufacture & handicraft, and animal
husbandry. The sum total would be regarded as labour time.
Here are some more useful indicators for gaining a better understanding of the time invested
into the food production system. They are all accounted for in percentage:
 Share of labour time in agriculture is the sum total of time invested in agriculture and animal
husbandry.
 Share of labour time in total domestic food production is the sum total of time invested in
agriculture, kitchen gardening, hunting, gathering, fishing, and animal husbandry.
 Share of children’s time in agriculture accounts for the time invested in agriculture and animal
husbandry by children between the ages 6 to 16.

48
6. Post Script
In the appendix below, you will find excel-templates that can guide data collection and its
organisation into excel sheets. Later, we should soon be uploading programmed excel sheets
that you can download and work into them directly, together with conversion factors and
formulae. In the appendix, we also attach some filled in templates on material, energy, time
and society’s stocks for some of the cases we have worked with. This way, you can get an
idea of the estimates of probable numbers, and a feeling for them. The appendix also contains
selected abstracts of published papers in this direction, in case you wish to read some of the
work already done in greater detail. However, a full paper on some of the cases we have
compared rather recently can be downloaded as a social ecology working paper number
121, “Sociometabolic regimes in indigenous communities and the crucial role of working
time: A comparison of case studies” (http://www.uni-klu.ac.at/socec/inhalt/1818.htm).
The local studies manual is a work in progress with several sections still to come in, such as
expanding on complex adaptive systems, integrating monetary units with biophysical
indicators and to suggest how one can meaningfully interpret these indicators for a
sustainability analysis and development goals. There is also a plan to introduce methods for
undertaking a stakeholder analysis to be able to evaluate the sustainability of the system in
terms of social processes and dynamics. Thus, we are grateful for any feedback for improving
this manual as it stands in terms of comprehension, and practical application. You can email
your feedback to:
Simron Jit Singh: simron.singh@uni-klu.ac.at

49
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Appendix 1: Abstracts of selected publications
Sociometabolic regimes in indigenous communities and the crucial role of working time:
A comparison of case studies
Marina Fischer-Kowalski, Simron J.Singh, Lisa Ringhofer, Clemens M. Grünbühel, Christian
Lauk, Alexander Remesch (2010)
Published as Social Ecology Working Paper 121
http://www.uni-klu.ac.at/socec/inhalt/1818.htm
Abstract
In the context of the broad discussion of visions for a more sustainable future, we present
findings from four case studies of indigenous communities in various world regions. Guided
by Sieferle’s theory of sociometabolic regime transitions, we compare their profiles in
material and energy use, and their time use patterns. Each of these subsistence economy based
communities bears some traits marked by interventions from higher scale levels (such as
development programs, health services or transport infrastructure) connecting them in some
way to industrial society. But apart from these features, the endogenous characteristics of the
local communities correspond well to what should be expected according to the theory of
sociometabolic regimes: low energy consumption based almost exclusively on biomass as
well as low rates of material use, and working time patterns according to Sahlin’s “original
affluent societies” and Boserup’s hypothesis of labour intensification. In conclusion, we
suggest that traditional development and aid policies should be aware of the intricate link
between demography, labour time, land degradation and subsistence when aiming for
sustainable interventions and human well-being.
***
Fishing, Foraging and Farming in the Bolivian Amazon: On a Local Society in Transition
Lisa Ringhofer (2010), Springer, Netherlands. (Book)
Abstract
Empirical in character, this book analyses in detail how the indigenous Tsimane’ of Campo
Bello, a remote village in the Bolivian Amazon, interact with their natural environment.
Following a common methodological framework - the material and energy flow (MEFA)
approach - it gives a detailed account of the local peoples’ management of energy and
material resources, land and time use and provides biophysical sustainability indicators. The
local community described in this publication stands for the many thousands of rural systems
in developing countries that, in light of an ever more globalising world, are currently steering
a similar - but maybe differently-paced - development course. This book presents
methodological and conceptual advances in the field of sustainability science and provides a
vital reader for students and researchers of social ecology, ecological anthropology, and
environmental sociology. Since the book also intends to improve our understanding of the
possible sustainability impacts of local/regional development interventions, it equally
contributes to improving practical development work methods.

54
***
Milk, manure and muscle power. Livestock and the transformation of pre-industrial
agriculture in Central Europe
Fridolin Krausmann (2004). Published in Human Ecology 32(6), 735-773
Abstract
The process of industrial modernization was characterized by fundamental changes in the
interaction of socio-economic systems with their natural environment. This paper reflects on
this transformation process from an ecologically informed perspective, focusing on the
interrelation of local populations, their specific mode of production, and the (agro-)ecosystem.
Four Austrian villages in different agro-ecological zones serve as case studies for a
comparative analysis of different types of farming systems and changes in these systems over
time from the early 19th century to present. The paper presents empirical results and aims at
contributing to the discussion of relevant topics in human ecology and environmental history.
Focusing on the changing significance of livestock in agricultural production systems, it
addresses issues including: the relation of population density to intensity of land use; soil
fertility and nutrient management; the sustainability of pre-industrial agriculture; and the
gradual opening of locally closed cycles during industrialization and its effect on the
landscape.
See also:
Krausmann, F., (2008). Land use and socioeconomic metabolism in pre-industrial
agricultural systems: Four nineteenth century Austrian villages in comparison. IFF
Social Ecology Working Paper No. 72. Available for download at http://www.uni-
klu.ac.at/socec/inhalt/1818.htm
Cunfer, G. and Krausmann, F., (2009): Sustaining soil fertility: Agricultural practice in the
Old and New Worlds, Global Environment 4, 9-43.
***
Environmental Relations and Bio-physical Transition: The case of Trinket Island
Simron Jit Singh & Clemens M. Grünbühel (2003).
Published in Geografiska Annaler, 85B (4).
Abstract
To what extent is an island economy cut off from the rest of the world? Defined as a mass of
land bounded off by water, island societies connect and exchange with their surroundings
rather intensely. Based on empirical research, the paper explores the role of a ‘remote’ island
society on Trinket in generating or sheltering itself from the process of globalisation in which
contextually given borders are transgressed and displaced. To this end, we apply the concepts
of societal metabolism and colonising natural processes operationalised by Material and
Energy Flow Analysis (MEFA), and Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production
(HANPP) respectively. Using these biophysical indicators, we describe the transition from a
metabolism based upon the natural environment to metabolism based on exchange with other

55
societies. Data presented in this paper further reveals a process of industrialisation and
integration into the global market of a so called ‘closed’ and ‘inaccessible’ island society.
***
Socioeconomic Metabolism and Colonization of Natural Processes in SangSaeng Village:
Material and Energy Flows, Land Use, and Cultural Change in Northeast Thailand
Clemens M. Grünbühel, Helmut Haberl, Heinz Schandl, and VerenaWiniwarter (2003)
Published in Human Ecology, Vol. 31(1).
Conceptualizing environmental problems as sustainability problems contributing to local and
global environmental change requires an understanding of how societies cope with their
natural environment. Indicators for society–nature interactions are fairly well developed for
national-level analyses. This study adapts some of these indicators to the local level and
relates them to a qualitative assessment of economic and cultural change in a single
community. Indicators are derived from material and energy flow accounting methods and
address two major objectives: Firstly, to identify mutual influences between the global and the
local level. Secondly, to assess future potentials of environmental pressures and impacts that
can be expected to occur as such communities follow a path of further modernization. This
study of a small rice-farming community in Northeast Thailand deals with physical as well as
sociocultural aspects in order to produce a broad picture of society–nature relations. The
indicators developed portray a society in the midst of transition and rapid modernization. This
becomes apparent when comparing the results to those of similar studies in traditional and
industrial societies. What we see is a community struggling to adapt to global influences,
while at the same time maintaining subsistence with traditional coping mechanisms.
***
Social metabolism and labour in a local context: Changing environmental relations on
Trinket Island
Simron Jit Singh, Clemens M. Grünbühel, Heinz Schandl, and Niels Schulz (2001). Published
in Population and Environment, Vol. 23(1).
Abstract
From a material and energetic perspective, this paper outlines the patterns of society-nature
interactions, of a local horticultural, hunter-and-gatherer population inhabiting a remote island
between India and Indonesia. Based on empirical research, we present several indicators to
show an economic portfolio of a local society that combines horticulture, hunting and
gathering activities with elements of industrialisation and market economy. In describing
these environmental relations, the study narrows its focus to the use of three socio-ecological
concepts, namely socio-economic metabolism, colonising natural processes, and the energetic
return on investment. Using these concepts, we show the dynamics of social and
environmental transformation at a local level and the consequences this may have for
sustainability.

56
Appendix 2: Prints of excel templates (blank)

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Appendix 3: Exemplary excel templates (filled)

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WORKING PAPERS SOCIAL ECOLOGY
Band 1
Umweltbelastungen in Österreich als Folge mensch-
lichen Handelns. Forschungsbericht gem. m. dem Öster-
reichischen Ökologie-Institut. Fischer-Kowalski, M., Hg.
(1987)
Band 2*
Environmental Policy as an Interplay of Professionals
and Movements - the Case of Austria. Paper to the ISA
Conference on Environmental Constraints and Opportu-
nities in the Social Organisation of Space, Udine 1989.
Fischer-Kowalski, M. (1989)
Band 3*
Umwelt &Öffentlichkeit. Dokumentation der gleichnami-
gen Tagung, veranstaltet vom IFF und dem Österreichi-
schen Ökologie-Institut in Wien, (1990)
Band 4*
Umweltpolitik auf Gemeindeebene. Politikbezogene
Weiterbildung für Umweltgemeinderäte. Lackner, C.
(1990)
Band 5*
Verursacher von Umweltbelastungen. Grundsätzliche
Überlegungen zu einem mit der VGR verknüpfbaren
Emittenteninformationssystem. Fischer-Kowalski, M.,
Kisser, M., Payer, H., Steurer A. (1990)
Band 6*
Umweltbildung in Österreich, Teil I: Volkshochschulen.
Fischer-Kowalski, M., Fröhlich, U.; Harauer, R., Vymazal R.
(1990)
Band 7
Amtliche Umweltberichterstattung in Österreich. Fischer-
Kowalski, M., Lackner, C., Steurer, A. (1990)
Band 8*
Verursacherbezogene Umweltinformationen. Bausteine
für ein Satellitensystem zur österr. VGR. Dokumentation
des gleichnamigen Workshop, veranstaltet vom IFF und
dem Österreichischen Ökologie-Institut, Wien (1991)
Band 9*
A Model for the Linkage between Economy and Envi-
ronment. Paper to the Special IARIW Conference on
Environmental Accounting, Baden 1991. Dell'Mour, R.,
Fleissner, P. , Hofkirchner, W.,; Steurer A. (1991)
Band 10
Verursacherbezogene Umweltindikatoren - Kurzfassung.
Forschungsbericht gem. mit dem Österreichischen
Ökologie-Institut. Fischer-Kowalski, M., Haberl, H., Payer,
H.; Steurer, A., Zangerl-Weisz, H. (1991)
Band 11
Gezielte Eingriffe in Lebensprozesse. Vorschlag für
verursacherbezogene Umweltindikatoren. For-
schungsbericht gem. m. dem Österreichischen Öko-
logie-Institut. Haberl, H. (1991)
Band 12
Gentechnik als gezielter Eingriff in Lebensprozesse.
Vorüberlegungen für verursacherbezogene Umweltindi-
katoren. Forschungsbericht gem. m. dem Österr. Ökolo-
gie-Institut. Wenzl, P.; Zangerl-Weisz, H. (1991)
Band 13
Transportintensität und Emissionen. Beschreibung
österr. Wirtschaftssektoren mittels Input-Output-Mo-
dellierung. Forschungsbericht gem. m. dem Österr.
Ökologie-Institut. Dell'Mour, R.; Fleissner, P.; Hofkirchner,
W.; Steurer, A. (1991)
Band 14
Indikatoren für die Materialintensität der öster-
reichischen Wirtschaft. Forschungsbericht gem. m. dem
Österreichischen Ökologie-Institut. Payer, H. unter Mitar-
beit von K. Turetschek (1991)
Band 15
Die Emissionen der österreichischen Wirtschaft. Syste-
matik und Ermittelbarkeit. Forschungsbericht gem. m.
dem Österr. Ökologie-Institut. Payer, H.; Zangerl-Weisz,
H. unter Mitarbeit von R.Fellinger (1991)
Band 16
Umwelt als Thema der allgemeinen und politischen
Erwachsenenbildung in Österreich. Fischer-Kowalski M.,
Fröhlich, U.; Harauer, R.; Vymazal, R. (1991)
Band 17
Causer related environmental indicators - A contribution
to the environmental satellite-system of the Austrian
SNA. Paper for the Special IARIW Conference on Envi-
ronmental Accounting, Baden 1991. Fischer-Kowalski, M.,
Haberl, H., Payer, H., Steurer, A. (1991)
Band 18
Emissions and Purposive Interventions into Life Proc-
esses - Indicators for the Austrian Environmental Ac-
counting System. Paper to the ÖGBPT Workshop on
Ecologic Bioprocessing, Graz 1991. Fischer-Kowalski M.,
Haberl, H., Wenzl, P., Zangerl-Weisz, H. (1991)
Band 19
Defensivkosten zugunsten des Waldes in Österreich.
Forschungsbericht gem. m. dem Österreichischen Insti-
tut für Wirtschaftsforschung. Fischer-Kowalski et al.
(1991)
Band 20*
Basisdaten für ein Input/Output-Modell zur Kopplung
ökonomischer Daten mit Emissionsdaten für den Be-
reich des Straßenverkehrs. Steurer, A. (1991)
Band 22
A Paradise for Paradigms - Outlining an Information
System on Physical Exchanges between the Economy
and Nature. Fischer-Kowalski, M., Haberl, H., Payer, H.
(1992)
Band 23
Purposive Interventions into Life-Processes - An Attempt
to Describe the Structural Dimensions of the Man-
Animal-Relationship. Paper to the Internat. Conference
on "Science and the Human-Animal-Relationship", Am-
sterdam 1992. Fischer-Kowalski, M., Haberl, H. (1992)
Band 24
Purposive Interventions into Life Processes: A Neg-
lected "Environmental" Dimension of the Society-Nature
Relationship. Paper to the 1. Europ. Conference of Soci-
ology, Vienna 1992. Fischer-Kowalski, M., Haberl, H. (1992)
Mit * gekennzeichnete Bände sind leider nicht
mehr erhältlich.

WORKING PAPERS SOCIAL ECOLOGY
Band 25
Informationsgrundlagen struktureller Ökologisierung.
Beitrag zur Tagung "Strategien der Kreislaufwirtschaft:
Ganzheitl. Umweltschutz/Integrated Environmental Pro-
tection", Graz 1992. Steurer, A., Fischer-Kowalski, M.
(1992)
Band 26
Stoffstrombilanz Österreich 1988. Steurer, A. (1992)
Band 28*
Naturschutzaufwendungen in Österreich. Gutachten für
den WWF Österreich. Payer, H. (1992)
Band 29*
Indikatoren der Nachhaltigkeit für die Volkswirt-
schaftliche Gesamtrechnung - angewandt auf die Regi-
on. Payer, H. (1992). In: KudlMudl SonderNr.
1992:Tagungsbericht über das Dorfsymposium "Zukunft der
Region - Region der Zukunft?"
Band 31*
Leerzeichen. Neuere Texte zur Anthropologie. Macho, T.
(1993)
Band 32
Metabolism and Colonisation. Modes of Production and
the Physical Exchange between Societies and Nature.
Fischer-Kowalski, M., Haberl, H. (1993)
Band 33
Theoretische Überlegungen zur ökologischen Bedeu-
tung der menschlichen Aneignung von Nettoprimärpro-
duktion. Haberl, H. (1993)
Band 34
Stoffstrombilanz Österreich 1970-1990 - Inputseite. Steu-
rer, A. (1994)
Band 35
Der Gesamtenergieinput des Sozio-ökonomischen Sys-
tems in Österreich 1960-1991. Zur Erweiterung des Beg-
riffes "Energieverbrauch". Haberl, H. (1994)
Band 36
Ökologie und Sozialpolitik. Fischer-Kowalski, M. (1994)
Band 37*
Stoffströme der Chemieproduktion 1970-1990. Payer, H.,
unter Mitarbeit von Zangerl-Weisz, H. und Fellinger, R.
(1994)
Band 38*
Wasser und Wirtschaftswachstum. Untersuchung von
Abhängigkeiten und Entkoppelungen, Wasserbilanz
Österreich 1991. Hüttler, W., Payer, H. unter Mitarbeit von
H. Schandl (1994)
Band 39
Politische Jahreszeiten. 12 Beiträge zur politischen
Wende 1989 in Ostmitteleuropa. Macho, T. (1994)
Band 40
On the Cultural Evolution of Social Metabolism with
Nature. Sustainability Problems Quantified. Fischer-
Kowalski, M., Haberl, H. (1994)
Band 41
Weiterbildungslehrgänge für das Berufsfeld ökologi-
scher Beratung. Erhebung u. Einschätzung der An-
gebote in Österreich sowie von ausgewählten Beispielen
in Deutschland, der Schweiz, Frankreich, England und
europaweiten Lehrgängen. Rauch, F. (1994)
Band 42
Soziale Anforderungen an eine nachhaltige Entwicklung.
Fischer-Kowalski, M., Madlener, R., Payer, H., Pfeffer, T.,
Schandl, H. (1995)
Band 43
Menschliche Eingriffe in den natürlichen Energiefluß von
Ökosystemen. Sozio-ökonomische Aneignung von Nettopri-
märproduktion in den Bezirken Österreichs. Haberl, H.
(1995)
Band 44
Materialfluß Österreich 1990. Hüttler, W., Payer, H.;
Schandl, H. (1996)
Band 45
National Material Flow Analysis for Austria 1992. Soci-
ety’s Metabolism and Sustainable Development. Hüttler,
W. Payer, H., Schandl, H. (1997)
Band 46
Society’s Metabolism. On the Development of Concepts
and Methodology of Material Flow Analysis. A Review of
the Literature. Fischer-Kowalski, M. (1997)
Band 47
Materialbilanz Chemie-Methodik sektoraler Materialbi-
lanzen. Schandl, H., Weisz, H. Wien (1997)
Band 48
Physical Flows and Moral Positions. An Essay in Mem-
ory of Wildavsky. A. Thompson, M. (1997)
Band 49
Stoffwechsel in einem indischen Dorf. Fallstudie Merkar.
Mehta, L., Winiwarter, V. (1997)
Band 50+
Materialfluß Österreich- die materielle Basis der Öster-
reichischen Gesellschaft im Zeitraum 1960-1995.
Schandl, H. (1998)
Band 51+
Bodenfruchtbarkeit und Schädlinge im Kontext von
Agrargesellschaften. Dirlinger, H., Fliegenschnee, M.,
Krausmann, F., Liska, G., Schmid, M. A. (1997)
Band 52+
Der Naturbegriff und das Gesellschaft-Natur-Verhältnis
in der frühen Soziologie. Lutz, J. Wien (1998)
Band 53+
NEMO: Entwicklungsprogramm für ein Nationales Emis-
sionsmonitoring. Bruckner, W., Fischer-Kowalski, M.,
Jorde, T. (1998)
Band 54+
Was ist Umweltgeschichte? Winiwarter, V. (1998)
Mit + gekennzeichnete Bände sind unter
http://www.uni-klu.ac.at/socec/inhalt/1818.htm
Im PDF-Format downloadbar.

WORKING PAPERS SOCIAL ECOLOGY
Band 55+
Agrarische Produktion als Interaktion von Natur und
Gesellschaft: Fallstudie SangSaeng. Grünbühel, C. M.,
Schandl, H., Winiwarter, V. (1999)
Band 57+
Colonizing Landscapes: Human Appropriation of Net
Primary Production and its Influence on Standing Crop
and Biomass Turnover in Austria. Haberl, H., Erb, K.H.,
Krausmann, F., Loibl, W., Schulz, N. B., Weisz, H. (1999)
Band 58+
Die Beeinflussung des oberirdischen Standing Crop und
Turnover in Österreich durch die menschliche Gesell-
schaft. Erb, K. H. (1999)
Band 59+
Das Leitbild "Nachhaltige Stadt". Astleithner, F. (1999)
Band 60+
Materialflüsse im Krankenhaus, Entwicklung einer Input-
Output Methodik. Weisz, B. U. (2001)
Band 61+
Metabolismus der Privathaushalte am Beispiel Öster-
reichs. Hutter, D. (2001)
Band 62+
Der ökologische Fußabdruck des österreichischen Au-
ßenhandels. Erb, K.H., Krausmann, F., Schulz, N. B. (2002)
Band 63+
Material Flow Accounting in Amazonia: A Tool for Sus-
tainable Development. Amann, C., Bruckner, W., Fischer-
Kowalski, M., Grünbühel, C. M. (2002)
Band 64+
Energieflüsse im österreichischen Landwirtschaftssek-
tor 1950-1995, Eine humanökologische Untersuchung.
Darge, E. (2002)
Band 65+
Biomasseeinsatz und Landnutzung Österreich 1995-
2020. Haberl, H.; Krausmann, F.; Erb, K.H.;Schulz, N. B.;
Adensam, H. (2002)
Band 66+
Der Einfluss des Menschen auf die Artenvielfalt. Gesell-
schaftliche Aneignung von Nettoprimärproduktion als
Pressure-Indikator für den Verlust von Biodiversität
.
Haberl, H., Fischer-Kowalski, M., Schulz, N. B., Plutzar, C.,
Erb, K.H., Krausmann, F., Loibl, W., Weisz, H.; Sauberer,
N., Pollheimer, M. (2002)
Band 67+
Materialflussrechnung London
.
Bongardt, B. (2002)
Band 68+
Gesellschaftliche Stickstoffflüsse des österreichischen
Landwirtschaftssektors 1950-1995, Eine humanökologi-
sche Untersuchung. Gaube, V. (2002)
Band 69+
The transformation of society's natural relations: from
the agrarian to the industrial system. Research strategy
for an empirically informed approach towards a Euro-
pean Environmental History. Fischer-Kowalski, M., Kraus-
mann, F., Schandl, H. (2003)
Band 70+
Long Term Industrial Transformation: A Comparative
Study on the Development of Social Metabolism and
Land Use in Austria and the United Kingdom 1830-2000.
Krausmann, F., Schandl, H., Schulz, N. B. (2003)
Band 72+
Land Use and Socio-economic Metabolism in Pre-
industrial Agricultural Systems: Four Nineteenth-century
Austrain Villages in Comparison. Krausmann, F. (2008)
Band 73+
Handbook of Physical Accounting Measuring bio-
physical dimensions of socio-economic activities MFA –
EFA – HANPP. Schandl, H., Grünbühel, C. M., Haberl, H.,
Weisz, H. (2004)
Band 74+
Materialflüsse in den USA, Saudi Arabien und der
Schweiz. Eisenmenger, N.; Kratochvil, R.; Krausmann, F.;
Baart, I.; Colard, A.; Ehgartner, Ch.; Eichinger, M.; Hempel,
G.; Lehrner, A.; Müllauer, R.; Nourbakhch-Sabet, R.; Paler,
M.; Patsch, B.; Rieder, F.; Schembera, E.; Schieder, W.;
Schmiedl, C.; Schwarzlmüller, E.; Stadler, W.; Wirl, C.;
Zandl, S.; Zika, M. (2005)
Band 75+
Towards a model predicting freight transport from mate-
rial flows. Fischer-Kowalski, M. (2004)
Band 76+
The physical economy of the European Union: Cross-
country comparison and determinants of material con-
sumption.
Weisz, H., Krausmann, F., Amann, Ch., Eisen-
menger, N., Erb, K.H., Hubacek, K., Fischer-Kowalski, M.
(2005)
Band 77+
Arbeitszeit und Nachhaltige Entwicklung in Europa:
Ausgleich von Produktivitätsgewinn in Zeit statt Geld?
Proinger, J. (2005)
Band 78+
Sozial-Ökologische Charakteristika von Agrarsystemen.
Ein globaler Überblick und Vergleich.
Lauk, C. (2005)
Band 79+
Verbrauchsorientierte Abrechnung von Wasser als Wa-
ter-Demand-Management-Strategie. Eine Analyse anhand
eines Vergleichs zwischen Wien und Barcelona.
Ma-
chold, P. (2005)
Band 80+
Ecology, Rituals and System-Dynamics. An attempt to
model the Socio-Ecological System of Trinket Island.
Wildenberg, M. (2005)
Band 81+
Southeast Asia in Transition. Socio-economic transi-
tions, environmental impact and sustainable develop-
ment. Fischer-Kowalski, M., Schandl, H., Grünbühel, C.,
Haas, W., Erb, K-H., Weisz, H., Haberl, H. (2004)
Helmut Haberl
Band 83+
HANPP-relevante Charakteristika von Wanderfeldbau
und anderen Langbrachesystemen. Lauk, C. (2006)
Band 84+
Management unternehmerischer Nachhaltigkeit mit Hilfe
der Sustainability Balanced Scorecard. Zeitlhofer, M.
(2006)
Band 85+
Nicht-nachhaltige Trends in Österreich: Maßnahmenvor-
schläge zum Ressourceneinsatz.
Haberl, H., Jasch, C.,
Adensam, H., Gaube, V. (2006)
Band 87+
Accounting for raw material equivalents of traded goods.
A comparison of input-output approaches in physical,
monetary, and mixed units.
Weisz, H. (2006)

WORKING PAPERS SOCIAL ECOLOGY
Band 88+
Vom Materialfluss zum Gütertransport. Eine Analyse
anhand der EU15 – Länder (1970-2000).
Rainer, G. (2006)
Band 89+
Nutzen der MFA für das Treibhausgas-Monitoring im
Rahmen eines Full Carbon Accounting-Ansatzes; Feasi-
bilitystudie; Endbericht zum Projekt BMLFUW-
UW.1.4.18/0046-V/10/2005. Erb, K.-H., Kastner, T., Zandl,
S., Weisz, H., Haberl, H., Jonas, M., (2006)
Band 90+
Local Material Flow Analysis in Social Context in Tat
Hamelt, Northern Mountain Region, Vietnam. Hobbes, M.;
Kleijn, R. (2006)
Band 91+
Auswirkungen des thailändischen logging ban auf die
Wälder von Laos. Hirsch, H. (2006)
Band 92+
Human appropriation of net primary produktion (HANPP)
in the Philippines 1910-2003: a socio-ecological analysis.
Kastner, T. (2007)
Band 93+
Landnutzung und landwirtschaftliche Entscheidungs-
strukturen. Partizipative Entwicklung von Szenarien für
das Traisental mit Hilfe eines agentenbasierten Modells.
Adensam, H., V. Gaube, H. Haberl, J. Lutz, H. Reisinger, J.
Breinesberger, A. Colard, B. Aigner, R. Maier, Punz, W.
(2007)
Band 94+
The Work of Konstantin G. Gofman and
colleagues: An early example of Material Flow Analysis
from the Soviet Union. Fischer-Kowalski, M.; Wien (2007)
Band 95+
Partizipative Modellbildung, Akteurs- und Ökosystem-
analyse in Agrarintensivregionen; Schlußbericht des
deutsch-österreichischen Verbundprojektes. Newig, J.,
Gaube, V., Berkhoff, K., Kaldrack, K., Kastens, B., Lutz, J.,
Schlußmeier B., Adensam, H., Haberl, H., Pahl-Wostl, C.,
Colard, A., Aigner, B., Maier, R., Punz, W.; Wien (2007)
Band 96+
Rekonstruktion der Arbeitszeit in der Landwirtschaft
im 19. Jahrhundert am Beispiel von Theyern in Nie-
derösterreich. Schaschl, E.; Wien (2007)
Band 98+
Local Material Flow Analysis in Social Context at the
forest fringe in the Sierra Madre, the Philippines.
Hobbes, M., Kleijn, R. (Hrsg); Wien (2007)
Band 99+
Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production
(HANPP) in Spain, 1955-2003: A socio-ecological
analysis. Schwarzlmüller, E.; Wien (2008)
Band 100+
Scaling issues in long-term socio-ecological biodi-
versity research: A review of European cases. Dirn-
böck, T., Bezák, P., Dullinger S., Haberl, H., Lotze-
Campen, H., Mirtl, M., Peterseil, J., Redpath, S., Singh,
S., Travis, J., Wijdeven, S.M.J.; Wien (2008)
Band 101+
Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production
(HANPP) in the United Kingdom, 1800-2000: A socio-
ecological analysis. Musel, A.; Wien (2008)
Band 102 +
Wie kann Wissenschaft gesellschaftliche Verände-
rung bewirken? Eine Hommage an Alvin Gouldner,
und ein Versuch, mit seinen Mitteln heutige Klima-
politik zu verstehen. Fischer-Kowalski, M.; Wien (2008)
Band 103+
Sozialökologische Dimensionen der österreichischen
Ernährung – Eine Szenarienanalyse. Lackner, Maria;
Wien (2008)
Band 104+
Fundamentals of Complex Evolving Systems: A Primer.
Weis, Ekke; Wien (2008)
Band 105+
Umweltpolitische Prozesse aus diskurstheoretischer
Perspektive: Eine Analyse des Südtiroler Feinstaubprob-
lems von der Problemkonstruktion bis zur Umsetzung
von Regulierungsmaßnahmen. Paler, Michael; Wien
(2008)
Band 106+
Ein integriertes Modell für Reichraming. Partizipative
Entwicklung von Szenarien für die Gemeinde Reich-
raming (Eisenwurzen) mit Hilfe eines agentenbasierten
Landnutzungsmodells. Gaube, V., Kaiser, C., Widenberg,
M., Adensam, H., Fleissner, P., Kobler, J., Lutz, J.,
Smetschka, B., Wolf, A., Richter, A., Haberl, H.; Wien (2008)
Band 107+
Der soziale Metabolismus lokaler Produktionssysteme:
Reichraming in der oberösterreichischen Eisenwurzen
1830-2000. Gingrich, S., Krausmann, F.; Wien (2008)
Band 108+
Akteursanalyse zum besseren Verständnis der Entwick-
lungsoptionen von Bioenergie in Reichraming. Eine
sozialökologische Studie. Vrzak, E.; Wien (2008)
Band 109+
Direktvermarktung in Reichraming aus sozial-
ökologischer Perspektive. Zeitlhofer, M.; Wien (2008)
Band 110+
CO
2
-Bilanz der Tomatenproduktion: Analyse acht ver-
schiedener Produktionssysteme in Österreich, Spanien
und Italien. Theurl, M.; Wien (2008)
Band 111+
Die Rolle von Arbeitszeit und Einkommen bei Rebound-
Effekten in Dematerialisierungs- und Dekarbonisie-
rungsstrategien. Eine Literaturstudie. Bruckner, M.; Wien
(2008)
Band 112+
Von Kommunikation zu materiellen Effekten -
Ansatzpunkte für eine sozial-ökologische Lesart von
Luhmanns Theorie Sozialer Systeme. Rieder, F.; Wien
(2008)
Band 113+
(in Vorbereitung)

WORKING PAPERS SOCIAL ECOLOGY
Band 114+
Across a Moving Threshold: energy, carbon and the
efficiency of meeting global human development needs.
Steinberger, J. K., Roberts, .J.T.; Wien (2008)
Band 115
(in Vorbereitung)
Band 116+
Eating the Planet: Feeding and fuelling the world sus-
tainably, fairly and humanely– a scoping study. Erb, K-H.,
Haberl, H., Krausmann, F., Lauk, C., Plutzar, C., Steinber-
ger, J.K., Müller, C., Bondeau, A., Waha, K., Pollack, G.;
Wien (2009)
Band 117+
Gesellschaftliche Naturverhältnisse: Energiequellen und
die globale Transformation des gesellschaftlichen Stoff-
wechsels. Krausmann, F., Fischer-Kowalski, M.; Wien
(2010)
Band 118
(in Vorbereitung)
Band 119+
Das nachhaltige Krankenhaus: Erprobungsphase. Weisz,
U., Haas, W., Pelikan, J.M., Schmied, H., Himpelmann, M.,
Purzner, K., Hartl, S., David, H.; Wien (2009)
Band 120+
LOCAL STUDIES MANUAL
A researcher’s guide for investigating the
social metabolism of local rural systems. Singh, S.J.,
Ringhofer, L., Haas, W., Krausmann, F., Fischer-Kowalski,
M.; Wien (2010)
Band 121+
Sociometabolic regimes in indigenous communities and
the crucial role of working time: A comparison of case
studies. Fischer-Kowalski, M., Singh, S.J., Ringhofer, L.,
Grünbühel C.M., Lauk, C., Remesch., A.; Wien (2010)
Band 122
Klimapolitik im Bereich Gebäude und Raumwärme.
Entwicklung, Problemfelder und Instrumente der Länder
Österreich, Deutschland und Schweiz. Jöbstl, R.; Wien
(2010)