Cascading risks in a social-ecological system: the South China Sea disputes

The situation in the South China Sea (SCS) is the epitome of a wicked problem where issues cross state boundaries and domains, and where stakeholders range from fishers to governments to shipping industries. This article frames the SCS as a social-ecological system that is composed of biological and social subsystems. It explains how, for over 70 years, global political and economic structures have conditioned state responses – territorialisation, militarisation, extraction, and exploitation – that, in turn, have led to cascading risks for further environmental degradation and conflict at different levels of community. This article uses the grammar of riskification, rather than securitisation, because the crisis in the SCS requires governance rather than military action. Any code of conduct needs to emphasise stewardship rather than ownership and to be climate-centred rather than threat-centred, in order to address the very real risk of the collapsing biological subsystem upon which the social subsystem ultimately depends.