There are many workers whose responsibilities include overseeing “social ecological systems” (SES): circumstances where human activity and the natural world are interconnected and reciprocally influential. We aimed to learn about how workers decide to intervene in these systems, decisions that can shape the fate of ecological systems and the species within them, as well as the livelihoods and experiences of the people who interact with them. Based on data gathered from interviews with recreational freshwater fisheries managers in the Canadian province of British Columbia and from archival sources, we analyzed descriptions of 26 SES interventions. We uncovered a narrative structure to those descriptions, comprised of four processes wherein workers considered (1) which aspects of the system were valuable and important (which we termed valorization); (2) whether a problem existed (problematization); (3) what was causing the problem (untangling); and (4) which action to take in response (implementation). The overall narrative provided both a series of steps to guide interventions, and a rhetorical structure to justify them. However, other actors in the social systems sometimes had differing accounts of what was happening, leading to what we termed “narrative disjunctions.” We explicate the implications of our findings for the critical work of SES management.
