Individual, institutional, and policy decision management (i.e., governance) has contributed to a disruption of socio-ecological systems (SES). These disruptions have resulted in unprecedented systemic challenges (e.g., climate change, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic (COVID-19), and associated consequences such as increased severe weather, poverty, and social unrest; and the decline of ecological health, and well-being). An emerging research question within the literature is how to improve individual and institutional governance to mitigate our trajectory and improve complex SES outcomes. Changing our trajectory requires a daunting transformative social change initiative. Using interdisciplinary literature, a compendium of qualitative and quantitative longitudinal data collected from applied action research, this dissertation presents an intervention framework that rapidly achieved significant social change, and environmental and public health risk reduction in a specific case. This research demonstrates the benefits of a collaborative and systemic approach to SES governance. Through this research, a Quality Governance Framework (QGF), and a Diagnostic Capacity Tool (DCT), were developed and found to be reliable and valid. Using SES conceptual models, factors that contributed to a successful governance transformation are presented. The conceptual model provides a means to visually depict the dynamism of key determinant drivers and disruptors to quality governance when attempting to improve complex SES outcomes. This model has been validated with key actors (i.e., social change participants). These actors shed light on cultural, institutional, and individual factors and associated processes that supported or thwarted the improvements in SES outcomes. Since this work focuses on human governance it relies on cultural socio-psychological and evolutionary concepts, values formation, learning, and behavioral science. A considerable portion of this human dimension approach is emergent within the SES governance and system dynamics literature. Collaborative and systemic governance co-create knowledge and broaden the collective understanding of how individual and institutional quality governance can shift trajectories and improve the resilience and sustainability of SES. This study also demonstrates that if the underlying theories and processes are not continually reinforced at the individual, institutional, and wider policy level, and embodied in the governing institutions, much like diets, the temporary expansion of rationality fails and the system begins to revert to its pre-intervention archetypical behavior. This speaks to the need to fortify interventions with shared experience, knowledge, understanding, and robust succession plans. Doing so can aid the durability of the intervention. Those left to lead and continue the legacy will be better fortified to continue the positive trajectory of the social system change – even through subsequent system shock.
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