Adaptive governance, law and regulation

Abstract

Adaptive governance emphasises the role of emergent bottom-up governance initiatives and processes for governing. While regulatory strategy adaptive governance and law can be seen as antithetical to each other, this chapter argues that adaptive governance is bounded and facilitated by law every step of the way. The chapter begins with the criteria for robust adaptive governance, namely sufficient information, dealing with conflict, inducing rule compliance, providing infrastructure, and preparedness for change. The chapter establishes two legal perspectives to analysing adaptive governance, namely how existing legal systems regulate adaptive governance, and how the legal systems could ideally support adaptive governance. The chapter then maps the numerous institutional, procedural, and substantive legal connections to the adaptive governance criteria in various fields of law. The chapter also discusses law’s complexity as a reason why legal systems will never fully facilitate adaptive governance and concludes by pointing ways forward for legal adaptive governance research.