Developing an Adaptive Space Governance Framework

Abstract

The space governance landscape has shifted rapidly in recent years. As previous scholars have noted, this shifting environment has relied heavily on private actors and commercial interests. The space industry is now made up of not just a handful of nation states but also corporations large and small developing innovative technologies. These corporations operate alongside and in partnership with government agencies around the world. The diversity of actors and rapid changes in technology have highlighted a series of governance challenges. However, the space sector is not alone in these coordination, cooperation, and collective action problems. We argue that space governance can be understood and developed through a framework of adaptive governance (AG), which has been applied in a variety of settings including environmental governance. Furthermore, from the AG literature, we identify five criteria for AG as it applies to space governance: (1) adequate information about the resource, (2) values, (3) human-environment interaction, (4) inclusive dialog between resource users, and (5) complex, redundant, and layered institutions. By adopting the AG framework, a space policy can be developed that is highly adaptive, allows rules to evolve from feedback, and appropriately accounts for uncertainty in the environment and governance of space.