Rethinking planning in post-colonial cities: Institutional hybridity, power, and conflict

Legal and institutional structures fundamentally shape opportunities for adaptive governance of environmental resources at multiple ecological and societal scales. Properties of adaptive governance are widely studied. However, these studies have not resulted in consolidated frameworks for legal and institutional design, limiting our ability to promote adaptation and social-ecological resilience. We develop an overarching framework that describes the current and potential role of law in enabling adaptation. We apply this framework to different social-ecological settings, centers of activity, and scales, illustrating the multidimensional and polycentric nature of water governance. Adaptation typically emerges organically among multiple centers of agency and authority in society as a relatively self-organized or autonomous process marked by innovation, social learning, and political deliberation. This self-directed and emergent process is difficult to create in an exogenous, top-down fashion. However, traditional centers of authority may establish enabling conditions for adaptation using a suite of legal, economic, and democratic tools to legitimize and facilitate self-organization, coordination, and collaboration across scales. The principles outlined here provide preliminary legal and institutional foundations for adaptive environmental governance, which may inform institutional design and guide future scholarship.

Decision letter for "Rethinking planning in post-colonial cities: Institutional hybridity, power, and conflict"

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Review for "Rethinking planning in post-colonial cities: Institutional hybridity, power, and conflict"

Author response for "Rethinking planning in post-colonial cities: Institutional hybridity, power, and conflict"

Decision letter for "Rethinking planning in post-colonial cities: Institutional hybridity, power, and conflict"

Review for "Rethinking planning in post-colonial cities: Institutional hybridity, power, and conflict"

Review for "Rethinking planning in post-colonial cities: Institutional hybridity, power, and conflict"

Review for "Rethinking planning in post-colonial cities: Institutional hybridity, power, and conflict"

Review for "Rethinking planning in post-colonial cities: Institutional hybridity, power, and conflict"

Land tenure basically refers to the system of formal and informal institutions governing people’s relationship with one another and with the land and natural resources on which they depend. Historically, customary land tenure systems that rely on traditional institutions for managing access to communally owned lands have been the dominant medium for land allocation in Ghana and most of sub-Saharan Africa. For several decades, tenure reforms have focused on transforming the African land tenure system from the customary system through land nationalization and privatization. Among other issues, the goals have been to promote tenure security, economic efficiency, and sustainable resource management. Thus far, these tenure reforms have yielded mixed results. Current problems include bottlenecks in land administration, weakening of traditional institutions, and increasing marginalization and landlessness among vulnerable groups. Based on insights from the literature on resilience in social-ecological systems, this chapter highlights the need to move beyond the search for panaceas in land policy toward institutional frameworks that can mediate the complex and dynamic relationships between people and land. The chapter proposes adaptive governance as an institutional framework that can promote an integrated approach to managing land and other natural resources with the aim of building the resilience of communities and regions against the impacts of various drivers of change.

The Yangtze River Basin faces unprecedented challenges in harmonizing competing interests in its ecological and social systems. The central government of China, in response to the need for change in governance arrangements and cooperation, passed the Yangtze River Protection Law. It is China's first legislation at the basin scale and for a specific river basin. Ecological disturbances caused by industrial and other human activity, followed by political support for environmental protection, catalyzed the passage of this law. As the first tentative effort to regulate a complex and changing social-ecological system, it has incorporated multiple legal and institutional design principles identified in the adaptive governance and law scholarship: scaled approaches to social-ecological systems, cooperation to address geographical and sectoral fragmentation, and participatory capacity. These commonalities show that designs are fundamental to tackle geographic and sectoral fragmentation of complex systems and catalyze the emergence of adaptive water governance.

The city plan of Kuching is not influenced by systematic planning principles, but rather, it is deeply embedded within colonial infrastructural logistics to meet the demands of global trade services and social structures. The postcolonial city is a palimpsest of hierarchical and territorial imprints from former colonial governance. Much of urban growth is concentrated around nodes, prioritized for resource collection and distribution. Therefore, this paper delineates how the current state and city governance recalibrate inherited infrastructures of economic development from the past, resulting in fragmented hybrid spaces of ethnic enclaves and economically marginalized groups in this northwest city of Borneo. We narrate how the Brooke dynasty, British administration and the Malaysian state have each developed and reappropriated logistics infrastructure based on their own agenda, leaving an indelible mark on the urban fabric and society of Kuching today. These findings are based on content analysis of city plans, visual surveys, government media, and secondary sources. We aim to open up new ways of understanding how multi-layered infrastructure and spaces produced by successive waves of different political strategies resulted in uneven development around the postcolonial city, and why some centres are given preference over others.

Micro-level crafting of institutions within integrated catchment management: Early lessons of adaptive governance from a catchment-based approach case study in England

This chapter explores the development of adaptive governance (AG) in vast, highly dynamic marine and coastal settings, focusing on applications in small-scale fisheries contexts. The first section presents a brief overview of the history and institutional diversity of global marine governance. Next, the specific challenges and strategies for implementing marine AG, including cross-scale institutional integration, stakeholder participation, and power sharing, are discussed. Lastly, a review of case studies examines the outcomes of marine AG in response to the crisis. This synthesis demonstrates the strengths of AG for addressing the spatial scale and unpredictability of marine settings; however, it also illustrates how limited conceptualisations of marine environments that overlook the social and historical context can impede trust, knowledge-sharing, and AG’s integration with existing institutions. Marine AG benefits from strong informal learning networks, recognizing situated practices and values, nested authority and procedural equity, and attention to implementation and practice over technical fixes.