Abstract
Cash, D. W., W. Adger, F. Berkes, P. Garden, L. Lebel, P. Olsson, L. Pritchard, and O. Young. 2006. Scale and cross-scale dynamics: governance and information in a multilevel world. Ecology and Society 11(2): 8. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-01759-110208
Highlights
There is a long history of disappointments in policy, management, and assessment arising from the failure to take into proper account the scale and cross-scale dynamics in human-environment systems: collapsing fisheries, transboundary pollution problems, vulnerability to repeated extreme events like floods and droughts, and the inability to address human-induced disease outbreaks (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005).The benefits of recognizing scale challenges in policy integration have been well documented
We suggest that the advent of co-management structures and conscious boundary management that includes knowledge co-production, mediation, translation, and negotiation across scale-related boundaries may facilitate solutions to complex problems that decision makers have historically been unable to solve
Either way, understanding crossscale interactions in the human-environment system is seen as increasingly important. This special issue brings together the work of a group of researchers who share a common interest in strengthening the capacity to analyze and resolve challenges arising from cross-scale dynamics
Summary
Either way, understanding crossscale interactions in the human-environment system is seen as increasingly important This special issue brings together the work of a group of researchers who share a common interest in strengthening the capacity to analyze and resolve challenges arising from cross-scale dynamics. Many environmental management plans and “actions,” for example, can be grouped into hierarchical sets ranging from tasks through projects and strategies (see Fig. 1E) These relationships are not conventionally framed as a scale issue, we would argue that some of the challenges relating to mismatches may not always have so much to do with space as with the “scale” of management response and change. The result in this system is, for example, an inability to relate an understanding of larger-scale climate dynamics to the decision-making needs of actors at lower levels These are, in effect, challenges of institutional fit. We begin by exploring three responses already identified by others elsewhere, but brought together under the general rubric of responses to problems of scale and cross-scale interactions: institutional interplay, comanagement, and boundary or bridging organizations
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