Abstract
Adaptive management has been considered a valuable approach for managing social-ecological systems involving high levels of complexity and uncertainty. However, many obstacles still hamper its implementation. Law is often seen as a barrier for moving adaptive management beyond theory, although there has been no synthesis on the challenges of legal constraints or how to overcome them. We contribute to filling this knowledge gap by providing a systematic review of the peer-reviewed literature on the relationship between adaptive management and law in relation to social-ecological systems. We analyze how the scholarship defines the concept of adaptive management, identifies the legal barriers to adaptive management, and the legal strategies suggested for enabling this approach. Research efforts in this domain are still highly geographically concentrated in the United States of America, unveiling gaps concerning the analysis of other legal jurisdictions. Overall, our results show that more flexible legal frameworks can allow for adaptive management without undermining the role of law in providing stability to social interactions. Achieving this balance will likely require the reform of existing laws, regulations, and other legal instruments. Legal reforms can facilitate the emergence of adaptive governance, with the potential to support not only adaptive management implementation but also to make law itself more adaptive.
Highlights
Forty years after its first description by Holling (1978), adaptive management is still considered a valuable approach for dealing with dynamic social-ecological systems (Williams 2011, Westgate et al 2013, Williams and Brown 2014, Garmestani and Allen 2015, Birgé et al 2016)
Overview of the literature sample we reiterate that our review is not exhaustive, publication dates indicate that the discussion on the relationship between adaptive management and law is likely growing over recent years, especially when compared to the initial four-year period of our literature sample (Fig. 2)
We recognize that publications may have been excluded because of our search and selection criteria, the results of our systematic review indicate that, if framed within underexplored environmental management contexts, e.g., integrated coastal management (ICM), future contributions to the existing body of literature may potentially improve understanding about the role of law in adaptive management
Summary
Forty years after its first description by Holling (1978), adaptive management is still considered a valuable approach for dealing with dynamic social-ecological systems (Williams 2011, Westgate et al 2013, Williams and Brown 2014, Garmestani and Allen 2015, Birgé et al 2016). Failure of adaptive management implementation is often related to the design of institutions, e.g., the political structure, sets of norms, social values, and standards of behavior shaping human interactions, because they can be too conservative to allow for changes in management (Stankey et al 2005, Gupta et al 2010, Herrfahrdt-Pähle and Pahl-Wostl 2012) Within this context, there has been increased efforts in recent decades to answer more specific research questions on how to eliminate constraints deriving from legal institutions and create harmony between adaptive management and law (Iles 1996, Doremus 2001, Karkkainen 2005, Ruhl 2005, Ruhl and Fischman 2010, Allen et al 2011, Craig and Ruhl 2014, Garmestani and Allen 2014, Benson and Schultz 2015, Craig et al 2017a). There is a clear need to improve the knowledge of the impact of legal frameworks on adaptive management implementation (Benson 2012) and understand how adaptive management can be legally operationalized (Lee 2014, McDonald and Styles 2014)
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