Towards adaptive coastal management law: Lessons from Australia and Brazil

Abstract

Although adaptive management has been advocated for dealing with the complexity and dynamics of social-ecological systems for more than 40 years, successful outcomes in practice have been limited. Among the efforts to overcome this implementation gap, there has been a growing interest in understanding the role of law in adaptive management. In this article, we provide an analysis of adaptive management in two jurisdictions struggling with coastal erosion in the context of their legal arrangements for coastal management: (i) Byron Shire, a local government area in the State of New South Wales, Australia; and (ii) Florianópolis, a municipality in the State of Santa Catarina, Brazil. Methods included document analysis and inductive thematic coding of 50 semi-structured interviews with key informants from four different stakeholder groups. Our results indicate that both legal certainty and legal flexibility are relevant for adaptive management success. Three directions towards coupling adaptive coastal management with law are suggested: (i) to incorporate adaptive management into coastal management legislation; (ii) to address legal path dependencies that cause maladaptation; and (iii) to integrate adaptive coastal management and adaptive coastal governance through adaptive coastal management law. Our suggestions contribute to improved knowledge on adaptive coastal management law by emphasising the need for an optimal balance between legal flexibility and legal certainty, which represents an avenue for further research and policy development beyond the jurisdictions analysed.