Adaptive Governance Principles Research Articles

Emerging attributes of adaptive governance in the global south

Adaptive governance is widely considered an effective approach to address the complexities and uncertainties of socio-ecological systems. The application of adaptive governance to sustainable environmental governance in the global south has not been sufficiently explored. There is a gap in the literature in the global south, especially given its conceptual roots in the global north. A number of reviews identified some key conceptual and practical gaps related to adaptive governance principles and the challenges to implementing them. To address this gap, this paper presents a systematic literature review of adaptive governance scholarship focused on the global south published between 2003 and 2022. The review discusses adaptive governance’s key principles and framings, as well as the challenges of implementing it in the global south. This paper examines the factors that influence the emergence of adaptive governance and how this framing has been used to understand effective environmental governance within the global south’s diverse socio-political and institutional settings. The review specifically focuses on Africa and South Asia, which are densely populated with limited financial and institutional capacity. Sustainable environmental governance is crucial in these regions not only for the wellbeing of the population, but also for the health of the planet. A review of adaptive governance scholarship identified emerging attributes that improve government structures and processes, as well as proposed attributes that would minimize challenges and improve adaptive capacity. The key emerging attributes are formal and informal networks, social learning, community engagement and proposed attributes are flexible, integrated and participatory institutional governance, inclusive decision making, context-specific strategies, accountability, and capacity development. These attributes provide a framework for adaptive governance scholarship for examining different governance structures and processes in different socio-ecological systems. This paper concludes with a framework for future research that can facilitate adaptive governance in the context of sustainable environmental management in the global south.

Co-Producing Narratives and Indicators as Catalysts for Adaptive Governance of a Common-Pool Resource within a Protected Area

The theory and practice of adaptive management and adaptive governance have been widely studied in the complex social contexts that mediate how humans interact with ecosystems. Adaptive governance is thought to enable adaptive management in such contexts. In this study, we examine four often-used principles of adaptive governance (polycentric institutions, collaboration, social learning and complexity thinking) to develop a framework for reflecting on adaptive governance of a social-ecological system—the Knysna Estuary in South Africa. This estuary is a priority for biodiversity conservation, as well as a common-pool resource central to livelihoods. We used the framework to structure dialogue on the extent to which the four principles of adaptive governance were being applied in the management of the Knysna Estuary. The dialogue included diverse stakeholders, from those who have the power to influence adaptive management to those most dependent on the resource for their livelihoods. Based on a combination of theory and current reality we then identified eight indicators that could be used to guide a transition towards improved adaptive governance of the estuary. These indicators were assessed and supported by most stakeholders. The main contributions of our research are (a) a process for combining theory and stakeholder dialogue to reflect on adaptive governance of a social-ecological system; (b) a set of indicators or conditions that emerged from our participatory process that can be used for reflexive monitoring and adaptation of adaptive governance of Knysna Estuary; and (c) a real-world example of seeking complementary links between adaptive governance and adaptive management to promote effective management of complex social-ecological systems.

Towards Adaptive Governance in Big Data Health Research: Implementing Regulatory Principles

In this chapter, we will first make the case for adaptive and principle-based governance of big data research. We will then outline six principles of adaptive governance (AFIRRM) for big data research and discuss key factors for their implementation into effective governance structures and processes.

Applying the principles of adaptive governance to bushfire management: a case study from the South West of Australia

Bushfires are a global climate change challenge and a critical disaster issue for Australia. Adaptive governance has emerged as a model to address socio-ecological issues such as disasters. This paper discusses four principles of adaptive governance: polycentric institutions, collaboration, social learning, and reflexivity and examines how these are reflected in the policy and practice of bushfire management in the South West of Australia. Findings demonstrate that current disaster policy discourse, which influences bushfire management, increasingly advocates for principles associated with adaptive governance. However, a case study on the Shire of Augusta-Margaret River found that the extent to which these principles translate into bushfire management practice is largely influenced by interpretive worldview policy frames. The paper suggests that governance for bushfire management could become more adaptive in its approach by incorporating more collaborative management activities, deliberative policy processes and reflexive practice.

Adaptive governance: a catalyst for advancing sustainable urban transformation in the global South

ABSTRACT Adaptive governance has been proposed by many scholars as an approach to sustainable resource management, and has subsequently been applied in many countries. While the conceptual origins of adaptive governance have largely emerged from the global North, there has been little critical attention to the utility of adaptive governance concepts in the global South. Through a qualitative meta-analysis of adaptive governance scholarship published between 2000 and 2018, this article characterizes the key attributes of adaptive governance in the global North and examines whether these attributes are present in contemporary scholarship on the global South. In doing so, the article confirms that adaptive governance principles are present, but reveals distinctions regarding how these manifest in the global South. The article proposes a guiding framework to advance the design and implementation of future adaptive governance interventions in the global South.

National laws and policies can enable or confound adaptive governance: Examples from South African national parks

There is growing appreciation that protected areas, like all social-ecological systems (SES), are inherently complex and face an unpredictable future under the influence of global environmental change. Adaptive management is the accepted approach for managing complex SES to ensure their resilience, but unless it is supported by a governance system that is itself adaptive it has little chance of success. Scholars have identified certain principles conducive to adaptive governance. Environmental legislation, an important component of the governance system, is often misaligned with these principles. In this paper we assess adaptive governance principles with regard to legislation governing South Africa’s national parks. This assessment indicates that, to enable adaptive governance and adaptive management, legislation should (1) be co-produced by policy-makers, policy implementers and users of protected area ecosystem services; (2) commit and empower management agencies to apply the principles of adaptive governance and adaptive management, particularly in the collaborative development of management plans; (3) commit agencies to review management plans and allow flexibility to adapt plans; (4) ensure that the temporal and spatial scales of the governance system match those of the SES being managed; (5) anticipate change and avoid assumptions of system stability and predictability; and (6) provide for flexible financing mechanisms, so that funds can be prioritised and timed to meet the unpredictable demands of complex systems.

Coordinated service provision in payment for ecosystem service schemes through adaptive governance

In this paper, we look to the adaptive governance literature for insight into how payment schemes for the provision of ecosystem services might be designed to achieve multiple socially desirable objectives over different spatial scales instead of simply focusing on localised benefits for service providers. Using the principles of adaptive governance, we explore how the concepts of lateral information flows and incentive alignment might shape ecosystem service payment schemes and allow the coordination of ecosystem service priorities across different jurisdictions. We suggest that progressing from purely anthropocentric assessments of payment schemes towards biocentric evaluations may lead to improved design principles. We discuss specific advantages of adaptive governance approaches over traditional centralised governance models related to policy-experimentation at multiple spatial scales, institutional variety and deliberative decision-making processes that establish dialogue between service providers and beneficiaries that promote group learning.

Aligning Climate Change Adaptation Planning with Adaptive Governance: Lessons from Exeter, NH

Adaptive governance has been recognized as an integrative approach for analyzing the social, institutional, ecologic, and economic aspects of decision-making to build resilience against climate change. Although closely aligned with adaptive co-management and ecosystem management, adaptive governance is a distinct framework that explicitly focuses on decentralized decision-making through social processes such as collaborative learning, networking, and the promotion of cross-sectoral partnerships to enhance adaptive capacity. In this paper, we explore an ongoing engagement process for climate change adaptation planning in Exeter, New Hampshire, and its alignment with key principles of adaptive governance. Climate change poses multiple challenges to Exeter, including increased flooding, reduced low flows, water quality degradation, and associated threats to estuarine ecosystems and public health. Engagement strategies include community conversations, workshops, experiential activities, and a community advisory board comprised of different stakeholder representatives (Citizens' Working Group) collaborating with the scientific team on water resources modeling and scenario analysis. We present important lessons about conveying expectations and timeframes of technical modeling to participants, developing multiple forums for interaction between researchers and other stakeholders, and making climate change locally relevant to residents by drawing connections to the community's experiences, cultural memory, values, and upcoming decisions. This study contributes to the literature on adaptive governance and climate change adaptation by evaluating stakeholder involvement in a local institutional setting, an important arena where adaptation decisions must be deliberated. It is also among the first studies to evaluate the ways in which a climate change adaptation stakeholder engagement process aligns with adaptive governance principles, particularly through boundary objects and experiences.

Not Learning from the Past: Adaptive Governance Challenges for Australian Natural Resource Management

AbstractAustralia's governance arrangements for natural resource management (NRM) have evolved considerably over the last 30 years. The impact of changes in governance on NRM planning and delivery requires assessment. We undertake a multi‐method programme evaluation using adaptive governance principles as an analytical frame and apply this to Queensland to assess the impacts of governance change on NRM planning and governance outcomes. Data to inform our analysis includes: (1) a systematic review of 16 audits/evaluations of Australian NRM over a 15‐year period; (2) a review of Queensland's first‐generation NRM plans; and (3) outputs from a Queensland workshop on NRM planning. NRM has progressed from a bottom‐up grassroots movement into a collaborative regional NRM model that has been centralised by the Australian government. We found that while some adaptive governance challenges have been addressed, others remained unresolved. Results show that collaboration and elements of multi‐level governance under the regional model were positive moves, but also that NRM arrangements contained structural deficiencies across multiple governance levels in relation to public involvement in decision‐making and knowledge production for problem responsiveness. These problems for adaptive governance have been exacerbated since 2008. We conclude that the adaptive governance framework for NRM needs urgent attention so that important environmental management problems can be addressed.

Adaptation policy and practice in densely populated glacier-fed river basins of South Asia: a systematic review

Rivers are the cultural, social and economic backbone of South Asia, and therefore, the focus of public, political and scientific debate. Himalayan glaciers are the source of numerous large Asian river systems, which support rich ecosystems and irrigate millions of hectares of fields, thereby supporting about a billion people who live in their catchments. Impacts of climate change in river systems are likely to have considerable social, economic, ecological and political implications. This paper reviews literature for three major glacier-fed river systems of South Asia—Brahmaputra, Ganga and Indus—to understand governance mechanisms for climate adaptation in the region. A systematic review methodology is applied to examine adaptation responses in the riparian countries of these Himalayan river basins in three different levels—policy objectives, institutions and practice. Using the “fit for purpose” governance framework, we try to examine how far or near is the region for operationalizing principles of adaptive governance.

‘Avoiding the certainty trap’: a research programme for the policy–practice interface

This paper outlines the rationale for a research focus on how meaning emerges from the interfaces between research, policy, and practice. In exploring where different constructions of risk, resilience, and landscape occur in the policy and practice discourses surrounding current developments in Victorian bushfire policy, this paper goes beyond simply advocating better science–policy–practice relationships by demonstrating the challenges of operationalising adaptive governance principles. Our findings stress that change can arise from interacting discourses on the policy–practice interface. Yet, although this may be the most adaptive moment in the policy process, producing multiple insights and alternative options, it is vulnerable to institutionalised discourses that obstruct flexible practice. Complex socioecological issues such as bushfire, we argue, require more explicit engagement with the processes of practice inherent in policy formulation. The paper offers coproductive research strategies as contributing to more flexible governance arrangements to improve adaptive policy design.

Adaptive climate change governance for urban resilience

Climate change poses new challenges to cities and new flexible forms of governance are required that are able to take into account the uncertainty and abruptness of changes. The purpose of this paper is to discuss adaptive climate change governance for urban resilience. This paper identifies and reviews three traditions of literature on the idea of transitions and transformations, and assesses to what extent the transitions encompass elements of adaptive governance. This paper uses the open source Urban Transitions Project database to assess how urban experiments take into account principles of adaptive governance. The results show that: the experiments give no explicit information of ecological knowledge; the leadership of cities is primarily from local authorities; and evidence of partnerships and anticipatory or planned adaptation is limited or absent. The analysis shows that neither technological, political nor ecological solutions alone are sufficient to further our understanding of the analytical aspects of transition thinking in urban climate governance. In conclusion, the paper argues that the future research agenda for urban climate governance needs to explore further the links between the three traditions in order to better identify contradictions, complementarities or compatibilities, and what this means in practice for creating and assessing urban experiments.

Integrating adaptive governance and participatory multicriteria methods: a framework for climate adaptation governance

S. Munaretto, G. Siciliano, and M. E. Turvani. 2014. Integrating adaptive governance and participatory multicriteria methods: a framework for climate adaptation governance. Ecology and Society 19(2): 74. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-06381-190274

Governing and managing water resources under changing hydro-climatic contexts: The case of the upper Rhone basin

Climate change represents a major increase in uncertainty that water managers and policy makers will need to integrate into water resources policy and management. A certain level of uncertainty has always existed in water resources planning, but the speed and intensity of changes in baseline conditions that climate change embodies might require a shift in perspective. This article draws on both the social and physical science results of the EU-FP7 ACQWA project to better understand the challenges and opportunities for adaptation to climate change impacts on the hydrology of the upper Rhone basin in the Canton Valais, Switzerland. It first presents the results of hydro-climatic change projections downscaled to more temporally and spatially-relevant frames of reference for decision makers. Then, it analyses the current policy and legislative framework within which these changes will take place, according to the policy coherence across different water-relevant frameworks as well as the integration and mainstreaming of climate change. It compares the current policy and legislative frameworks for different aspects of water resources management to the projected impacts of climate change on the hydrology of the upper Rhone basin, in order to examine the appropriateness of the current approach for responding to a changing climatic context. Significant uncertainties pose numerous challenges in the governance context. The study draws on adaptive governance principles, to propose policy actions across different scales of governance to better manage baseline variability as well as more ‘unpredictable’ uncertainty from climate change impacts.

Water, resilience and the law: From general concepts and governance design principles to actionable mechanisms

• Reviews literature on law and resilience, adaptive governance and management. • Discusses practical examples of legal mechanisms for adaptive water resources management. • Assesses aptness of different measures according to different levels of uncertainty. • General design principles are operationalised in legislative frameworks. • Monitoring, data sharing, financial and technical capacity are pre-requisites. Climate change has significant ramifications for water law and governance, yet, there is strong evidence that legal regulations have often failed to protect environments or promote sustainable development. Scholars have increasingly suggested that the preservation and restoration paradigms of legislation and regulation are no longer adequate for climate change related challenges in complex and cross-scale social-ecological systems. This is namely due to past assumptions of stationarity, uniformitarianism and the perception of ecosystem change as predictable and reversible. This paper reviews the literature on law and resilience and then presents and discusses a set of practical examples of legal mechanisms from the water resources management sector, identified according to a set of guiding principles from the literature on adaptive capacity, adaptive governance as well as adaptive and integrated water resources management. It then assesses the aptness of these different measures according to scientific evidence of increased uncertainty and changing ecological baselines. A review of the best practice examples demonstrates that there are a number of best practice examples attempting to integrate adaptive elements of flexibility, iterativity, connectivity and subsidiarity into a variety of legislative mechanisms, suggesting that there is not as significant a tension between resilience and the law as many scholars have suggested. However, while many of the mechanisms may indeed be suitable for addressing challenges relating to current levels of change and uncertainty, analysis across a broader range of uncertainty highlights challenges relating to more irreversible changes associated with greater levels of warming. Furthermore the paper identifies a set of pre-requisites that are fundamental to the successful implementation of such mechanisms, namely monitoring and data sharing, financial and technical capacity, particularly in nations that are most at risk with the least data infrastructure. The article aims to contribute to both theory and practice, enabling policy makers to translate resilience based terminology and adaptive governance principles into clear instructions for incorporating uncertainty into legislation and policy design.

Adaptive Approaches to Biosecurity Governance

This article discusses institutional changes that may facilitate an adaptive approach to biosecurity risk management where governance is viewed as a multidisciplinary, interactive experiment acknowledging uncertainty. Using the principles of adaptive governance, evolved from institutional theory, we explore how the concepts of lateral information flows, incentive alignment, and policy experimentation might shape Australia's invasive species defense mechanisms. We suggest design principles for biosecurity policies emphasizing overlapping complementary response capabilities and the sharing of invasive species risks via a polycentric system of governance.