Beyond Blueprints? Adaptive Governance and Metropolitan Spatial Planning

by Cathy Wilkinson

On the 8th October 2002 Melbourne’s most recent metropolitan strategy, Melbourne 2030 – planning for sustainable growth, was released followed an almost ten year formal and informal experiment exploring the relevance of complexity theory to metropolitan spatial planning and governance.

To cut a long story short (Wilkinson in submission) this exploration resulted in three changes to the way Melbourne’s metropolitan planning had been done since 1929:
- ‘adaptability’ was included as one of seven guiding principles (alongside the usual suspects of ‘sustainability’, ‘innovation’, ‘equity’ etc.)
- a much broader range of non-traditional governance mechanisms were identified (Niven and Wilkinson 2005) in recognition of the uncertainties and complexities of achieving transformative urban change
- the role of ongoing monitoring and adjustment of the implementation program towards desired trajectories in face of unintended consequences was included as one of nine ‘key directions’.

As the Executive Director responsible for Melbourne’s metropolitan planning, I thought we had made significant progress in putting the past century’s linear ‘command and control’ style approaches to spatial planning and governance behind us. Until 8th October 2002. Guess what the single most common descriptor of Melbourne 2030 was and has been from that fatal day of release on by politicians, stakeholders and the media - a blueprint!

Almost without exception, metropolitan strategies aspire to transformative change. Through Melbourne 2030 we wanted to double public transport patronage, significantly reduce water consumption and reverse urban sprawl. A blueprint as you most probably are aware is literally a reproduction of an engineering technical drawing. Not much use for governing towards transformative change in complex adaptive systems like cities. And this was just one of several examples of the way linear legacies and the desire for certainty continued to plague the ongoing strategic planning process in Melbourne.

So whilst I realize that adaptive management/co-management/governance has enjoyed success transforming natural resource management approaches (Olsson et al 2006) I believe there is still a long way to go when it comes to evolving management approaches for linked social-ecological urban systems. Given the importance of urban systems to planetary environmental conditions (Grimm et al 2008, Newman et al. 2009) it seems important to unpack how the politics of certainty/uncertainties affects attempts at adaptive governance in urban settings.

Why isn’t there an equivalent history of success for adaptive urban governance? Why has urban planning theory only recently begun to (tentatively) consider such approaches (Hillier 2008, Murdoch 2006)? How does adaptive urban governance differ from incrementalism (Lindblom 1959) that has been heavily critiqued in the planning literature? And of perhaps most relevance for this blog, what insights can adaptive governance provide for sustainable urban governance and what challenges does sustainable urban governance raise for adaptive governance?



References

Grimm, N.B et al (2008) Global change and the ecology of cities, Science 319:756-760

Murdoch, J. (2006) Post-structural geography, Sage

Newman et al. (2009) Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change, Island Press

Niven S. & Wilkinson, C. (2005) ‘Reinventing Melbourne’ in Charlesworth, E. (ed) Cityedge: case studies in contemporary urbanism.

Wilkinson, C. (in submission) ‘Harnessing Urban Complexity - Reflections on the implications of a complexity approach to metropolitan planning from Melbourne, Australia’, Hillier, J. et al (eds) (forthcoming) Complexity and Planning, Ashgate

Are We under Attack?

by Victor, Emily, Per

The title of this post might seem a bit drastic. But think about it for a moment. As the science behind the environmental challenges facing the planet is getting clearer each day - people direct their attention to issues related to management, institutions and governance in search for solutions. And obviously, everybody wants to contribute. Transitions scholars, reflexive governance researchers, the Earth System Governance Project, institutional scholars from the Ostrom school, social constructionists in the UK - just to mention a few.

Our challenges hence lies in finding our niche in this landscape of emerging governance research. And to move the research front in a direction that we find interesting, innovative and relevant for the study of coupled social-ecological systems. So, just to start off the debate, here are 3 topics we see emerging in the frontiers.

a) Innovation and Transformations- We all talk about it, and everybody seem to agree on that they are important, but we actually know little about these processes and practice. Sure, Panarchy theory gives a range of great hints on what to look for, but we are still looking for some solid elaborations and empirical research for social-ecological systems. How do we for example, separate between maladaptations, adaptations and transformations? Other scholars - such as those studying transitions in socio-technical systems - have developed ways of analyzing the multilevel institutional dimensions of these topics. On the other hand, they also miss the action happening at the social-ecological interface.

b) Governance and Cascading Crisis - We know a lot about how communities deal with surprise and change. But we know little about how national and international policy makers deal with social crises induced by ecological change. Multiple and cascading crises that easily move across systems and spatial scales, develop a quite different social, political and mass media dynamic compared to slow environmental change. Just think about the current droughts in Argentina and Uruguay, or attempts to deal with infectious diseases. An institutional analysis here would require combining resilience theory with insights from crisis management (for example Boin et al 2005), and high reliability organizations (Weick and Sutcliffe 2007).

c) Scaling Up - A last point mentioned quite often, is the need to address the national and international level to really get a grip of multilevel governance processes in AG. We all know that a bulk of the resilience literature has a bias towards local and regional governance, and that a lot of interesting topics remain to be explored once we start moving up in levels of political organization. We are getting there - thanks to Per's piece in PNAS, Emily's article, and ongoing work by Lisen, Jacob, Björn, Måns and Victor. The question in the longer term is how to bring all of this together into a framework that speaks not only to the resilience community, but also to insights from other (and quite disparate) fields in the social sciences.

So while it is too drastic to say that we are "under attack", the pressure is on us to prove that AG is a relevant framework to understand, and deal with the governance challenges posed by global change. The question is: what other topics do you see emerging on the frontier? Add your comments, recommended literature and feed-back in the comment field!

About this blog

Where are the frontiers of Adaptive Governance? This internal blog has been set up to facilitate dialogue between all team members of the Adaptive Governance theme at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. The ambition is to advance our joint research agenda in a slightly different way: by posting novel, concise and thought provoking blog-posts. All members are invited to comment and discuss these posts on-line. Anytime, anywhere.

By the end of August 2009, we will organize a joint one-day workshop, where all discussions on this blog - and seminars associated with them - will be summarized into a synthesis piece: New Frontiers in Adaptive Governance. So the question is, where do YOU see the frontiers? Join the debate!

• 12/3 - Victor Galaz, Per Olsson, Emily Boyd "Are We under Attack? In Search of the Frontiers"
• 24/3 - Cathy Wilkinson "Beyond Blue-Prints? Adaptive Governance and Metropolitan Spatial Planning"
  
• 14/4 - Victor Galaz "How Information Technology Changes Everything"
  
• 16/4 - Carl Folke "Hot Topics for Adaptive Governance"
  
• 23/4 - Åsa Persson
  
• 7/5 - Guest blogger: TBA
  
• 21/5 - Per Olsson "How Regimes Emerge out of Nowhere"
  
• 11/6 - Stephan Barthel "Social-Ecological Memory and Civil Society"
  
• 18/6 - Emily Boyd "Resilient Climate Futures and Adaptive Governance"
  

SUMMER BREAK

• 3/8 - Björn Nyqvist "Adaptive Governance and National Institutions"
  
• 17/8 - Annika Nilsson - The Arctic as a case for bringing international relations analysis into adaptive governance
  
• 31/8 - One day workshop - writing of synthesis piece

[Note that dates are preliminary].