Are there limits to adaptive governance?

by Emily Boyd

From a development perspective adaptive governance (AG) raises questions about how do you measure fair, efficient and effective processes, who are the winners and losers? The concept of ‘good’ governance in the context of development is about procedural justice and fairness and all that entails to try to stamp out inequalities. It is normative and connected to human rights. Many rely on concepts of ‘good’ governance to set transparent goals in decision-making processes.

For instance, the Nobel Peace Prize Winner Wangari Maathai stated recently that without good governance Africa was unlikely to overcome its numerous poverty challenges. In the case of SES or coupled climate and development we are still searching for ways to think about what governance means for understanding coupled, complex, interconnected climate change, ecosystem and development challenges across multiple actors in cities, forests, coastal areas etc. The question that haunts us is whether AG is a ‘utopia’ where getting the principles right leads to a system of management that hides inequalities across scales?

AG emerged from understanding about adaptive management and co-management in natural resource management. AG is in a sense the scaled up version of co-management across hierarchies of decision-making and knowledge. Co-management is by no means a panacea and encounters broad challenges of who is accountable and for what? (e.g. see the work of Plummer and Armitage). Early research from the development community tried to break out of the hegemonies that surround natural resource management and sought to increase understanding for, and interest in, the continual evolution of local knowledge, through farmers own experimentation with crops, soils, and irrigation and with the dynamics of social networks for spreading knowledge as well as risks (for example the work of Chambers, Scoones & Thompson, Leach) (www.ids.ac.uk).

What came out of that work was a revisionist agenda that was much more nuanced about the politics of knowledge. Yet, what was missing from that early work was the resilience dimensions of ecological and climatic change – the stuff that we know now, e.g. the importance of flips, thresholds, feedbacks etc. - and also how knowledge relates to resilience. This is perhaps where adaptive governance can lend a hand specifically to ask questions about how to govern complex climate – development interactions given the imperfections of the ‘real’ world and the inequalities of uneven development.

Let us think about adaptive governance simply as a heuristic to help to pose new critical questions and tease out understandings about features of change, institutional flexibility, scale, and learning in social and ecological systems. Adaptive governance opens up arenas for asking questions about up scaling collective action e.g. the work of Per Olsson and others on the governance of the Great Barrier Reef. Another example is in examining the importance in ecological forecasting (Clark et al 2003). An emerging imperative is to incorporate feedback mechanisms into ecological forecasts, which are essential to predicting ‘potential’ tipping points. How best to manage tipping points also requires consideration of the social dynamics and ways to collectively understand and think about this. The co-production of knowledge looks to be an important part of this.

Adaptive governance also opens up new ways to conceptualize how actors and organizations respond and reorganize following shocks in coupled systems, e.g. the 2005 dieback in Amazonia and 2005 floods in Mumbai and helps us to ask questions about how networks and learning platforms (e.g. in planning for a 2 degree world) connect across different levels of organization in managing for resilience. Thus to conclude, yes there are limits to adaptive governance. We must avoid panaceas. However it is early days and the concept has opened up avenues to think critically and engage across disciplines. It is now from further theoretical and empirical work we will get a better grasp of the utility and limits of AG. In the meantime, let us not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Further reading

Clark et al 2003 Ecological Forecasts: An Emerging Imperative et al. Science 293, 657.

Plummer R and DR Armitage 2007 Charting the new territory of adaptive co-management: a Delphi study. Ecology and Society 12(2):10 [online] URL:http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol12/iss2/art10/

Derek A Melissa M and R Plummer 2008 Adaptive co-management and the paradox of learning Global Environmental Change Vol.18 (1):86-98

Governance, memory and transformation

by Stephan Barthel

Thinkers that study social relations agree that socially constructed images of the world – negotiated versions and meanings of the past – to a large degree determine social practice (e.g. Misztal 2003: Rothstein 2005; North 2005). For instance, Rothstein (2005) on his work on social capital shows with game theory that ‘the history of play’ determines trust and future strategies. This is what social memory is about. Can these thinkers teach us anything about governance of desirable trajectories of social-ecological systems, or even about transitions from undesirable ones?

Social-ecological memory is the means by which social practice about how to manage a local ecosystem is retained and stored among a group people, and modified and transmitted through time (Barthel 2008). Reification processes co-produces things that persist, which stores memory. Participation in ecosystem management is a mean for capturing and transmitting memory and identity. The one cannot continue without the other. Over time their combination in “community of practice” (Wenger 1998) becomes invested in social-ecological memory that tends to guide behavior (Barthel et al. in review). In allotment gardens memory is captured and transmitted for instance via mentor programs, collaboration in management of commons and exchange of seeds, and it is stored in property rights, norms, proverbs and physical things such as artifacts, fruit trees, seeds, chalets and vegetable plots which all tend to outlive the repertoires of participation that first shaped them. Complicated? Well in short socialecological memory lives within relations, and it may be a conservative force of trajectories since it temporally carries social practice that co-evolves with local ecosystems. It puts weight on the ‘ball in the cup’ and is thus great for desirable resilience.

How about transitions from undesirable trajectories? Rothstein argues (2005) that traps of low social capital are essentially impossible to get out since the history of play ‘sticks’ in the social memory of the players. It seems then that when working for transformation of a trap of mistrust, or an undesirable social-ecological trajectory, memory must be addressed. The logic goes; transformation of memory creates transformation of social practice. So if allotment gardens were on an unsustainable trajectory the work for transformation could address mentor programs, the way collaboration is performed and proverbs, as well as property rights regimes, artifacts, and physical objects. Maybe this kind of memory-practice thinking could be of interest when designing theories about adaptive governance for transformation.

Starting to sound scary? You all are aware of the creation and modification of social memory that has been done before in history (Nazi Germany, Soviet, Apartheid South Africa etc), so even if our goal is restricted to support resilient local social-ecological systems that generate ecosystem services, such thinking will require deep ethical reflections and analysis.

Adaptive Governance News May 2009

Dear friends, here is a brief update of ongoing and future activities within the theme. This is just a selection, so please, please use the comment field at the bottom to add your activities!

1. Emily and Per are cohosting a workshop 'Beyond Limits to Adaptation towards Transformations' in Oxford 1-2 June, 2009. Co-hosted with colleagues at the Walker Institute Reading University and Environmental Change Institute Oxford. 

 

2. Adaptive governance book edited by Emily and Carl, is on track for submission for end of 2009.

 

3. Emily is part of a project bid to the Leverhulme Trust on Tipping Points in coupled systems (lead by Geography Oxford). If successful, the project will be a large 4 year project examining 3-5 case studies in Africa, India, Amazonia and the UK to better understand and model social and ecological tipping points with opportunities for post docs. 

4. Per is planning a PhD course for spring 2010. The preliminary name of the course "Shaping change: understanding transformations in social-ecological systems". The course will pull together a number of disciplines and lecturers that are addressing transitions and transformations.

5. Per is presenting in a session on resilience at the Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) Synthesis Conference “
HUMAN SECURITY IN AN ERA OF GLOBAL CHANGE” in June 22-24, 2009
, University of Oslo, Norway

6. Per is, together with Henrik Österblom, organizing a joint session with the DRIFT (Dutch Research Institute for Transitions) group at the RMNO-conference "Towards a Knowledge Democracy", August 25-27 in the Netherlands.

7. Victor contributed to two reports as the result of work done for the International Commission for Climate Change and Development. Both reports deal with the role of local institutions and governance for building climate resilience. They can be downloaded here.

8. The emerging Global Change theme (with Will Steffen and Kevin Noone) is working very closely with a range of people from our theme (Beatrice, Per, Måns, Åsa, Victor) to make a governance follow up on the Planetary Boundaries concept. A small workshop will be held June 24th, with two possible follow up meetings in Stockholm and Amsterdam. Additional workshops on e.g. implications of abrupt climate change under way for 2010. 

9. Victor and Per are on their way to Rotterdam on June 8th to meet a group of researchers dealing with network governance, and network management. 

9. Don't forget Lisen's dissertation on June 4th!

Adaptive Governance and Planetary Boundaries: Some Uneducated Guesses

by Åsa Persson

A new initiative by SEI and SRC researchers, together with around twenty leading Earth system scientists, seeks to define Planetary Boundaries, for in total nine global environmental change processes. These include processes such as climate change (where the boundary is proposed as ≤ 350 ppm atmospheric CO₂), ocean acidification, anthropogenic nitrogen inflow, land system change, biodiversity loss, and chemical pollution. The aim of this initiative is to synthesise recent global environmental change research, in order to communicate the breadth of the challenge and system interlinkages (as compared with the current strong policy focus on climate change exclusively); to incorporate new findings on non-linearities, slow feedbacks and ‘tipping points’ in the Earth system; and to emphasise the need for resilience also at this highly aggregated global, or planetary, scale. The intention is not to impose boundaries on human activities as such, but outline a ‘safe operating space’ for human development, in which economic, social and technological development is theoretically limitless as long as the integrity of the boundaries is ensured. The boundaries initiative is an attempt to kick-start a process of evidence-based risk analysis engaging a much wider scientific community, and, of course, all kinds of stakeholders.

 

From the outset of this initiative, it was clear that proposing Planetary Boundaries would have important implications for global environmental governance, including the study thereof. The boundaries framework could serve to re-energise or redirect the debate on governance arrangements at the global or international level. Considering the boundaries from a global governance perspective raises big questions – en masse! An initial reflection is whether it is not misguided to, like in traditional global environmental governance studies, focus strongly on environmental governance regimes and instruments, such as multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs). Considering the generally poor track record of MEAs, as well as the drivers behind transgressing boundaries, it seems more urgent to study ‘upstream’ global governance arrangements, under which major public and private investment decisions are taken, technology choices made, and consumption patterns regulated (or not). This could be done by adopting an environmental policy integration (EPI) approach at the global level and considering how the boundaries framework could apply to, for example, the trade regime, regulation of the global financial system and intellectual property rights.

 

A second initial reflection – and the one I would like to pick your brains about in this short text – is how the principles of adaptive governance apply to the Planetary Boundaries, and global environmental governance more generally. Being uneducated in the literature on adaptive governance, I personally struggle with some questions and trade-offs it appears to raise and would like to use this opportunity to get your help on furthering the contextualisation of boundaries within an adaptive governance framework.

 

Starting with the most basic question; governance adaptive to what? My reading is that governance should be adaptive to new knowledge about functions, dynamics and conditions of social-ecological systems, rather than rigidly sticking to outdated knowledge about, for example, critical emission or resource extraction levels. An example here would be that current climate negotiations assume that the commonly accepted 2°C target [it is now proposed that we are on a path towards 4°C warming]

is associated with 450 ppm CO₂ and thus calibrate emission targets to that level, whereas new research shows that the omission of certain feedbacks relating to ice-sheets and air pollution could mean that the target level should rather be 350 ppm CO₂. If this reading is accurate, adaptive governance would to me represent an ideal version of knowledge-based governance. The problem then is how this vision of elevated status (and veto role?) of environment-related knowledge matches with today’s political and governance realities; competition over limited resources for environmental management and governance, asymmetry in power of interest groups, myopic decision-making, national sovereignty, etc. With this reading of adaptive governance, the key analytical problem seems to me to be how to – in theory and in practice – facilitate a transition from current governance to adaptive governance. Further, can this be done through incremental steps, or is a quick ‘fix’ necessary and possible? Below are some of the challenges and trade-offs I imagine would need to be overcome in such a transition. I will try and illustrate some of my thoughts with examples from climate change governance, a field in which I am working at the moment.

First, a key principle for adaptive governance is flexibility. I interpret this to refer to continuous re-evaluation of policy targets and legislation based on emerging knowledge, experimenting with policy and making use of crises. Against these obvious advantages, I see two major risks with increasing the level of flexibility in global environmental governance. The first classical problem is how to avoid delay in international policy action as a consequence of expectations of new and better knowledge. Already, calls have been made to put a post-2012 climate agreement on hold until the IPCC’s next round of assessment reports (AR5) are presented in 2013. With regards to the thorny issue of agreeing on financing of climate adaptation in developing countries, calls for new needs assessments are made despite finalised National Adaptation Programmes of Action for forty LDCs. How do we make the trade-off between early action based on ‘second-best’ knowledge and late action based on better (but never perfect) knowledge? Can adaptive governance enlighten us? The second problem is how to balance more flexible international policy targets and instruments, as a consequence of more fluid and frequent intake of new knowledge, with the need for stability and certainty of investment frameworks for the private sector and households. A common argument from business in international climate policy is that certainty itself is more important than the actual level of emission quotas or other costs imposed upon them, since investment cycles are long in many sectors – and definitely longer than most governments hold office. Considering these risks, what practical steps could be taken to facilitate a transition towards increased flexibility? Introducing more medium-term targets in addition short- and long-term ones? Imposing tougher targets as needed but also more support measures?

 

Another key concern I see in the adaptive governance literature is capacity to deal with surprise, as a result of dynamic systems and non-linear responses. My understanding here is that what we are talking about is a ‘known unknown’, in Rumsfeld-speak, i.e. that they can be planned and prepared for. In relation to global environmental governance, the responses to possible surprises that come to my mind are state-guaranteed insurance funds for nuclear accidents, insurance schemes for climate impacts being proposed under the UNFCCC, and of course general monitoring and relief provided for natural disasters. The challenges here, I assume, are to expand crisis response and disaster risk reduction to surprises which only indirectly affect humans, through eroded ecological resilience, and to shift from reactive disaster relief (such as insurance pay-outs) to preventive disaster risk reduction. In order to facilitate the transition to better deal with surprise, I imagine the first challenge would need to be addressed by better educating decision-makers at the national and international level about Earth system dynamics – something which the Planetary Boundaries initiative would contribute to. Overcoming the second challenge may not necessarily require fundamental philosophical shifts in risk preference (i.e. preferring to commit either type I or type II error), considering that there appears to be more and more evidence that prevention is more cost-effective than reactive responses.

 

A third key principle in adaptive governance is institutional diversity and redundancy, which I interpret as a primarily precautionary device, i.e. increasing the chances that someone (out of many) is governing effectively and appropriately, but also to stimulate learning, innovation and healthy competition. In relation to global environmental governance, an obvious challenge with, for example, using and creating more institutions alongside UNEP and others is how to cover the cost and who should pay for those institutions. There is a difficult-to-avoid trade-off here between effectiveness, in terms of addressing global environmental change (presumably benefiting from institutional redundancy), and efficiency, in terms of using scarce resources at the global level. The challenge is amplified by the economic inequalities at the global level – if not greater, then often more tangible and politically loaded than at the national and local levels – which make each dollar going into environmental governance rather than direct poverty reduction or some other just cause more controversial and harder to justify. Could a possible transitional response be to create an ‘artificial’ redundancy by expanding the mandates and responsibilities of already existing and financed institutions in ‘non-environmental’ fields (trade, finance, IPRs) to include stewarding the planetary boundaries, such as was argued for above?

 

A final key concern I want to raise here is the question of who makes decisions. My understanding of adaptive governance is that this literature emphasises the general appropriateness of networks (as opposed to hierarchical bureaucracies?), self-organisation, and broad public participation, at the same time as recognising the need for leadership. I assume here that this is because those with the best knowledge and incentives to act (well) should be allowed to do so. In global environmental governance, however, I wonder if these forms of organisation and implicit assigning of decision-making authority conflict with democratic norms. As has been seen in the climate regime on several occasions, procedural equity and fairness is considered equally or sometimes more important than the substantive outcome of negotiations. Of course, informal and formal networks operate also at the global level, such as recent G8 and Major Economies meetings on climate change. But the need for democratic representativity may be more pronounced at the global level, since the inequality of the distribution of costs and benefits of global environmental change is arguably higher and there may be both big winners and big losers. Would a transition phase involve trying to find compromise solutions where democratic norms are somehow maintained, but more appropriate representatives for the global demos than nation states are chosen? Or does adaptive governance provide other insights on issues of democracy?

 

I hope these are big, provocative and stupid enough questions to generate responses that will enable us to together start addressing the governance implications of Planetary Boundaries in the most informed and intelligent way possible.

How Information Technology Changes Everything

by Victor Galaz

It all started with a range of books that are likely to become modern classics: “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More”, ”Wikinomics – How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything” and ”Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations”. Not only do they make a great read, but they also describe a quite recent - and accelerating  - change in how people share information, collaborate, and innovate through information and communication technology (ICT). The business community is obviously at the frontier of these developments, e.g. Google, Twitter, YouTube, and MySpace.

But there is more to ICT than Facebook status updates, and blogging. As information dynamics in society changes, established modes of operating government, non-governmental organizations and business transforms. And this adds a range of unexplored challenges and opportunities to adaptive governance of SES. Here are three interesting topics I see emerging in the near future:

Do Good – it seems like a range of state and non-state actors now are exploring the potential of ICT for empowerment and poverty reduction – a movement called ICT4D (‘ICT for Development’). ‘Virtual charity’ seems to be an additional emerging movement that was highlighted during the Skoll World Forum for Social Entrepreneurship. Kiva.org for example, is a non-profit organization that presents itself as the “e-Bay for micro-loans”. A simple web-based innovation with a huge global fan-base, and with the ability to transfer large amounts of financial resources across the globe (1 million USD a week according to its president Premal Shah).

Do Better – A wise political scientist once said that governments should be understood as information processing structures.  And like all such organizations, they may have some dysfunctions. When they fail to gather, process, and disseminate information properly, they are likely to be challenged by other actors. As novel innovative approaches to ecological monitoring are developed by academia or non-state actors  - such as web crawlers or intelligent wireless sensors – there will be calls for serious institutional reform. For example, what is the use of having a United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) if all they do is compile reports that describe ecological crises only years after they have happened?

Do Bottom-Up – most interestingly however, is how the business community is experimenting with tools that support information sharing, co-production and self-organization across geographical boundaries and levels. The resilience community has been talking about the need for these processes for quite some time now, but we are missing that true experimentation with “framed creativity” (Folke et al 2005) is really happening in non-state organizations (e.g, Kiva.org), creative communities, private business (e.g. Best Buy) and in what organizational scholars denote as “virtual organizations”. The challenge is of course, how to transfer these insights to an adaptive governance setting. 

But it is possible. For example; how about a paper called “A Virtual Organization for the Baltic Sea”? Might seem like a geeky title, but I must admit that I like the sound of it.

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!