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Public participation is commonly advocated in policy responses to climate change. Here we discuss prospects for inclusive approaches to adaptation, drawing particularly on studies of long-term coastal management in the UK and elsewhere. We affirm that public participation is an important normative goal in formulating response to climate change risks, but argue that its practice must learn from existing critiques of participatory processes in other contexts. Involving a wide range of stakeholders in decision-making presents fundamental challenges for climate policy, many of which are embedded in relations of power. In the case of anticipatory responses to climate change, these challenges are magnified because of the long-term and uncertain nature of the problem. Without due consideration of these issues, a tension between principles of public participation and anticipatory adaptation is likely to emerge and may result in an overly managed form of inclusion that is unlikely to satisfy either participatory or instrumental goals. Alternative, more narrowly instrumental, approaches to participation are more likely to succeed in this context, as long as the scope and limitations of public involvement are made explicit from the outset. La participation publique est souvent encouragée pour l'élaboration de réponses aux changements climatiques. Plusieurs perspectives participatives à l'adaptation sont ici discutées, en s'appuyant particulièrement sur des études de gestion côtière à long terme au Royaume-Uni et ailleurs. Nous affirmons que la participation publique satisfait un objectif normatif important dans l'élaboration de réponses aux risques des changements climatiques, mais nous avançons que sa mise en oeuvre doit incorporer les leçons tirées de l'utilisation du processus participatif dans d'autres contextes. La concertation d'un grand éventail d'acteurs dans la prise de décisions représente des défis fondamentaux pour la politique climatique, émanant surtout des rapports de forces. Dans le cas de réponses anticipées aux changements climatiques, ces défis sont d'autant plus importants que l'échelle temporelle et l'incertitude liées au problème augmentent.Si ces questions ne sont pas bien prises en compte, une tension peut apparaître entre les principes de participation publique et l'adaptation anticipée, laquelle pourrait donner lieu à une forme d'inclusion trop étroitement gérée qui ne satisferait ni le but participatif ou instrumental. Des approches alternatives à la participation et plus étroitement instrumentales seraient plus adéquates dans ce contexte, pourvu que la portée et la limite de la participation publique soient rendues explicites dès le départ.

We investigate linkages between stakeholders in resource management that occur at different spatial and institutional levels and identify the winners and losers in such interactions. So-called crossscale interactions emerge because of the benefits to individual stakeholder groups in undertaking them or the high costs of not undertaking them. Hence there are uneven gains from cross-scale interactions that are themselves an integral part of social-ecological system governance. The political economy framework outlined here suggests that the determinants of the emergence of cross-scale interactions are the exercise of relative power between stakeholders and their costs of accessing and creating linkages. Cross-scale interactions by powerful stakeholders have the potential to undermine trust in resource management arrangements. If government regulators, for example, mobilize information and resources from cross-level interactions to reinforce their authority, this often disempowers other stakeholders such as resource users. Offsetting such impacts, some cross-scale interactions can be empowering for local level user groups in creating social and political capital. These issues are illustrated with observations on resource management in a marine protected area in Tobago in the Caribbean. The case study demonstrates that the structure of the cross-scale interplay, in terms of relative winners and losers, determines its contribution to the resilience of social-ecological systems.

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This article examines whether some response strategies to climate variability and change have the potential to undermine long-term resilience of social–ecological systems. We define the parameters of a resilience approach, suggesting that resilience is characterized by the ability to absorb perturbations without changing overall system function, the ability to adapt within the resources of the system itself, and the ability to learn, innovate, and change. We evaluate nine current regional climate change policy responses and examine governance, sensitivity to feedbacks, and problem framing to evaluate impacts on characteristics of a resilient system. We find that some responses, such as the increase in harvest rates to deal with pine beetle infestations in Canada and expansion of biofuels globally, have the potential to undermine long-term resilience of resource systems. Other responses, such as decentralized water planning in Brazil and tropical storm disaster management in Caribbean islands, have the potential to increase long-term resilience. We argue that there are multiple sources of resilience in most systems and hence policy should identify such sources and strengthen capacities to adapt and learn