ABSTRACT. The governance of climate adaptation involves the collective efforts of multiple societal actors to address problems, or to reap the benefits, associated with impacts of climate change. Governing involves the creation of institutions, rules and organizations, and the selection of normative principles to guide problem solution and institution building. We argue that actors involved in governing climate change adaptation, as climate change governance regimes evolve, inevitably must engage in making choices, for instance on problem definitions, jurisdictional levels, on modes of governance and policy instruments, and on the timing of interventions. Yet little is known about how and why these choices are made in practice, and how such choices affect the outcomes of our efforts to govern adaptation. In this introduction we review the current state of evidence and the specific contribution of the articles published in this Special Feature, which are aimed at bringing greater clarity in these matters, and thereby informing both governance theory and practice. Collectively, the contributing papers suggest that the way issues are defined has important consequences for the support for governance interventions, and their effectiveness. The articles suggest that currently the emphasis in adaptation governance is on the local and regional levels, while underscoring the benefits of interventions and governance at higher jurisdictional levels in terms of visioning and scaling-up effective approaches. The articles suggest that there is a central role of government agencies in leading governance interventions to address spillover effects, to provide public goods, and to promote the long-term perspectives for planning. They highlight the issue of justice in the governance of adaptation showing how governance measures have wide distributional consequences, including the potential to amplify existing inequalities, access to resources, or generating new injustices through distribution of risks. For several of these findings, future research directions are suggested.
ABSTRACT. Adaptive comanagement (ACM) is often suggested as a way of handling the modern challenges of environmental governance, which include uncertainty and complexity. ACM is a novel combination of the learning dimension of adaptive management and the linkage dimension of comanagement. As has been suggested, there is a need for more insight on enabling policy environments for ACM success and failure. Picking up on this agenda we provide a case study of the world famous Venice lagoon in Italy. We address the following questions: first, to what extent are four institutional prescriptions typically associated with ACM currently practiced in the Venice system? Second, to what extent is learning taking place in the Venice system? Third, how is learning related to the implementation or nonimplementation of the prescriptions of ACM in the Venice system? Our analysis is based on interviews with stakeholders, participatory observation, and archive data. This paper demonstrates that the prescriptions of ACM are hardly followed in the Venice lagoon, but some levels of cognitive learning do take place, albeit very much within established management paradigms. Normative and relational learning are much rarer and when they do occur, they seem to have a relatively opportunistic reason. We propose that in particular the low levels of collaboration, because the governance system was deliberately set up in a hierarchical and mono-centric way, and the limited possibilities for stakeholder participation are implicated in this finding because they cause low levels of social capital and an incapacity to handle disagreements and uncertainty very well.
ABSTRACT. Climate adaptation is a dynamic social and institutional process where the governance dimension is receiving growing attention. Adaptive governance is an approach that promises to reduce uncertainty by improving the knowledge base for decision making. As uncertainty is an inherent feature of climate adaptation, adaptive governance seems to be a promising approach for improving climate adaptation governance. However, the adaptive governance literature has so far paid little attention to decisionmaking tools and methods, and the literature on the governance of adaptation is in its infancy in this regard. We argue that climate adaptation governance would benefit from systematic and yet flexible decision-making tools and methods such as participatory multicriteria methods for the evaluation of adaptation options, and that these methods can be linked to key adaptive governance principles. Moving from these premises, we propose a framework that integrates key adaptive governance features into participatory multicriteria methods for the governance of climate adaptation.
The sustainable management of natural resources under climate change conditions is a critical research issue. Among the many approaches emerged in recent times, the so-called ‘nexus approach’ is gaining traction in academic and policy circles. The nexus approach presupposes the analysis of bio-physical, socio-economic and policy interlinkages among sectors (e.g., water, energy, food) for the identification of integrated solutions and the support of policy decisions. Ultimately, the nexus approach aims to identify synergies and trade-offs among the nexus dimensions. Concerning policy, the nexus approach focuses on policy coherence, i.e., the systematic identification and management of trade-offs and synergies between policies across sectors. This paper investigates the coherence between policies on the water-land-energy-food-climate nexus in Greece. The systematic analysis of policy documents led to the elicitation of nexus-related policy objectives and instruments. Then, the coherence among objectives and between objectives and instruments was assessed using the methodology proposed by Nilsson et al. A stakeholder (trans-disciplinary) orientation was adopted and the need to incorporate stakeholders’ recommendations as to policy coherence assessment was highlighted. Overall, the findings revealed that climate and food/agricultural policies represent critical future priorities in Greece by stimulating progress in other nexus-related policies (energy, water, land policies) and being positively influenced by them.
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