Adaptive Comanagement for Building Resilience in Social?Ecological Systems

Abstract

Ecosystems are complex adaptive systems that require flexible governance with the ability to respond to environmental feedback. We present, through examples from Sweden and Canada, the development of adaptive comanagement systems, showing how local groups self-organize, learn, and actively adapt to and shape change with social networks that connect institutions and organizations across levels and scales and that facilitate information flows. The development took place through a sequence of responses to environmental events that widened the scope of local management from a particular issue or resource to a broad set of issues related to ecosystem processes across scales and from individual actors, to group of actors to multiple-actor processes. The results suggest that the institutional and organizational landscapes should be approached as carefully as the ecological in order to clarify features that contribute to the resilience of social-ecological systems. These include the following: vision, leadership, and trust; enabling legislation that creates social space for ecosystem management; funds for responding to environmental change and for remedial action; capacity for monitoring and responding to environmental feedback; information flow through social networks; the combination of various sources of information and knowledge; and sense-making and arenas of collaborative learning for ecosystem management. We propose that the self-organizing process of adaptive comanagement development, facilitated by rules and incentives of higher levels, has the potential to expand desirable stability domains of a region and make social-ecological systems more robust to change.

Social learning: A knowledge and capacity building approach for adaptive co-management of contested landscapes

“…This allowed time for researchers to reflect and change strategy to help manage uncertainties associated with different participant personalities (group dynamics). This has been reported to enhance self-organisation of social-ecological systems and help build community resilience by Olsson et al (2004a) and Hahn et al (2006), although highly dependant on local leadership qualities.…”

“…The term 'management' is differentiated from 'governance' in the literature by suggesting that management is the operation of processes under the rules of governance (Hahn et al, 2006) whether they be formal or flexible. Adaptive co-management offers flexibility in that local actors contribute to rules of membership and negotiation as opposed to prescriptive measures enforced by formal institutions (Connick and Innes, 2003;Olsson et al, 2004a;Hahn et al, 2006;Pahl-Wostl et al, 2007).…”

Participatory scenario planning for developing innovation in community adaptation responses: three contrasting examples from Latin America

“…This would challenge a simple linear stepwise interpretation of learning cycles and also appears more consistent with the conceptual framework of 'adaptation action cycles' which highlight oscillation between incremental and transformative modes of action, with each mode differing in terms of their information needs and requirements for policy support . In this context, policy support for adaptive governance may be required to improve cross-scale linkages to higher levels of decision making and external stakeholders (Olsson et al, 2004;Mistry et al, 2014). The case studies also suggest a smooth transition from coping towards adaptation is complicated by the association of social learning with place and identity which can encourage elements of both incremental and transformational processes depending on the local context .…”

Entre Hibridismos E Polissemias: Para Uma Análise Sociológica Das Sustentabilidades

“…This perspective gained momentum with Holling (1973), from the incorporation of the concept of resilience in ecosystem dynamics, in an ecological theoretical scenario excessively centered on the notion of static equilibrium. The incorporation of these concepts led to the emergence of the idea that sustainability practices should be linked to the concept of "adaptive management" (Gunderson, 2000) and its possible variations, such as "adaptive co-management" (Olsson et al, 2004). They are linked to an extension of the systemic perspective to the human dimensions, from the concept of "complex socio-ecological systems" (Berkes et al, 2003).…”