Legal and institutional foundations of adaptive environmental governance

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Legal and institutional structures fundamentally shape opportunities for adaptive governance of environmental resources at multiple ecological and societal scales. Properties of adaptive governance are widely studied. However, these studies have not resulted in consolidated frameworks for legal and institutional design, limiting our ability to promote adaptation and social-ecological resilience. We develop an overarching framework that describes the current and potential role of law in enabling adaptation. We apply this framework to different social-ecological settings, centers of activity, and scales, illustrating the multidimensional and polycentric nature of water governance. Adaptation typically emerges organically among multiple centers of agency and authority in society as a relatively self-organized or autonomous process marked by innovation, social learning, and political deliberation. This self-directed and emergent process is difficult to create in an exogenous, top-down fashion. However, traditional centers of authority may establish enabling conditions for adaptation using a suite of legal, economic, and democratic tools to legitimize and facilitate self-organization, coordination, and collaboration across scales. The principles outlined here provide preliminary legal and institutional foundations for adaptive environmental governance, which may inform institutional design and guide future scholarship.

Unravelling Stakeholder Perceptions to Enable Adaptive Water Governance in Dryland Systems

“…Learning processes that allow a shared vision of the WES to be established, offer potential to facilitate collaboration between stakeholders (Medema et al 2017). Collaboration is key as it can mitigate current conflicts, create networks, and enhance participation in decision-making: basic elements of adaptive governance (DeCaro et al 2017).…”

“…Adaptive water governance (AWG) integrates collaboration and learning processes to increase system adaptive capacity in the face of uncertainty and changing social-ecological conditions (DeCaro et al 2017). AWG suits contexts such as drylands, which are naturally exposed to droughts, land degradation, and desertification.…”

Can Resilience Thinking Be Integrated into the Strategic Environmental Assessment Process?

“…Systemic change tends to emerge through self‐organization at the local level (DeCaro, Chaffin et al ) and can be supported by regulatory agency policy that, for example, creates support schemes that overcome issues of loss aversion and by the private sector adopting proactive corporate social responsibility measures. One of the potential difficulties with creating a paradigm shift in environmental policy is an economistic mindset that believes in unlimited economic growth, technological solutions, and the power of the market that will tend to dominate the political process, especially in sectors of high financial value.…”

Introduction to the Special Feature Practicing Panarchy: Assessing legal flexibility, ecological resilience, and adaptive governance in regional water systems experiencing rapid environmental change

“…Their framework describes the legal underpinnings for multidimensional, polycentric, self-organized, and emergent structures that pursue innovation, social learning, and political deliberation. They (DeCaro et al 2017b) also argue that such frameworks are difficult in extant, top-down centers of authority, but are possible using existing tools to legitimize and facilitate self-organized coordination and collaboration across scales.…”