Managing Wicked Environmental Problems as Complex Social-Ecological Systems: The Promise of Adaptive Governance

Rethinking Sustainable Development Using Deep Ecology and Adaptive Governance of Social-Ecological Systems: Implications for Protected Areas Management

“…favor of an alternative paradigm that posits that social and ecological systems are intricately interconnected as coupled social-ecological systems and that it is unreasonable to try to study or manage the two as separate entities [41,42]. The dynamics of coupled social-ecological systems have been described using the attributes of complex adaptive systems, such as scale, thresholds, nonlinearity, emergence, surprise, heterogeneity, and path-dependency [40,[43][44][45]. These dynamics can be modeled using the concepts of adaptive cycles and panarchy [46].…”

“…In this regard,[73] build on[63] to define adaptive governance as "a process of dealing with complexity and change under uncertain conditions that are difficult to control, involving diverse interest, and reconciling conflict among people and groups who differ in values, interests, perspectives, and power, and the kinds of information they bring to situations" (p. 2). This makes adaptive governance an appropriate mechanism for managing the wicked problems that are entailed in the implementation of adaptive management and ecosystem management[45,69,74]. Adaptive governance is also seen as an effective mechanism for promoting transformational change in social-ecological systems when existing conditions become undesirable[54,70,75,76].The key features of adaptive governance have received considerable attention in the resilience literature and they include: recognition of change and uncertainty; integration of diverse sources of knowledge; promotion of integrative and adaptive management goals; and reliance on diverse and nested institutional structures within polycentric systems [9,45,63,68,69].…”

“…Ecosystem-based management often involves actors with diverse values and interests as well as competing knowledge claims who are dispersed across various scales. Managing these differences in perspectives calls for mechanisms for conflict management, such as those entailed in adaptive governance processes[63,67].A key requirement of adaptive governance is analytic deliberation, a process of deliberation among scientists and resource managers that is also informed by scientific analysis[63,104,105].Analytic deliberation serves as a means of managing conflicting values and knowledge uncertainties, thus making adaptive governance a promising approach for dealing with wicked problems in ecosystem management processes[45,106]. For instance, in their analysis of three case studies on the role of adaptive governance in ecosystem management,[13] found that the adaptive governance approach had led to procedural benefits, such as enhanced capacity for monitoring, communication, and responding to changes, as well as substantive benefits, such as the provision of multiple ecosystem services.…”

“…"In line with deep ecology's holistic and dynamic conception of human-nature interactions, the adaptive governance approach is informed by the view of social and ecological systems as integrated complex adaptive social-ecological systems that shape each other in a co-evolutionary fashion across space and time[9,43]. Panarchy theory suggests that the dynamic cross-scale interactions among adaptive cycles in social-ecological systems give rise to periods of gradual predictable change, as well as occasional abrupt changes that are characterized by high levels of uncertainties[45,49,83]. Adaptive governance provides the mechanisms for managing gradual and abrupt change in such complex social-ecological systems[12,71,84].…”

A review of the emergent ecosystem of collaborative geospatial tools for addressing environmental challenges

“…Environmental challenges such as biodiversity loss, wildfire management, climate change, and rapid conversion of natural areas due to urbanization and agricultural expansion are recognized as "wicked problems" (Allen & Gould, 1986;Balint, Stewart, & Desai, 2011;Carroll, Blatner, Cohn, & Morgan, 2007;Temby, Sandall, Cooksey, & Hickey, 2016), or "complex social-ecological systems" (Akamani, Holzmueller, & Groninger, 2016). Many of these challenges can be described as global in scale, at the nexus of interdisciplinary approaches, and/or part of coupled processes.…”