The Role of Social-Ecological Resilience in Coastal Zone Management: A Comparative Law Approach to Three Coastal Nations

Abstract

Around the globe, coastal communities are increasingly coping with changing environmental conditions as a result of climate change and ocean acidification, including sea level rise, more severe storms, and decreasing natural resources and ecosystem services. A natural adaptation response is to engineer the coast in a perilous and often doomed attempt to preserve the status quo. In the long term, however, most coastal nations will need to transition to approaches based on ecological resilience-that is, to coastal zone management that allows coastal communities to absorb and adapt to change rather than to resist it-and the law will be critical in facilitating this transition. Researchers are increasingly illuminating law's ability to promote social-ecological resilience to a changing world, but this scholarship-mostly focused on U.S. law-has not yet embraced its potential role in helping to create new international norms for social-ecological resilience. Through its comparison of coastal zone management in Australia, Finland, and the Netherlands, this article demonstrates that a comparative law approach offers a fruitful expansion of law-and-resilience research, both by extending this research to other countries and, more importantly, by allowing scholars to identify critical variables, or variable constellations associated with countries' decisions to adopt laws designed to promote social-ecological resilience and to identify mechanisms that allow for a smoother transition to this approach. For example, our comparison demonstrates, among other things, that countries can adopt coastal zone management techniques that integrate social-ecological resilience without fully abandoning more traditional engineering approaches to adapt to environmental change and its impacts.

Tsetse Invasion as an Emerging Threat to Socioecological Resilience of Pastoral Communities in Karamoja, Uganda

“…The socioecological resilience of ecosystems depends on its ability to absorb change and disturbance, without shifting to a new regime, governed by a different set of processes and structures. In this case, resilience is the system's ability to resist transforming into a new system state [27]. Often, transformations and the associated threat of additional transformations have critical implications for both human well-being and resource management [28].…”

Who Has Benefited? A Socio-Ecological Chronology of Urban Resilience in the Early Reconstruction of Talca after the 27-F Earthquake, Chile 2010–2012

“…Furhermore, urban resilience is part of a more complex socioecological system and an evolutionary concept that is far from its conservative definition, as discussed recently by scholars who have included "three constitutive elements of resilience in planning: adaptive capacity, self-organization, and transformability" [80] (p. 6). Moreover, by increasing recent case studies from other countries of post-earthquake reconstruction including different territories such as costal zones [81,82], the universality of the method will increase; and a good start is including other global seismic territories within the "Pacific Fire Belt", with similar natural hazards such as earthquakes, tsunamis, or landslides, as registered in Chile. Thus, cases like Talca are relevant for planning, as the observed conflicts of institutional inter-organization [83,84], the stagnation of mobilized social assets, and the potential loss of communitarian capital could possibly impact the ecosystem sphere, which is also relevant to other intermediate cities with similar post reconstruction processes [85].…”

Strategy on climate change adaptation from socio-ecology approach: A philosophical-ethical assessment of Tam Nong district case study

“…With the flexibility of the socio-ecology approach based on the results of systematic research, its inter-disciplinary nature will ensure the provision of scientific information as a basis for recommendations appropriate to regional development policy, ensuring the load-bearing capacity of nature, management capacity, knowledge, cultural identity and feasibility in the implementation process, while solving conflicts in the declaration, exploiting and using of resources. This proves to be especially suitable for developing policies to adapt to climate change based on proactive adaptation, promoting potential advantages, transforming challenges into opportunities for development (McGinnis & Ostrom, 2014;Nicholls et al, 2018;Garmestani et al, 2019). Respecting nature and making a wise use of it becomes more viable when choosing the adaptive model, integrating human activities and social structure into the system to ensure harmony in adaptation and development, as these are expected to enhance territorial competitiveness combined with strengthening human adaptive capacity and natural systems to protect and improve the quality of life, ensure security and sustainable development of the territory through improving ecological and rational social capacities (Ostrom, 2009;Michael et al, 2014;Petrosillo, Aretano, & Zurlini, 2015;Juanet al, 2020).…”