Understanding process, power, and meaning in adaptive governance: a critical institutional reading

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Adaptive governance continues to attract considerable interest in academic and policy circles. This is with good reason, given its increasing relevance in a globalized and changing world. At the same time, adaptive governance is the subject of a growing body of critical literature concerned with the ways in which it theorizes the social world. In this paper, we respond to these critiques, which we see as broadly concerning the process, power, and meaning dimensions of environmental and natural resource governance. We argue that adaptive governance theory would benefit from engaging constructively with critical institutionalism, a school of thought that, like adaptive governance, has one foot in commons scholarship. Critical institutionalism conceives of institutional change as a process of bricolage, where those involved piece together new arrangements from the resources to hand. This approach highlights the interplay of structure and agency, and illuminates how new governance arrangements form and come to be seen as natural in dynamic relation to the wider social and cultural landscape. We consider how these arrangements tend to reflect dominant power relations, whilst the plural nature of social life also provides scope for adaptation and transformative change.

Innovative Resources, Promotion Focus and Responsible Innovation: The Moderating Roles of Adaptive Governance

“…It not only encourages enterprises to use technological advancement and economic growth as evaluation criteria, but also integrate the acceptability of moral ethics and the satisfaction of social needs and expectations into the evaluation criteria of innovation performance, so as to realize the public value of science and technology [75]. Finally, in the process of policy implementation, the policies formulated by adaptive governance not only alleviate the target conflict between the government and the enterprise, but also conform to the market environment of the industry where the enterprise is located, and weakens the concern of the enterprise about government intervention damaging the value of enterprise [76]. In this case, the goal consistency between the enterprise and the government becomes stronger, which not only ensures the interests of the enterprise, but also addresses the government's demand for public value, reduces the risk associated with the enterprise's implementation of the policy and encourages the enterprise to make use of their existing innovative resources, actively implement the issued policies and regulations, fulfill the ethical responsibility emphasized by the government and ensure there is a public value of technological innovation [77].…”

Social Innovations as A Response to Dispossession: Community Water Management in View of Socio-Metabolic Rift in Chile

“…The term "critical institutionalism", coined by Frances Cleaver et al [30,67], points out the context and complexity within institutions in order to explain actors' behavior by highlighting path-dependency and the importance of informality [34,35]. Taking this approach, we recognize one outstanding internal link between the above described impacts of the socio-metabolic rift on community organization, which elicits several trust decreasing mechanisms: inequality of power-determined by an institutional framework that is characterized by neoliberal paradigms (maximum freedom (for some) to pursue deregulations favoring free market conditions).…”

“…offers the conceptual toolkit for illuminating process (how particular governance arrangements emerge and are enacted); power (how they are shaped to benefit some and not others); and meaning (how they become invested with meaning and so gain legitimacy and endurance." [35].…”

“…These refurbishments are everyday responses to changing circumstances." Consequently, actors constantly redefine the institutions at hand while the institutions' resilience depends on the social fitting [35].…”

Factoring in Societal Culture in Policy Transfer Design: the Proliferation of Private Sponsorship of Refugees

“…More recent studies on such bricolage activities confirm how policy actors explicitly and strategically employ cultural sensitivity when absorbing foreign institutions (de Jong 2013; Frick-Trzebitzky 2017; Koppenjan and de Jong 2018). In culturally diverse societies, these choices may well be reflections of majority culture and power relations at large, as critical institutionalists have argued (Cleaver and Whaley 2018). In a nutshell, before and throughout the policy process, brokering entities mediate between different knowledges and cultures, with decisive implications for the outcomes (Daniell 2014).…”