Chapter 1
Integrating Perspectives on Adaptive Capacity and Environmental Governance Ryan Plummer and Derek Armitage
1.1
Introduction
Promising governance strategies for complex social–ecological conditions are emerging. Although these strategies build upon well established ideas from environmental management, emphasis has increasingly been directed at recognizing feedback processes, nonlinearity, and the problem of “fit” between institutions and biophysical systems (Young 2002; Galaz et al. 2008). Strategies better suited to embrace resource uncertainty and environmental change via collaborative processes and systematic learning highlight the importance of multilevel interactions among social actors with conflicting objectives (Adger et al. 2005; Lebel et al. 2005), innovative ways of producing and sharing knowledge (van Kerkhoff and Lebel 2006; Berkes 2009), and linking science and policy through communities of practice (Reid et al. 2006; Davidson-Hunt and O’Flaherty 2007) to cope with uncertainty and adapt to change. Building adaptive capacity is at the core of these promising governance strategies. Adaptive capacity is broadly defined as the ability of a social–ecological system (or the components of that system) to be robust to disturbance and capable of responding to change (Walker and Salt 2006; Carpenter and Brock 2008). As Folke et al. (2003) identified, four general factors may foster adaptive capacity in social– ecological systems, particularly during periods of crisis: (1) learning to live with
R. Plummer Department of Tourism and Environment, Brock University, 500 Glenridge Avenue, L2S 3A1 St., Catharines, ON, Canada Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, SE-106 91, Sweden e-mail:
[email protected] D. Armitage Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University, N2L 3C5 Waterloo, ON, Canada e-mail:
[email protected]
D. Armitage and R. Plummer (eds.), Adaptive Capacity and Environmental Governance, Springer Series on Environmental Management, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-12194-4_1, # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010
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change and uncertainty; (2) nurturing diversity for resilience; (3) combining different types of knowledge for learning; and (4) creating opportunity for self-organization toward social–ecological sustainability. Adaptive capacity, therefore, provides a valuable analytic construct around which managers, scientists, resource users, and policy makers can come together in theoretically engaged but decidedly applied ways to address the challenges of governance. Yet, several important questions need to be addressed to realize the potential of adaptive capacity to enhance environmental governance: What is the theoretical basis of adaptive capacity? How can adaptive capacity be effectively applied through policy and cultivated in practice? What issues require future consideration? The goal of this volume is to address the need for a consolidated, interdisciplinary approach to the theoretical advances and practical implications of adaptive capacity in the context of an emerging environmental governance discourse that emphasizes local–global interactions and linkages, adaptiveness, and learning. Specifically, the volume seeks to (1) synthesize current knowledge and understanding of adaptive capacity in the context of environment and natural resource governance (e.g., climate change, fisheries, water resources, forests); (2) build theory from synthesis of experiences with adaptive capacity by identifying principles and critically examining key features of the concept; (3) highlight the implications of theory and experience for practice; (4) foster policy innovation; and (5) encourage efforts to build capacity for novel governance approaches to address complex environment and natural resource challenges. This introductory chapter sets the stage for the book. Contemporary environmental challenges and the emerging governance agenda provide a backdrop and rationale for the volume. Adaptive capacity is then defined in relation to its interdisciplinary heritage and situated in the context of previous research. Areas of scholarship that inform adaptive capacity are highlighted as key themes, upon which the interdisciplinary contributors to this volume advance concepts, tools and knowledge about the critical relationships among global environmental change, multilevel environmental governance, and adaptive capacity.
1.2
Contemporary Environmental Challenges: A Synopsis
Kofi Annan called for the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) in his report to the United Nations General Assembly in the year 2000 (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005). From 2001 to 2005, the MA was conducted to “. . . assess the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being and to establish the scientific basis for actions needed to enhance the conservation and sustainable use of ecosystems and their contributions to human well-being” (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005, p. ii). The conceptual framework developed to orient the assessment concentrates on human well-being, assumes dynamic interactions between people and parts of ecosystems, acknowledges other factors that also influence humans and ecosystems, and recognizes the need for a multiscale
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approach (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2003). The multiscale assessment involved the compilation, judgment, and interpretation of existing knowledge by some 1,360 experts from 95 countries. It yielded four main findings: (1) over the past half century, humans have changed ecosystems more quickly and extensively than in the past due primarily to the growing demands for ecosystem services by humans and have caused a “substantial and irreversible loss in diversity of life on Earth”; (2) while changes have furthered “substantial net gains in human well-being and economic development”, they have also come with increasing costs that will diminish the benefits possible to future generations; (3) degradation of ecosystem services is an impediment to accomplishing the Millennium Development Goals and could worsen substantially in the next 50 years; and (4) options exist to reduce negative trade-offs and bolster positive synergies with ecosystem services, but these will involve new and substantial changes by humans (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005). Since conveying the detailed findings for all systems are beyond the scope of this book, we draw attention to the contemporary challenges of global–local environmental change captured by the MA (2005) and more recent evidence and assessments that support these findings (Stern 2007). Most substantial has been the transformation of one quarter of the land surface area from terrestrial ecosystems (e.g., forests and grasslands) to cultivated systems. Forest cover in particular has declined at 0.2% per year, with Africa as well as Latin America and the Caribbean losing forests at higher rates (FAO 2007). Marine and freshwater ecosystems have also been altered considerably. Fishing pressure in marine systems has been intensified dramatically in response to the world demand for food to the point where trophic levels harvested are declining and biomass is generally reduced to less than one-tenth of preindustrial fishing levels. Modification of freshwater systems is pervasive throughout the world with flows in more than half of the large river systems worldwide being moderately or strongly affected by capture structures and withdrawals. Substantial change is also evident in polar systems, where average temperatures are warmer than the past 400 years, precipitating widespread reductions in sea ice and thawing of permafrost. The MA (2005) also focused on the critical factors responsible for ecosystem changes. The term “driver” is used to describe natural or human-induced factors that cause changes; direct drivers unequivocally influence ecosystem processes while indirect drivers cause ecosystem change by influencing one or more direct drivers. Direct drivers include habitat change, overexploitation, invasive alien species, pollution and climate change. Indirect drivers identified in the MA (2005) include human population change, change in economic activity, sociopolitical factors, cultural factors, and technological change. The scenarios developed by the MA to explore potential future situations suggest that these drivers will continue to cause changes and the relative importance of particular drivers will increase; climate change and associated impacts may be the dominant direct drivers of change in ecosystems by the end of the century (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) corroborated the importance of this driver as “there is high agreement and much evidence that with current climate change
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mitigation policies and related sustainable development practices, global GHG emissions will continue to grow over the next few decades” (2007, p. 44). This synopsis of global–local environmental change signals the scope and severity of contemporary environmental challenges within which the chapters in this book are located. The interrelationships among current and future drivers clearly illustrate the complicated nature of the causes and outcomes of these environmental challenges. The attendant issues of how to approach these challenges is the quintessential question for those concerned with environmental governance.
1.3
Environmental Governance
The limitations of conventional command and control approaches to environmental problems that will dominate this century are now recognized. These limitations include substantial economic costs associated with compliance and enforcement of regulations; extensive litigation that is often associated with regulatory approaches and the management decisions of regulatory agencies; political conflicts and polarization of stakeholders; limited gains with respect to initial problems and often unforeseen (and undesirable) outcomes (Holling and Meffe 1996; Cortner 2000; Kettle 2002; Durant et al. 2004); and more generally a “pathology of natural resource management” (Holling and Meffe 1996; Cortner 2000; Briggs 2003). The nature of social–ecological problems thus combines with limitations of conventional approaches and pervasive uncertainties to demand broader consideration of governance systems forged to address recurring and emerging environmental challenges. Governance is distinct from government. Governance refers to “. . . the whole of public as well as private interactions taken to solve societal problems and create societal opportunities. It includes the formulation and application of principles guiding those interactions and care for institutions that enable them (Kooiman and Bavinck 2005, p. 17)”. More recently, Biermann et al. (2009, p. 3) defined governance in the context of an earth systems perspective as, “. . . the interrelated and increasingly integrated system of formal and informal rules, rule-making systems, and actor-networks at all levels of human society (from local to global) that are set up to steer societies towards preventing, mitigating, and adapting to global and local environmental change”. This definition has a number of advantages, including a stronger emphasis on scale, integration, and the normative emphasis on seeking ways to “steer” societies away from harm and toward sustainability. Finally, the definition emphasizes the importance of adapting to change. Flexibility to respond quickly and proactively to uncertain circumstances is recognized as a focal point of governance. Both these definitions and the issues they raise point to the varied manner in which environmental governance is conceived. Indeed, environmental governance as a specific form or subcategory of a broader governance concerns has been conceptualized from a variety of perspectives, determined largely by the disciplinary orientation of the scholar or analyst. One common typology is to distinguish among several models or agents, including regulatory control through bureaucracies
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of the state and international regimes, market-based approaches, and a range of more civil society-oriented approaches. These forms and the related actors often combine or hybridize in practice in the form of governance networks with different degrees of formality (e.g., private–social partnerships, public–private partnerships, or cooperative arrangements between states and communities), to address critical environmental challenges (see Glasbergen 1998; Lemos and Agrawal 2006). Recognizing the importance of interplay between structure and agency in different governance forms is necessary. However, we argue here that in light of global environmental change, an overly static and structural perspective of governance is limiting, as is the tendency to consider actors through a lens of those that govern as opposed to those being governed. Instead, the crucial task as summarized by Galaz et al. (2008, p. 169) is how to “. . . create governance that is able to ‘navigate’ the dynamic nature of multilevel and interconnected socio-ecological systems...” This view draws attention to several crucial aspects of governance, such as (1) embracing integrative science of sustainability and interconnections between social and ecological systems (Berkes et al. 2003; Folke 2007); (2) fostering attributes of institutions that are devolved, participatory, deliberative, accountable, just, multilayered and polycentric (e.g., Kettle 2002; Durant et al. 2004; Lebel et al. 2006; Huitema et al. 2009); and (3) framing governance in the context of a complex adaptive systems approach and dynamics of cross-scale and cross-level interactions (Dietz et al. 2003; Lemos and Agrawal 2006; Cash et al. 2006; Folke 2007; Ostrom 2007). Although governance strategies are emerging with slightly different names (e.g., adaptive governance, adaptive comanagement, cogovernance) and points of emphasis (e.g., consequences during periods of change or transformation, the intricacies of co-management and learning processes, partnerships extending across state-marketsociety), they share the sentiment that making environmental governance operational requires collaboration among heterogeneous actors with diverse interests, institutions that are flexible and nested across scales and levels, and analytic deliberation that develops understanding through multiple knowledge systems; builds trust through repeated interactions; and fosters learning and adaptive responses through continuous feedback (Dietz et al. 2003; Folke et al. 2003, 2005; Armitage et al. 2009). However, there are many unanswered questions regarding the institutional systems that facilitate or constrain the capacity of actors to respond to change and learn through uncertainty. Similarly, greater clarity regarding the specific attributes and relational factors (e.g., collaborative processes, social capital, and social networks) that foster efforts to navigate multilevel and interconnected socio-ecological systems is required. Adaptive capacity provides a valuable analytical entre´e into those strategies and requirements paramount to the making of environment governance.
1.4
Adaptive Capacity
Adaptive capacity has a myriad of meanings and a diverse intellectual ancestry from which various perspectives emerge. For example, adaptive capacity is traceable to the natural sciences and evolutionary biology, in which features that permit
