Exploring the future of adaptive governance: what are our capacities to change?

1. Exploring the future of adaptive governance: what are our capacities to change? Lorrae van Kerkhoff Human Ecology Forum, 19 April 2013

2. CCAEG???... today • Run through of a presentation • Presenting ideas behind the CCAEG program, for discussion and feedback • Seeking your views on relevance in areas you work in • Starting off a theme for the 2013 HEF, volunteer speakers welcome!

3. Adaptive governance

4. Adaptive governance: • Past • Present • Future

5. Adaptive governance: past • Resilience • Complexity • Uncertainty  Ecosystem-based approach to governance

6. Adaptive governance: past Beyond government, beyond management “Adaptive governance accepts and responds to uncertainty through promoting learning, avoiding irreversible interventions and impacts, encouraging constant monitoring of outcomes, facilitating broad participation in policy-making processes, encouraging transparency, and reflexively highlighting the limitations of the knowledge on which policy choices are based.” Cooney R and A Lang. Taking Uncertainty Seriously: Adaptive Governance and International Trade. Eur J Int Law (2007) 18 (3): 523-551

7. Adaptive governance: past Beyond government, beyond management “Adaptive governance accepts and responds to uncertainty through promoting learning, avoiding irreversible interventions and impacts, encouraging constant monitoringof outcomes, facilitating broad participation in policy-makingprocesses, encouraging transparency, and reflexively highlighting the limitations of the knowledge on which policy choices are based.” Cooney R and A Lang. Taking Uncertainty Seriously: Adaptive Governance and International Trade. Eur J Int Law (2007) 18 (3): 523-551

8. Adaptive governance: past Dietz T, E Ostrom and P Stern.(2003) The Struggle to Govern the Commons Science 302, 1907

9. Adaptive governance: present • Social learning • Collective action • Wicked problems • Reflexivity • Fit-for-purpose • Polycentric • Matching scales • Complex dynamics

10. Adaptive governance: the present “This revealed that constraints to the uptake of adaptive governance relate, to a large extent, to the inability of practitioners and policy makers to cope with complexity and uncertainties.” Rijke, J, et al. (2012). Fit-for-purpose governance: A framework to make adaptive governance operational. Environmental Science & Policy, 22, 73–84.

11. Adaptive governance: present

12. Adaptive governance: the future? • Tension between perceived need for top-down design and inherent uncertainty • Reluctance to really grapple with the political and cultural dimensions of managing socio-ecological systems • Collaboration, not consultation or contestation; new institutions? • Predominantly wealthy, Western-democratic perspective

13. Capacities for Adaptive Governance What does it take for societies to be able govern more / less adaptively? What are the dimensions of governance and science that may support or constrain the practice of adaptive environmental governance?

14. Core Capacities for Adaptive Environmental Governance @ Fenner Our emerging view: “We seek to understand, articulate, explore and examine those dimensions of governance and science that may support or constrain the practice of adaptive environmental governance…as a desirable trait for all governance, not limited to designated projects or programs.”

15. Core Capacities for Adaptive Environmental Governance @ Fenner “We are particularly concerned with the capacities that constrain or enable more productive relationships between science and governance for environmental outcomes, and the institutions that impact positively or negatively on those capacities. These capacities may be human, technological, financial or organisational.”

16. Core Capacities for Adaptive Environmental Governance @ Fenner Adaptive governance Socio-cultural-political Science and research-based knoweldge A critical perspective