Craig Anthony Arnold

Understanding and applying principles of social cognition and decision making in adaptive environmental governance

Environmental governance systems are under greater pressure to adapt and to cope with increased social and ecological uncertainty from stressors like climate change. We review principles of social cognition and decision making that shape and constrain how environmental governance systems adapt. We focus primarily on the interplay between key decision makers in society and legal systems. We argue that adaptive governance must overcome three cooperative dilemmas to facilitate adaptation: (1) encouraging collaborative problem solving, (2) garnering social acceptance and commitment, and (3) cultivating a culture of trust and tolerance for change and uncertainty. However, to do so governance systems must cope with biases in peoples decision making that cloud their judgment and create conflict. These systems must also satisfy peoples fundamental needs for self-determination, fairness, and security, ensuring that changes to environmental governance are perceived as legitimate, trustworthy, and acceptable. We discuss the implications of these principles for common governance solutions (e.g., public participation, enforcement) and conclude with methodological recommendations. We outline how scholars can investigate the social cognitive principles involved in cases of adaptive governance.

Adaptive Water Law

U.S. water law can be static, rigid, and fragmented, using legal arrangements to give a false sense of security against change. These characteristics are maladaptive to changing conditions and sudden disturbances, as illustrated by conflict in the Colorado River system over decreasing water quantities, tensions between groundwater management and private property rights in Texas, and litigation over nutrient runoff in the Mississippi River basin. Water law must become more adaptive if aquatic ecosystems, legal institutions, and society itself are to be resilient under conditions of change and disturbance. This article applies a relatively new “adaptive law framework” to the field of water law in order to promote social-ecological resilience in water governance. In particular, the article explores three features of an adaptive water law system: 1) shared risk among the system’s stakeholders; 2) conditional and flexible standards, instead of rigid rules, to govern water rights and permits; and 3) integrated water governance. Several examples of watershed planning and governance illustrate various aspects of an adaptive water law system emerging from system participants’ efforts to address water insecurity and rapid transformation of aquatic conditions. These examples include the Santa Ana Watershed Project in California, the Blackfoot Challenge in Montana’s Blackfoot River basin, state-mandated watershed planning in the State of Washington, adaptive management of Kentucky’s Green River, and watershed restoration and regulation in the urban-suburban Anacostia River watershed of Maryland and Washington, D.C.

Quantifying uncertainty and trade-offs in resilience assessments

Several frameworks have been developed to assess the resilience of social-ecological systems, but most require substantial data inputs, time, and technical expertise. Stakeholders and practitioners often lack the resources for such intensive efforts. Furthermore, most end with problem framing and fail to explicitly address trade-offs and uncertainty. To remedy this gap, we developed a rapid survey assessment that compares the relative resilience of social-ecological systems with respect to a number of resilience properties. This approach generates large amounts of information relative to stakeholder inputs. We targeted four stakeholder categories: government (policy, regulation, management), end users (farmers, ranchers, landowners, industry), agency/public science (research, university, extension), and NGOs (environmental, citizen, social justice) in four North American watersheds, to assess social-ecological resilience through surveys. Conceptually, social-ecological systems are comprised of components ranging from strictly human to strictly ecological, but that relate directly or indirectly to one another. They have soft boundaries and several important dimensions or axes that together describe the nature of social-ecological interactions, e.g., variability, diversity, modularity, slow variables, feedbacks, capital, innovation, redundancy, and ecosystem services. There is no absolute measure of resilience, so our design takes advantage of cross-watershed comparisons and therefore focuses on relative resilience. Our approach quantifies and compares the relative resilience across watershed systems and potential trade-offs among different aspects of the social-ecological system, e.g., between social, economic, and ecological contributions. This approach permits explicit assessment of several types of uncertainty (e.g., self-assigned uncertainty for stakeholders; uncertainty across respondents, watersheds, and subsystems), and subjectivity in perceptions of resilience among key actors and decision makers and provides an efficient way to develop the mental models that inform our stakeholders and stakeholder categories.

Cross-interdisciplinary insights into adaptive governance and resilience

The Adaptive Water Governance project is an interdisciplinary collaborative synthesis project aimed at identifying the features of adaptive governance in complex social-ecological institutional systems to manage for water-basin resilience. We conducted a systematic qualitative meta-analysis of the project’s first set of published interdisciplinary studies, six North American basin resilience assessments. We sought to develop new knowledge that transcends each study, concerning two categories of variables: (1) the drivers of change in complex water-basin systems that affect systemic resilience; and (2) the features of adaptive governance. We have identified the pervasive themes, concepts, and variables of the systemic-change drivers and adaptive-governance features from these six interdisciplinary texts using qualitative methods of inductive textual analysis and synthesis. We produced synthesis frameworks for understanding the patterns that emerged from the basin assessment texts, as well as comprehensive lists of the variables that these studies uniformly or nearly uniformly addressed. These study results are cross-interdisciplinary in the sense that they identify patterns and knowledge that transcend several diverse interdisciplinary studies. These relevant and potentially generalizable insights form a foundation for future research on the dynamics of complex social-ecological institutional systems and how they could be governed adaptively.

Uncertainty and Trade-Offs in Resilience Assessments

Several frameworks have been developed to assess the resilience of social-ecological systems, but most are time consuming and require substantial time and technical expertise. Stakeholders and practitioners often lack the resources for such intensive efforts. Furthermore, most resilience assessments end with problem framing and fail to explicitly address trade-offs and uncertainty inherent in any assessment of resilience. This chapter reports on a rapid assessment of survey responses to compare the relative resilience across four North American social-ecological watershed systems with respect to a number of proposed resilience properties. Responses were compared among four stakeholder categories: (1) government (policy, regulation, management), (2) end users (farmers, ranchers, landowners, industry), (3) agency/public science (research, university, extension), and (4) nongovernmental organizations (environmental, citizen, social justice) in each of the watersheds. Conceptually, social-ecological systems are comprised of components ranging from strictly human to strictly ecological, but that relate directly or indirectly to one another in complex ways. They have soft boundaries and several important dimensions or axes that together describe the nature of social-ecological interactions (e.g., variability, diversity, modularity, slow variables, feedbacks, capital, innovation, redundancy, and ecosystem services). There is no absolute measure of resilience, so our design takes advantage of comparisons across watersheds and therefore focuses on relative resilience. Our approach quantifies and compares the relative resilience across watershed systems and the potential trade-offs among different aspects of the social-ecological system (e.g., among social, economic, and ecological contributions). This approach permits explicit assessment of several types of uncertainty (e.g., self-assigned uncertainty for stakeholders; uncertainty across respondents, watersheds, and subsystems) and subjectivity in perceptions of resilience among key actors and decision-makers and provides an efficient way to develop the mental models that inform stakeholders and stakeholder categories.

Transforming (perceived) rigidity in environmental law through adaptive governance: a case of Endangered Species Act implementation

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) is often portrayed as a major source of instability and crisis in river basins of the U. S. West, where the needs of listed fish species frequently clash with agriculture dependent on federal irrigation projects subject to ESA Section 7 prohibitions on federal agency actions likely to jeopardize listed species or adversely modify critical habitat. Scholarship on Section 7 characterizes the process as unwaveringly rigid, the legal “hammer” forcing federal agencies to consider endangered species’ needs when proposing operations and management plans for federally funded irrigation. In this paper, we identify barriers to an integrated approach to Section 7 implementation and characterize a set of strategies for overcoming its rigidity that may have broader applicability. We draw on lessons derived from the Klamath Basin along the Oregon-California border, where cross-scale processes and venues involving interagency collaboration among leaders in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation supported efforts to replace an ecologically and socially fragmented Upper Basin/Lower Basin approach to ESA implementation fraught with conflict. The result was the nation’s first joint biological opinion (BiOp), which effectively institutionalized an adaptive, flexible, integrated approach to water sharing among competing interests. Keys to success included existing collaborative capacity related to shifting stakeholder networks, trust, and relationships and a shift in local agency culture facilitated by empathic leadership leading to a greater sense of shared responsibility for Section 7 compliance. A collaborative hydrologic modeling process enhanced participatory capacity, facilitated transformative social and technical learning, and cultivated greater understanding of the social-ecological system among key stakeholders. The 2013 joint BiOp exemplifies both governmental capacity for flexibility and evolution within the constraints of formal law and the potential for greater integration among federal agencies and between federal agencies and stakeholders involved in ESA implementation.