Daniel A. DeCaro

Public Participation and Institutional Fit: A Social-Psychological Perspective

Public participation plays a role in the development and long-term maintenance of environmental institutions that are well-matched to local social–ecological conditions. However, the means by which public participation impacts such institutional fit remains unclear. We argue that one major reason for this lack of clarity is that analysts have not clearly outlined how humankind’s sense of agency, or self-determination, influences institutional outcomes. Moreover, the concept of institutional fit is ambiguous as to what constitutes a good fit and how such fit could be diagnosed or improved. This is especially true for “social fit,” or how well institutions match human expectations and local behavioral patterns. We develop an interdisciplinary framework based on principles of human agency and institutional analysis from social psychology to address these problems. Using the concept of “institutional acceptance” as an indicator of social fit, we show how analysts can define, diagnose, and improve social fit of participatory programs. We also show how such fit emerges and is sustained over time. This interdisciplinary perspective on fit and participation has important implications for participatory approaches to environmental management and the scientific study of institutional evolution.

Legal and institutional foundations of adaptive environmental governance

Legal and institutional structures fundamentally shape opportunities for adaptive governance of environmental resources at multiple ecological and societal scales. Properties of adaptive governance are widely studied. However, these studies have not resulted in consolidated frameworks for legal and institutional design, limiting our ability to promote adaptation and social-ecological resilience. We develop an overarching framework that describes the current and potential role of law in enabling adaptation. We apply this framework to different social-ecological settings, centers of activity, and scales, illustrating the multidimensional and polycentric nature of water governance. Adaptation typically emerges organically among multiple centers of agency and authority in society as a relatively self-organized or autonomous process marked by innovation, social learning, and political deliberation. This self-directed and emergent process is difficult to create in an exogenous, top-down fashion. However, traditional centers of authority may establish enabling conditions for adaptation using a suite of legal, economic, and democratic tools to legitimize and facilitate self-organization, coordination, and collaboration across scales. The principles outlined here provide preliminary legal and institutional foundations for adaptive environmental governance, which may inform institutional design and guide future scholarship.

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.

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.

Resilience of the Anacostia River Basin: Institutional, Social, and Ecological Dynamics

The Anacostia watershed traverses the urban-suburban areas around Washington, D.C., and Maryland. Historically, the Anacostia River basin has transitioned from a biologically rich natural ecology prior to European settlement through three periods of ecosystem degradation due to agriculture and navigation, industrialization, and urbanization. The current regime is dominated by restoration and green-infrastructure activities yet is still influenced by previous regimes’ legacy effects and continued urban-development pressures. The major drivers of regime shifts from presettlement to the present are (1) societal treatment of the basin’s waters, lands, vegetation, and wildlife as exploitable goods and services for short-term economic benefit (even in the current regime in which improved water quality and restored lands are public goods and services); (2) shifts from weak to strong environmentalist values and activism; (3) changing ways that humans psychologically relate to the basin and its functions; (4) patterns of structural inequality, oppression, discrimination, and movements to seek social and environmental justice; and (5) changes in governance institutions, including laws, to support and facilitate the dominant social values and policies of the time. Institutions have played strong and pervasive roles in both the watershed’s declining ecological resilience and potential for improving social-ecological resilience. The greatest opportunities for a more resilient, climate-adaptive Anacostia River watershed require continued and improved changes in watershed governance, restoration and green-infrastructure initiatives, land-use regulation, public engagement, integration of social justice into watershed decision-making, and monitoring and feedback loops.

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.

Stability and Flexibility in the Emergence of Adaptive Water Governance

One of the goals of adaptive governance is to increase management flexibility in the face of a changing social-ecological system. In contrast, one of the key functions of governance systems is to provide stability, predictability, and security for the people subject to that system. This chapter explores this adaptive governance paradox, focusing on the Klamath and Everglades case studies presented earlier in this volume—although the paradox arises in all of the case study river basins and indeed in most adaptive governance projects. It concludes that while the Everglades system has detrimentally privileged stability at the expense of flexibility and adaptability, the Klamath Basin system is showing signs that it may be able to appropriately balance stability and flexibility in its governance institutions to better address changing climatic, legal, and political realities.

Legal Pathways to Adaptive Governance in Water Basins in North America and Australia

Law dictates the structure, boundaries, rules, and processes within which governmental action takes place and in doing so becomes one of the focal points for analysis of governmental barriers to adaptation as the effects of climate change are felt. Governance encompasses both governmental and nongovernmental participation in collective choice and action. Adaptive governance contemplates a level of flexibility and evolution in governmental action beyond that currently found in the heavily administrative governments in the United States and Australia. Nevertheless, over time, law itself has proven highly adaptive in democracies, evolving to address and even facilitate the emergence of new social norms (such as the rights of women and minorities) or to provide remedies for emerging problems (such as pollution). Thus, law can adapt, evolve, and be reformed to facilitate adaptive governance. In doing so, not only may barriers be removed, but law may be adjusted to facilitate adaptive governance and to aid in institutionalizing new and emerging approaches to governance. The key is to do so in a way that also enhances legitimacy, accountability, and justice (i.e., good governance), or such reforms will never be adopted by democratic societies or, if adopted, will destabilize those very societies. By identifying those aspects of adaptive governance relevant to the legal system, this chapter presents guidelines for evaluating the role of law in environmental governance and demonstrates their use by applying them to the basin studies presented in Part I of this volume.

Theory and Research to Study Principles of Social Cognition and Decision-Making in Adaptive Environmental Governance

Environmental governance systems must adapt to address increased uncertainty and new social-ecological conditions posed by stressors like climate change. This chapter presents several principles of social cognition and decision-making that influence adaptive governance. The principles are illustrated with examples from six US river basins. Future research opportunities are also outlined.

Theory and Research to Study the Legal and Institutional Foundations of Adaptive Governance

Adaptation to major social and ecological changes requires the participation, innovation, social learning, and political deliberation of many stakeholders, doing many different governance activities at different scales. Legal and institutional systems set the ground rules for this governance activity, establishing boundaries and opportunities for widespread innovation and cooperation. However, the enabling conditions for adaptive governance are poorly understood, making it difficult to facilitate. Candidate design principles that describe enabling conditions for adaptive environmental governance are proposed. Research opportunities are outlined to study the effects of these factors in different social-ecological systems and to further refine the principles.