Melinda Harm Benson

A Framework for Resilience-Based Governance of Social-Ecological Systems

Panarchy provides a heuristic to characterize the cross-scale dynamics of social-ecological systems and a framework for how governance institutions should behave to be compatible with the ecosystems they manage. Managing for resilience will likely require reform of law to account for the dynamics of social-ecological systems and achieve a substantive mandate that accommodates the need for adaptation. In this paper, we suggest expansive legal reform by identifying the principles of reflexive law as a possible mechanism for achieving a shift to resilience-based governance and leveraging cross-scale dynamics to provide resilience-based responses to increasingly challenging environmental conditions.

Ecosystem Processes and Human Influences Regulate Streamflow Response to Climate Change at Long-Term Ecological Research Sites

Analyses of long-term records at 35 headwater basins in the United States and Canada indicate that climate change effects on streamflow are not as clear as might be expected, perhaps because of ecosystem processes and human influences. Evapotranspiration was higher than was predicted by temperature in water-surplus ecosystems and lower than was predicted in water-deficit ecosystems. Streamflow was correlated with climate variability indices (e.g., the El Niño—Southern Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation), especially in seasons when vegetation influences are limited. Air temperature increased significantly at 17 of the 19 sites with 20- to 60-year records, but streamflow trends were directly related to climate trends (through changes in ice and snow) at only 7 sites. Past and present human and natural disturbance, vegetation succession, and human water use can mimic, exacerbate, counteract, or mask the effects of climate change on streamflow, even in reference basins. Long-term ecological research sites are ideal places to disentangle these processes.

The End of Sustainability

It is time to move past the concept of sustainability. The realities of the Anthropocene warrant this conclusion. They include unprecedented and irreversible rates of human-induced biodiversity loss, exponential increases in per-capita resource consumption, and global climate change. These factors combine to create an increasing likelihood of rapid, nonlinear, social and ecological regime changes. The recent failure of the Rio + 20 provides an opportunity to collectively reexamine—and ultimately move past—the concept of sustainability as an environmental goal. We must face the impossibility of defining—let alone pursuing—a goal of “sustainability” in a world characterized by such extreme complexity, radical uncertainty and lack of stationarity. After briefly examining sustainabilitys failure, we propose resilience thinking as one possible new orientation and point to the challenges associated with translating resilience theory into policy application.

Can We Manage for Resilience? The Integration of Resilience Thinking into Natural Resource Management in the United States

The concept of resilience is now frequently invoked by natural resource agencies in the US. This reflects growing trends within ecology, conservation biology, and other disciplines acknowledging that social–ecological systems require management approaches recognizing their complexity. In this paper, we examine the concept of resilience and the manner in which some legal and regulatory frameworks governing federal natural resource agencies have difficulty accommodating it. We then use the U.S. Forest Service’s employment of resilience as an illustration of the challenges ahead.

Intelligent Tinkering: the Endangered Species Act and Resilience

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) is one of the most powerful and controversial environmental laws in the United States. As a result of its uncompromising position against biodiversity loss, the ESA has become the primary driver of many ecological restoration efforts in the United States. This article explains why the ESA has become the impetus for so many of these efforts and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the ESA as a primary driver from a resilience-based perspective. It argues that in order to accommodate resilience theory, several changes to ESA implementation and enforcement should be made. First and foremost, there is a need to shift management strategies from a species-centered to a systems-based approach. Chief among the shifts required will be a more integrated approach to governance that includes a willingness to reassess demands placed on ecological systems by our social systems. Building resilience will also require more proactive management efforts that support the functioning of system processes before they are endangered and on the brink of regime change. Finally, resilience thinking requires a reorientation of management away from goals associated with achieving preservation, restoration, and optimization and toward goals associated with fostering complexity and adaptive capacity.

Can law foster social-ecological resilience?

Law plays an essential role in shaping natural resource and environmental policy, but unfortunately, many environmental laws were developed around the prevailing scientific understanding that there was a “balance of nature” that could be managed and sustained. This view assumes that natural resource managers have the capacity to predict the behavior of ecological systems, know what its important functional components are, and successfully predict the outcome of management interventions. This paper takes on this problem by summarizing and synthesizing the contributions to this Special Feature (Law and Social-Ecological Resilience, Part I: Contributions from Resilience 2011), focusing on the interaction of law and socialecological resilience, and then offering recommendations for the integration of law and social-ecological resilience.

Regional Initiatives: Scaling the Climate Response and Responding to Conceptions of Scale

In the absence of a coherent national policy to address global climate change, there was an emergence of new scales of environmental governance in the United States. They include regional initiatives that configure binding agreements between individual states within the United States that in some instances also involve cross-border collaborations with Canadian provinces. There are currently three such initiatives: the Northeastern Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the Western Climate Initiative, and the Midwestern Regional Greenhouse Gas Reduction Accord. Combined, they include twenty-four states representing over half of the U.S. economy and four Canadian provinces representing almost three quarters of the Canadian economy. These initiatives are an interesting and unprecedented experiment in environmental governance. As such, they inform current conceptualizations of scale within human geography. They also evidence the need for geographers to enter into public debates on climate change governance and engage in a reconceptualization of the nature of sovereignty.

Practitioner Perceptions of Adaptive Management Implementation in the United States

Adaptive management is a growing trend within environment and natural resource management efforts in the United States. While many proponents of adaptive management emphasize the need for collaborative, iterative governance processes to facilitate adaptive management, legal scholars note that current legal requirements and processes in the United States often make it difficult to provide the necessary institutional support and flexibility for successful adaptive management implementation. Our research explores this potential disconnect between adaptive management theory and practice by interviewing practitioners in the field. We conducted a survey of individuals associated with the Collaborative Adaptive Management Network (CAMNet), a nongovernmental organization that promotes adaptive management and facilitates in its implementation. The survey was sent via email to the 144 participants who attended CAMNet Rendezvous during years 2007-2011 and yielded 48 responses. Our research found that practitioners do feel hampered by legal and institutional constraints: well over 70% not only believed that constraints exist and could specifically name one or more example of a legal constraint on their work implementing adaptive management. At the same time, we found practitioners generally optimistic about potential for institutional reform.

Regime shifts and panarchies in regional scale social-ecological water systems

In this article we summarize histories of nonlinear, complex interactions among societal, legal, and ecosystem dynamics in six North American water basins, as they respond to changing climate. These case studies were chosen to explore the conditions for emergence of adaptive governance in heavily regulated and developed social-ecological systems nested within a hierarchical governmental system. We summarize resilience assessments conducted in each system to provide a synthesis and reference by the other articles in this special feature. We also present a general framework used to evaluate the interactions between society and ecosystem regimes and the governance regimes chosen to mediate those interactions. The case studies show different ways that adaptive governance may be triggered, facilitated, or constrained by ecological and/or legal processes. The resilience assessments indicate that complex interactions among the governance and ecosystem components of these systems can produce different trajectories, which include patterns of (a) development and stabilization, (b) cycles of crisis and recovery, which includes lurches in adaptation and learning, and (3) periods of innovation, novelty, and transformation. Exploration of cross scale (Panarchy) interactions among levels and sectors of government and society illustrate that they may constrain development trajectories, but may also provide stability during crisis or innovation at smaller scales; create crises, but may also facilitate recovery; and constrain system transformation, but may also provide windows of opportunity in which transformation, and the resources to accomplish it, may occur. The framework is the starting point for our exploration of how law might play a role in enhancing the capacity of social-ecological systems to adapt to climate change.

Adaptive Management Approaches by Resource Management Agencies in the United States: Implications for Energy Development in the Interior West

Adaptive management is gaining influence among natural resource management decision-makers. In the United States, the Department of the Interior is now encouraging its agencies to utilise adaptive management when ‘appropriate’. This is a positive step in natural resource management, reflecting a growing recognition of the need to integrate scientific uncertainty more effectively into agency planning and resource development. This new management scheme has potentially significant implications for energy development and its corresponding impacts on water and other resources. The US Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is the primary agency responsible for managing 700 million subsurface acres of mineral estate. This article examines how the BLM might employ adaptive management in the context of oil and gas development to better protect resources in areas such as Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, where extraction of coal-bed methane has created significant controversy.Adaptive management is gaining influence among natural resource management decision-makers. In the United States, the Department of the Interior is now encouraging its agencies to utilise adaptive management when ‘appropriate.’ This is a positive step in natural resource management, reflecting a growing recognition of the need to integrate scientific uncertainty more effectively into agency planning and resource development. This new management scheme has potentially significant implications for energy development and its corresponding impacts on water and other resources. The US Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is the primary agency responsible for managing 700 million subsurface acres of mineral estate. This article examines how the BLM might employ adaptive management in the context of oil and gas development to better protect resources in areas such as Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, where extraction of coal-bed methane has created significant controversy.