Managing water through change and uncertainty: comparing lessons from the adaptive co-management literature to recent policy developments in England

Water management is set to become increasingly variable and unpredictable, in particular because of climate change. This paper investigates the extent to which water policy in England provides an enabling environment for ‘adaptive co-management’, which its proponents claim can achieve the dual objective of ecosystem protection and livelihood sustainability under conditions of change and uncertainty. Five policy categories are derived from a literature review, and are used to conduct a directed content analysis of seven key water policy documents. The findings reveal that although, in part, English water policy serves as an enabling environment for adaptive co-management, there is a level of discrepancy between substantive aspects of the five policy categories and water policy in England. Addressing these discrepancies will be important if English water policy is to allow for the emergence of processes, like adaptive co-management, that are capable of coping with the challenges that lie ahead.     

Monitoring in adaptive co-management: Toward a learning based approach

The recognition of complexity and uncertainty in natural resource management has lead to the development of a wealth of conceptual frameworks aimed at integrated assessment and complex systems monitoring. Relatively less attention has however been given to methodological approaches that might facilitate learning as part of the monitoring process. This paper reviews the monitoring literature relevant to adaptive co-management, with a focus on the synergies between existing monitoring frameworks, collaborative monitoring approaches and social learning. The paper discusses the role of monitoring in environmental management in general, and the challenges posed by scale and complexity when monitoring in adaptive co-management. Existing conceptual frameworks for monitoring relevant to adaptive co-management are reviewed, as are lessons from experiences with collaborative monitoring. The paper concludes by offering a methodological approach to monitoring that actively seeks to engender reflexive learning as a means to deal with uncertainty in natural resource management.     

Evolution of co-management: Role of knowledge generation,bridging organizations and social learning

Over a period of some 20 years, different aspects of co-management (the sharing of power and responsibility between the government and local resource users) have come to the forefront. The paper focuses on a selection of these: knowledge generation, bridging organizations, social learning, and the emergence of adaptive co-management. Co-management can be considered a knowledge partnership. Different levels of organization, from local to international, have comparative advantages in the generation and mobilization of knowledge acquired at different scales. Bridging organizations provide a forum for the interaction of these different kinds of knowledge, and the coordination of other tasks that enable co-operation: accessing resources, bringing together different actors, building trust, resolving conflict, and networking. Social learning is one of these tasks, essential both for the co-operation of partners and an outcome of the co-operation of partners. It occurs most efficiently through joint problem solving and reflection within learning networks. Through successive rounds of learning and problem solving, learning networks can incorporate new knowledge to deal with problems at increasingly larger scales, with the result that maturing co-management arrangements become adaptive co-management in time.     

Exogenous factors in collective policy learning: the case of municipal flood risk governance in the Netherlands

ABSTRACT

Conceptualizing and analyzing collective policy learning processes is a major ongoing theoretical and empirical challenge. A key gap concerns the role of exogenous factors, which remains under-theorized in the policy learning literature. In this paper, we aim to advance the understanding of the role that exogenous factors play in collective learning processes. We propose a typology of exogenous factors (i.e. material, socioeconomic, institutional, discursive), and subsequently apply this in a comparative study of flood risk policymaking in two municipalities in the Netherlands. We find that exogenous factors are indeed essential for understanding collective learning in these cases, as the combined influence with endogenous factors can steer similar learning processes towards different learning products. We conclude our contribution by identifying two opportunities for further developing the collective learning framework, namely regarding the distinction of varying learning products, and the dynamics of exogenous factors over time.     

Between adaptability and the urge to control: making long-term water policies in the Netherlands

Triggered by recent flood catastrophes and increasing concerns about climate change, scientists as well as policy-makers increasingly call for making long-term water policies to enable a transformation towards flood resilience. A key question is how to make these long-term policies adaptive so that they are able to deal with uncertainties and changing circumstances. The paper proposes three conditions for making long-term water policies adaptive, which are then used to evaluate a new Dutch water policy approach called ‘Adaptive Delta Management’. Analysing this national policy approach and its translation to the Rotterdam region reveals that Dutch policy-makers are torn between adaptability and the urge to control. Reflecting on this dilemma, the paper suggests a stronger focus on monitoring and learning to strengthen the adaptability of long-term water policies. Moreover, increasing the adaptive capacity of society also requires a stronger engagement with local stakeholders including citizens and businesses.     

Parsing participation: models of engagement for outcomes monitoring in urban stewardship

Few urban environmental stewardship, or civic ecology, practices monitor their impacts on local communities and ecosystems. This lack of monitoring prevents lay stewards from adapting their practices based on outcomes. For those that do collect data on their practices, we see different forms of practitioner engagement in outcomes monitoring. We categorise these different forms of engagement according to five published models of public participation in scientific research, revealing different strategies for collecting and analysing data towards adaptive co-management in urban ecosystems. We propose two broad strategies for expanding outcomes monitoring in these contexts: creating openly accessible tools and protocols for do-it-yourself inquiry and supporting more resource-intensive partnerships between practitioners and scientists for more complex forms of outcomes monitoring.     

Network structure and adaptive capacity in watershed governance

What supports the adaptive capacity of watershed governance? Using document review, interviews, and network diagrams, we analyze how structural attributes of a governance network emerged and co-evolved with changes in biophysical conditions in a case study of a small watershed in northeast Ohio. Results indicate that the network governance structure that emerged evolved to become a hybrid of two different structural forms that diversified stakeholder engagement, generated social capital, improved social learning, and stimulated change in management practices, all of which have enhanced adaptive capacity. A significant challenge to adaptive capacity arises, however, as network governance has come to rely significantly on a centralized organization to broker relationships for information and other resources.     

River channel network design for drought and flood control: A case study of Xiaoqinghe River basin, Jinan City, China

Vulnerability of river channels to urbanization has been lessened by the extensive construction of artificial water control improvements. The challenge, however, is that traditional engineering practices on isolated parts of a river may disturb the hydrologic continuity and interrupt the natural state of ecosystems. Taking the Xiaoqinghe River basin as a whole, we developed a river channel network design to mitigate river risks while sustaining the river in a state as natural as possible. The river channel risk from drought during low-flow periods and flood during high-flow periods as well as the potential for water diversion were articulated in detail. On the basis of the above investigation, a network with “nodes” and “edges” could be designed to relieve drought hazard and flood risk respectively. Subsequently, the shortest path algorithm in the graph theory was applied to optimize the low-flow network by searching for the shortest path. The effectiveness assessment was then performed for the low-flow and high-flow networks, respectively. For the former, the network connectedness was evaluated by calculating the “gamma index of connectivity” and “alpha index of circuitry”; for the latter, the ratio of flood-control capacity to projected flood level was devised and calculated. Results show that the design boosted network connectivity and circuitry during the low-flow periods, indicating a more fluent flow pathway, and reduced the flood risk during the high-flow periods.     

Marshaling Adaptive Capacities within an Adaptive Management Framework to Enhance the Resiliency of Wastewater Systems

We assess adaptive capacity and adaptive management as measures of wastewater (WW) system resiliency using data from interviews with WW system managers (hereafter managers) impacted by past storms. Results suggest the most resilient WW systems are those with high adaptive capacities that employ an adaptive management approach to make ongoing adaptation investments over time. Greater amounts of generic adaptive capacities (i.e., skilled staff and good leadership) help smooth both day‐to‐day and emergency operations and provide a foundation for adaptive management. In turn, adaptive management helps managers both build more generic adaptive capacities, and develop and employ greater amounts and diversity of specific adaptive capacities (i.e., soft and/or hard adaptations) that are especially important for enhancing and sustaining resiliency. Adaptive management also enables managers to better understand their system's vulnerabilities, how those vulnerabilities change over time, and what specific actions may reduce those vulnerabilities. Finally, our work suggests WW system resilience critically depends on the capacities of the human systems for building resilience as much as or more so than relying only on physical infrastructure resilience. Our work contributes to filling an important gap in the literature by advancing our understanding of the human dimensions of infrastructure resilience and has practical implications for advancing resilience in the WW sector.     

Enhanced learning from multi-stakeholder partnerships: Lessons from the Enabling Rural Innovation in Africa programme

Despite increasing interest and support for multi‐stakeholder partnerships, empirical applications of participatory evaluation approaches to enhance learning from partnerships are either uncommon or undocumented. This paper draws lessons on the use of participatory self‐reflective approaches that facilitate structured learning on processes and outcomes of partnerships. Such practice is important to building partnerships, because it helps partners understand how they can develop more collaborative and responsive ways of managing partnerships. The paper is based on experience with the Enabling Rural Innovation (ERI) in Africa programme. Results highlight the dynamic process of partnership formation and the key elements that contribute to success. These include: (i) shared vision and complementarity, (ii) consistent support from senior leadership; (iii) evidence of institutional and individual benefits; (iv) investments in human and social capital; (v) joint resources mobilization. However, key challenges require coping with high staff turnover and over‐commitment, conflicting personalities and institutional differences, high transaction costs, and sustaining partnerships with the private business sector. The paper suggests that institutionalizing multi‐stakeholder partnerships requires participatory reflective practices that help structure and enhance learning, and incrementally help in building the capacity of research and development organisations to partner better and ultimately to innovate.     

Some lessons for resilience from the 2011 multi-disaster in Japan

With the goal of resilience becoming ever more present in diverse policy discourses, it is important to reflect critically on its meaning and realisation. In this viewpoint, we re-emphasise that understanding the systemic nature of social and ecological interactions and interdependencies is fundamental to developing resilience to shocks and stresses in whatever context they materialise. Through the lens of the 2011 Japanese multi-disaster, we reflect on some of the difficulties in generating knowledge to underpin resilience-building processes and illustrate some dilemmas inherent in seeking to cultivate resilience in practice. Events in Japan underscore the complex vulnerabilities of place in multi-hazard scenarios and highlight, in particular, the choices to be made in determining which systemic interactions are to be imagined, characterised, assessed and forewarned and which are not. These events also emphasise that while resilience ultimately must be located where consequences are felt, strategies for a resilient future have to take on the multi-scale interactions and tensions within which local processes are embedded. There are dangers, we argue, in thinking about resilience in overly simple and non-systemic ways and in responding to these challenges only as a matter of extended techno-managerial competence.     

Flexibility in Water Resources Management: Review of Concepts and Development of Assessment Measures for Flood Management Systems

Discussions around adapting water management systems to climate change often express the need to increase system flexibility. Yet despite the frequent use of the term flexibility, very little work has examined what exactly it means to have a flexible water management system, what features of a system make it more flexible than another system, or when the costs to implement flexible options outweigh the benefits gained from increased flexibility. To define and operationalize the concept of flexibility in the field of water resources management, this article reviews and analyzes concepts of flexibility from the fields of information technology, manufacturing, management, and adaptive social‐ecological systems. We identify five characteristics of flexible water resources systems, namely: slack, redundancy, connectivity, compatibility/coordination, and adjustability. We then operationalize the assessment of flexibility for flood management systems by proposing original flexibility metrics and discussing their application. We conclude with a discussion on the tradeoffs of increasing flexibility.     

Adaptive Management of Flows in the Lower Roanoke River, North Carolina, USA

The lower Roanoke River in North Carolina, USA, has been regulated by a series of dams since the 1950s. This river and its floodplain have been identified by The Nature Conservancy, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the State of North Carolina as critical resources for the conservation of bottomland hardwoods and other riparian and in-stream biota and communities. Upstream dams are causing extended floods in the growing season for bottomland hardwood forests, threatening their survival. A coalition of stakeholders including public agencies and private organizations is cooperating with the dam managers to establish an active adaptive management program to reduce the negative impacts of flow regulation, especially extended growing season inundation, on these conservation targets. We introduce the lower Roanoke River, describe the regulatory context for negotiating towards an active adaptive management program, present our conservation objective for bottomland hardwoods, and describe investigations in which we successfully employed a series of models to develop testable management hypotheses. We propose adaptive management strategies that we believe will enable the bottomland hardwoods to regenerate and support their associated biota and that are reasonable, flexible, and economically sustainable.     

淮河流域水环境治理路径的整体性研究

无论是从流域水环境治理的语义变迁还是治理模式的路径变迁来看,其变迁的本质都是为了解决水环境治理过程中产生的低效化和碎片化问题。在如今公共管理转型和水环境治理严峻形势的双重压力下,文章基于整体性治理的理论溯源及适用性分析,结合治淮二十载的实践探索,提出了实现流域水环境综合治理和整体运作的创新路径。可行的方案是:通过结构的创新和制度的规约,最大限度激发出市场与社会组织的治理效能,通过重新评价水环境治理过程以夯实整体性治理的制度基础,以整体精神和技术支撑塑造出整体政府。     

Reflexive governance: exploring the concept and assessing its critical potential for sustainable development. Introduction to the special issue

ABSTRACT

Elaborated in publications on transition management, sustainability governance and deliberative environmental governance, ‘reflexive governance’ addresses concerns about social-ecological vulnerabilities, flawed conceptualisations of human-nature relations fragmented governance regimes and conditions for a sustainability transition. Key barriers to reflexive government include unavoidable politics; the influence of broader discursive systems that shape actors’ strategic interests; and structural and deliberate limitations to the range of admitted epistemological understandings, normative perspectives and material practices. Against this background, the contributions to the special issue provide novel conceptual linkages between reflexive governance and boundary objects, intercultural dialogue, conflict management heuristics, discourse linguistics, theories of the policy cycle and reflexive law, network and learning theories, and Lasswell’s ‘developmental constructs’. Based on the contributions, we identify five inherent conceptual tensions of reflexive governance: between the openness of horizontal learning processes and the desired direction towards sustainable development; between reflexive governance as a normative or procedural concept; between expected learning orientations and other, strategic orientations; between governance as a precondition for reflexivity and reflexive learning as a precondition for reorganized governance structures; and between reflexivity as an open-ended, evolutionary process and the need to strategically defend the space for reflexivity against powerful groups with an interest in the status quo.     

Natural resource industry involvement in collaboration for water governance: influence on processes and outcomes in Canada

Natural resource industries are increasingly significant actors in environmental decision-making. Possessing vast institutional and technical capacity, firms have an important role to play in ‘new’ governance strategies such as collaboration. These strategies are often based upon assumptions of equitable influence. This paper investigates the nature of resource industry participation in collaborative water governance in Canada, and the potential consequences of that participation as investigated using power theory. The study used comparative cases to reveal that resource industries are able to shape collaboration, and the issues collaborated upon, at multiple analytical levels both internal and external to the collaborative process in ways not available to other actors. Analysis also revealed that resource industry participation in collaboration did not reflect a commitment to engage in shared learning and the reexamination of values and interests as presupposed by collaborative theory. Collaboration is thus challenged in producing equitable, representative outcomes when resource industries participate.     

The importance of context for effective public engagement: learning from the governance of waste

This paper takes a new look at the importance of context – institutional and political – in effective public engagement processes. It does so through a rare comparative opportunity to examine the effectiveness of processes of public engagement in two UK waste authorities, where the same waste company was involved as both the primary contractor for the delivery of the waste management service (including new energy-from-waste facilities) and, furthermore, the same staff delivered the public engagement. Interrogating these cases affords the opportunity to place flesh on the bones of the sometimes ‘abstract’ skeleton of context. While engagement processes support effective local governance in an era of partnerships and deliberative democracy, the paper identifies that the methods adopted cannot be played out devoid of detailed understanding and response to local context, including the strength of partnership working between the public and private sector, the degree of political support for engagement, and the extent to which a traditional institutional paternalism still dominates.     

The greening of Chicago: environmental leaders and organisational learning in the transition toward a sustainable metropolitan region

Urban sustainability literature calls for new governance relations to support green urban agendas. Privileging non-hierarchical relations, this literature fails to address the means by which organisations create these capacities. The author interviewed public, private and community environmental leaders in metropolitan Chicago regarding their disposition toward creating boundary spanning organisations (BSOs) in addressing the City's Environmental Action Agenda. Their responses reflect engaged efforts to enhance cross-boundary sharing of information, resources, and power. However, they also reflect the decisive role of central authority in initiating this process. These findings suggest the complexity of urban governance in transitions toward sustainability and the opportunities they provide to explore the implications of on-the-ground practice.     

基于CAS视角的供应链环境协同治理研究

为探究供应链环境协同治理问题,本文从复杂适应系统视角分析了供应链环境协同治理中内部主体之间以及内外部主体间的协同作用机理,以此为基础构建了供应链环境协同治理模型。为探究协同治理机制在该模型中的实际成效,本文运用多主体仿真技术,对二级供应链模型进行仿真模拟,验证了协同治理在企业运营发展以及供应链整体环境绩效方面的提升作用,并针对协同模型中制造商零售商间减排成本分担系数进行调整,检验上下游企业间减排成本分担系数变化对供应链环境治理效果的影响。仿真结果显示,虽然供应链整体利润随着制造商承担的减排成本增加而增加,但供应链单位产值排放量却随之呈现先下降后上升的趋势,进一步验证了协同治理的效果。     

Stakeholders' views towards flood risk management in the Paz River catchment area of Guatemala and El Salvador

The river Paz is a transboundary river that flows through Guatemala and El Salvador. Its frequent floods endanger the lives and livelihoods of downstream communities. Attempts have previously been made to develop flood management programmes for this watershed. However, these approaches were generally made by high-level governmental institutions with few if any contributions from floodplain communities and other stakeholders. Recognising that public consultation is a key aspect in flood management programmes, we intend in this work to extract different stakeholders' views regarding current and future flooding and flood management programmes in the Paz River basin. This is achieved using Future Scenarios Workshops with a projected time horizon of 30 years. The exercise was expected to identify consensual short- and medium–long-term flood management strategies for the Paz River basin that draws on input from inhabitants of flood-prone areas and other stakeholders.