Governance innovations for climate change adaptation in urban Denmark

Urban areas worldwide are challenged by climate change and urban flooding. Within the academic literature, adaptive measures that can be integrated into other issues such as recreation, nature reserves, and social issues are considered the way forward. Adaptation has recently become a mandatory planning theme for Danish municipalities, which in the absence of established practices are struggling to find the best institutional set-up to address adaptation as an integrated issue. Based on a case study of an integrated project organised as a partnership, this article identifies and discusses governance challenges that must be addressed if municipalities are to benefit from synergies through integrated projects. The municipality in question has established a partnership with housing organisations, foundations, and a utility company as well as facilitated a dialogue with citizens and institutions to address flooding threats and social issues at the neighbourhood scale. Because of strong political and leadership support, funding from partners, and good project facilitation both partners and politicians are enthusiastic about the project and its potential. Several challenges, however, needed to be addressed, particularly in relation to clashing norms from different governance paradigms. This is an issue requiring more attention both in research and practice.     

Policy learning in collaborative environmental governance processes

ABSTRACT

Collaborative governance processes have become a popular mechanism for addressing complex environmental problems. Their success is premised, in part, on the assumption that they promote learning among diverse participants, who are then better equipped to develop creative, consensus-oriented environmental management actions. Significant gaps remain, however, in our understanding of how collaborative governance processes foster learning and what impact increased learning has on policymaking outputs. To investigate these relationships, this study provides one of the first empirical applications of Heikkila and Gerlak's collective learning framework. Key framework concepts are operationalized via interview data and existing literature and then measured via survey data collected from participants in a collaborative environmental governance process in Colorado, U.S. Findings indicate that both internal and exogenous contextual factors affect how much an individual learns within a collective context. Additionally, participants who report more learning also more strongly agree that the process produced favorable outputs and outcomes. These findings advance theories of learning in collaborative contexts and inform process design to maximize learning.     

Organizational learning during policy implementation: lessons from U.S. forest planning

ABSTRACT

Learning is critical for land management agencies implementing new policies in the face of rapid social and ecological change. We investigated learning in the U.S. Forest Service as it implemented new planning regulations. Our research objectives were to: (1) identify collective learning processes and outcomes during this time, and (2) understand factors within the organization supporting or impeding learning. Based on participant observation and 25 interviews with planning personnel, we found evidence of collective learning on individual national forests and across the organization. Several factors helped the agency act as a ‘learning organization,’ including internal networks and tools for information sharing, and meetings for staff to exchange lessons learned. Learning was compromised by limited time and capacity, and lack of internal clarity about balancing the desire for innovation with the need to ensure legal compliance and meet deadlines. This work contributes to the empirical foundations of collective learning theory, allowing us to identify learning processes and outcomes at multiple levels in a public organization, and identifying topics for future research. Based on our exploration of organizational learning, we offer suggestions for how to effectively support learning during times of new policy implementation.     

Social learning in a policy-mandated collaboration: community wildfire protection planning in the eastern United States

Policies such as the US Healthy Forests Restoration Act (HFRA) mandate collaboration in planning to create benefits such as social learning and shared understanding among partners. However, some question the ability of top-down policy to foster successful local collaboration. Through in-depth interviews and document analysis, this paper investigates social learning and transformative learning in three case studies of Community Wildfire Protection Planning (CWPP), a policy-mandated collaboration under HFRA. Not all CWPP groups engaged in social learning. Those that did learned most about organisational priorities and values through communicative learning. Few participants gained new skills or knowledge through instrumental learning. CWPP groups had to commit to learning, but the design of the collaborative-mandate influenced the type of learning that was most likely to occur. This research suggests a potential role for top-down policy in setting the structural context for learning at the local level, but also confirms the importance of collaborative context and process in fostering social learning.     

Alberta's oil sands reclamation policy trajectory: the role of tense layering,policy stretching,and policy patching in long-term policy dynamics

As the Canadian oil sands development matures, an increasingly important policy activity is reclamation. Reclamation has received limited attention compared with the broader discussion of oil sands expansion, however, and its past direction and future trajectory are unclear. Recent moves to reform the policy in Alberta have been interpreted simultaneously as a major change and a marginal adaptation to the existing framework. This article employs a historical-institutional perspective to help reconcile this debate and further understanding of changes to Alberta's oil sands reclamation policies over the past half century. It traces the factors and outlines the processes which have driven its evolution since 1963 with special attention paid to the 2011 Oil Sands Progressive Reclamation Strategy, the most recent attempt to reform oil sands reclamation policy. The article reveals a complex long-term pattern of policy development in which processes of ‘tense layering’ of new initiatives on top of old elements resulted in a constantly shifting policy landscape as existing policy instruments and settings were ‘stretched’ to cover new circumstances but failed to resolve tensions between successive policy layers. After 1993, however, a more reflective process was put into place in which policy feedback informed alterations intended to reduce or remove tensions between successive layers. Such a policy ‘patching’ process is shown to have helped resolve tensions associated with earlier stretching of the existing regime and adds to the vocabulary of more general studies of policy dynamics.     

Public policy, private landholders: perspectives on policy mechanisms for sustainable land management

A variety of tools can be employed in support of environmental policy objectives, but achieving preferred outcomes also requires the cooperation of private landholders and others with vested interests in the land. The Land Stewardship project in the state of Victoria, Australia, is an initiative devoted to exploring the ways in which private landholders could be encouraged towards more sustainable land management. Following the view that the success of policy initiatives is contingent on effective stakeholder engagement, a component of the Land Stewardship project involved a dialogue with landholders about policy tools (e.g., regulation, economic instruments) that might be deployed to encourage improved land management practices. This paper provides an account of the views and attitudes of landholders, as revealed in a series of three workshops, which consisted of discussions about the factors influencing agriculture, participants' interpretations of sustainability, and policy methods. The focus of the paper is on what landholders believe to be the strengths and limitations of standard policy tools, and the essential requirements for these tools to deliver the best land management outcomes. One of the main findings of the project was a 'preference hierarchy' in respect of policy methods, according to which the strongest support was expressed for voluntary and education-based tools, followed by market-based instruments, with command-and-control regulation identified as a measure of 'last resort'. In the paper we reflect also on how the views and outlook of landholders should be positioned relative to other inputs in the design of policy interventions.     

海南"美丽乡村"环境协同治理状况调研:政策工具的视角

"美丽乡村"是"美丽中国"的重要载体和组成部分。实现"美丽乡村"的生态环境治理需要政府、社会、村民的多方协同治理,政策工具的选取、组合、使用,决定了协同模式的构建。本调研基于政策工具的视角考察海南"美丽乡村"环境协同治理状况,根据所得数据科学研究分析,科学合理地提出相应的建议对策,以期为海南"美丽乡村"环境协同治理提供实证借鉴。     

Sustainability indicator system and policy processes in Malaysia: a framework for utilisation and learning

Formulation of effective sustainability indicators for national assessment demands a comprehensive understanding of the utilisation, diffusion and dissemination of information in policy processes. To illustrate the dynamic of sustainability assessment within the context of policy processes, this paper uses a case study of national sustainability indicators development in Malaysia. Subsequently, this paper ascribes the limited achievement of national sustainability assessment in Malaysia to four types of constraints: meta-policy issues; technical capacities; communication concerns; and the inherent knowledge gaps within the indicator developer community vis-a-vis their theoretical limitations. It is proposed that such constraints will be encountered in many countries. Drawing from the literature on public policy, this paper outlines a framework for investigating indicator behaviour within policy processes based on well-established concepts such as knowledge utilisation and policy learning. I conclude this paper by elaborating on the corresponding future challenges that must be addressed before effective integration of sustainability indicators within policy systems can occur.     

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.     

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.     

The neighbourhood project for urban rehabilitation in France: a progress report

Serious social and environmental problems are encountered on many of the large post‐war estates of blocks of social housing (grands ensembles) surrounding French cities, as well as in many inner‐city districts. In 1981 the new Socialist administration set up a National Commission to foster grass‐roots schemes in order to improve housing and to attempt to tackle both the expressions and the causes of social problems. The resulting neighbourhood programme represents an innovative dialogue between the central State, the regions, local authorities and residents’ groups. Examination of a sample of projects from the provinces (Romans, Dreux, Les Minguettes) and the Paris region confirms that progress has been made by improving housing, open spaces and community facilities. Formidable problems of poverty, unemployment and racism remain on many estates.     

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.     

The relation between objective and subjective exposure to traffic noise around two suburban highway viaducts in Ghent: lessons for urban environmental policy

A growing empirical evidence base identifies environmental noise exposure as an important health problem. While the health effects depend for a great part on personal noise sensitivity and contextual factors, in environmental policy, generic noise standards and procedures based on objective sound levels are used. In this article, the relation between objective and subjective noise exposure variables is further explored by carrying out a residents’ survey in a highly noise polluted area along two highways south of the city centre of Ghent, Belgium. The survey results show only a weak correlation between objective and subjective exposure variables, with both variables demonstrating different associations with the respondents’ background characteristics. While lower-educated and lower-income people are generally higher exposed according to the models, they do not report a higher subjective exposure. People who have been living longer in the area are not necessarily higher exposed according to the models but do report a higher subjective exposure. Most strikingly, owners of a comfortable detached house report a higher subjective exposure than renters of an apartment or small house, while the latter group is significantly higher exposed according to the models. The results support a plea for the joint evaluation of both objective and subjective noise exposure variables in environmental policy and environmental assessments. In addition, the results argue for specific attention for noise exposure of socio-economically vulnerable people and the establishment of a shared knowledge base on noise exposure with both objective and subjective information.     

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.     

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.     

Tackling wicked problems and tricky transitions: change and continuity in Cape Town's environmental policy landscape

This paper offers a reflection on 15 years of policy change in the City of Cape Town aimed at fostering sustainability from the perspective of a City practitioner. The persistent continuation of unsustainable outcomes, despite ongoing policy reforms, is understood as a combination of the emergence of wicked problems, within a changing local government mandate, in the absence of a transformation of institutional structures, tools and approaches. While the approach to policy reform in Cape Town has focussed on reducing substantive uncertainty through its knowledge-based approach, we show that in the context of an expanding local government mandate, sustainability becomes an aspect of many departments’ directive resulting in strategic uncertainty. The untransformed traditional line-function-based structure of local government in turn works against integration between departments (fundamental for addressing non-linear wicked problems), thus promoting institutional uncertainty. In addressing this combination of strategic and institutional uncertainty, our findings indicate that integration has to happen in the policy stage in order for sustainability principles to be implemented in relevant departments; that implementation requires resourcing across the institution, and ought to be included in departments’ targets; and that competing and conflicting rationalities underpin the policy–practice gap. It is suggested that a first step in breaking down the strategic and institutional uncertainties would be to foster shared values through creating deliberative spaces within the City in which debate, discussion and learning can occur.     

Intergovernmental relationships after disaster: state and local government learning during flood recovery in Colorado

ABSTRACT

When communities experience disaster, emergency response and recovery are led internally, based on local-level policy decisions and priorities. Decisions about how or whether to rebuild are made by local governments. Higher governmental authorities such as states and provinces may institute their own disaster recovery processes and policies in addition to or in competition with local governments. Greater intergovernmental engagement could increase resources and knowledge, which would yield higher levels of learning and result in superior disaster recovery policy outcomes. The role of higher authorities, then, can have important implications for policy processes and outcomes. The learning literature includes a dearth of studies that analyze the relationships between state and local governments during disaster recovery. We move the learning literature forward by analyzing intergovernmental relationships during disaster recovery. We find that learning within local governments is associated with higher levels of resource flows from state agencies as well as more collaborative intergovernmental relationships. We also find that state governments can improve processes for disaster recovery assistance and bring together disaster-affected local governments to promote learning during the recovery process. While this study focused on relationships constrained by U.S. federal dynamics, the lessons are useful to other multilevel governance systems.     

Collaborative Modeling for Decision Support in Water Resources: Principles and Best Practices

Collaborative Modeling for Decision Support integrates collaborative modeling with participatory processes to inform natural resources decisions. Practitioners and advocates claim that the approach will lead to better water management, balancing interests more effectively and reducing the likelihood of costly legal delays. These claims are easy to make, but the benefits will only be realized if the process is conducted effectively. To provide guidance for how to conduct an effective collaborative modeling process, a task committee cosponsored by the Environmental Water Resources Institute (EWRI) of the American Society of Civil Engineers and by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Institute for Water Resources developed a set of Principles and Best Practices for anyone who might convene or conduct collaborative modeling processes. The guidance is intended for both conflict resolution professionals and modelers, and our goal is to integrate these two fields in a way that will improve water resources planning and decision making. Here, the set of eight principles is presented along with a selection of associated best practices, illustrated by two different case examples. The complete document is available at: http://www.computeraideddisputeresolution.us/bestpractices/ .     

Mind the gap: institutional considerations for gender-inclusive climate change policy in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper positions climate change against the backdrop of gender, premised on the understanding that neither climate change impacts nor responses are gender neutral, therefore institutions need to respond accordingly. Institutions play a central role in facilitating policy effects and forming major nodes of interaction as well as determining the accentuation of risk. Drawing on examples from different parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, the paper seeks to elucidate why women should be placed at the heart of climate change interventions. Establishing the appropriate connections between gender and climate change will enhance the opportunities for problem-solving and can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of policy-making. The gendered aspects of climate change and environmental relations are analysed by using an African feminist approach as the theoretical framework to expand and expound upon this position. This paper also investigates institutional matters pertaining to the management of environmental resources and highlights some of the constraints that need to be overcome in order to ensure the inclusion and empowerment of women in the management of these resources. It concludes by calling for a thorough understanding of the gender-based power relations in the agendas and activities of environmental governance institutions at all levels in society.     

Lenses for learning: visual techniques in natural resource management

In this study, we explored the use of selected visual techniques (e.g. video, photography, diagramming) in facilitating learning among Indigenous communities living in remote protected areas at sites in Vietnam and Australia. The techniques were employed during interviews and workshops aimed at accessing and enhancing local peoples' perspectives on their landscape and on specific natural resource management issues. The effectiveness of the different techniques for enabling learning varied markedly with the context, highlighting the need for facilitator skill and flexibility in application of techniques. Visual techniques helped to engage participants; encourage unrestrained and lateral thinking; provide opportunities for self-expression and reflection; and to expose participants to perspectives of other community members. Valuable insights emerged on broad aspects of learning and these were incorporated into a simple model that highlights three types of conceptualisation found to be important in these processes.