The concept of adaptive governance is an established social-ecological system management and governance approach. Conceptualized in the field of environmental governance in the 1990s, it has evolved as an analytical framework for understanding natural resource governance that takes as its foundation the interdependence of social and ecological systems, recognizing that the two cannot exist in isolation.
Adaptive governance is a range of interactions between actors, networks, organizations, and institutions emerging in pursuit of the desired state for social-ecological systems. It has been employed with significant success in the management of social-ecological systems, especially in natural resource management (NRM).
The question is: how does the concept of adaptive governance contribute to resilience, especially through the integration of development and disaster risk reduction (DRR)? The concept of ‘disaster governance’ has been under discussion over the last decade in the DRR discourse. It emphasizes “the interrelated sets of norms, organizational and institutional actors, and practices (spanning pre-disaster, trans-disaster, and post-disaster periods) that are designed to reduce the impacts and losses associated with disasters”.
Both disaster governance and adaptive governance transcend formal institutions and processes to include other stakeholders such as business and non-governmental entities at different scales. In resilience research, adaptive governance has been used for analyzing the social, institutional, economic, and ecological foundations of multi-level governance modes that are successful in building resilience to the complex challenges posed by global change and coupled complex adaptive social-ecological systems.
Adaptive governance has four important characteristics that are essential for building disaster resilience: one, polycentric and multi-layered institutions: This concept involves having a set of governing bodies at different levels (local, regional, national) that can collaborate effectively. It avoids a rigid, top-down approach and allows for quicker decision-making at the most relevant level.
Two, participation and collaboration: This highlights the importance of involving diverse stakeholders, including citizens, businesses, and NGOs, in the decision-making process. This helps create a sense of ownership and enhances the effectiveness of implemented solutions.
Three, self-organization and networks: This encourages communities and organizations to self-organize and work together to address challenges. Networks can share resources, knowledge, and best practices, leading to more efficient disaster response and recovery.
Four, learning and innovation: Adaptive governance promotes continuous learning from past experiences and encourages innovative solutions for future challenges. This allows the system to adapt to changing circumstances and improve its response over time.
The concept of resilience has been used to explore the interdisciplinary linkages between DRR and adaptive governance. Some of the key challenges to dealing with disaster risk include the uncertainties and complexities of the SES, which form the basis for surprise, especially during rapid-onset disasters. But adaptive governance is potentially helpful in dealing with these even in rapid environmental change while taking cognizance of the socioeconomic, cultural, and political dynamics contingent at different scales and contexts.
Through open and cooperative decision-making structures, it provides a framework for integrating science and other forms of knowledge (for example, traditional ecological knowledge) into policies and practices to advance disaster resilience.
Adaptive governance has become a useful concept in climate change adaptation and has been suggested as an “alternative approach for governing complex problems such as disasters” and a “leading approach to successfully meet the challenges of changes in social-ecological systems”. It can help advance DRR by facilitating the exploration of context-specific characteristics of risk, best-associated governance arrangements, and risk reduction measures. Such progress occurs through adaptive governance processes or systematic approaches for improving governance and management policies and practices based on lessons from management strategies that have already been implemented.
Adaptive institutions, those “able to adjust to encourage individuals to act in ways that maintain or improve to a desirable state”, form the basis of effective adaptive governance processes. The establishment of such institutions is, therefore, an important step towards adaptive governance and resilience, and augments the prospects for participation and collaboration. The adaptive institutions should be “participatory, inclusive, integrative, risk-tolerant, flexible, legitimate, accountable, diverse, creative, learning, iterative, autonomous, resourceful, self-assessing, collaborative, transparent, reflexive, and integrated with broader processes”.
Polycentrism and multi-layered Ness (or federalism) of institutions are other key attributes of adaptive institutions that enable the alignment of activities and processes at various operational scales and environments in which DRR and adaptive governance processes happen and considerations of external processes that affect the institutions’ working environment.
Adaptive governance approaches offer a mechanism through which to fundamentally change the relationship between development and disaster risk with implications for science, policy, and practice. DRR interventions occur in three realms - science, policy, and practice. The influence of the adaptive governance approach in these realms can have a direct and indirect stimulus on DRR.
Adaptive governance has been termed “the most effective approach in terms of both management and governance”. The iterative process of policymaking is fed into research, which provides the “constant monitoring and recalibration of the parameters driving the policy formulation” towards resilience and sustainability.
The writer is a research associate at the Sustainable Development Policy
Institute (SDPI) in Islamabad.