Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 118, Issue 36, Pages -Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2102798118
Keywords
governance; complex systems; social-ecological-technological systems; law and science
Categories
Funding
- US National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) under National Science Foundation (NSF) [DBI-1052875]
- AWG 2.0
- SESYNC
- research project Adaptive Capacity for Sustainable Blue Growth (BlueAdapt) - Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland [312652, 312747]
- NSF/National Institute of Food and Agriculture INFEWS T1, 2016-2020, Increasing Regional to Global-Scale Resilience in Food-Energy-Water Systems through Coordinated Management, Technology, and Institutions [1639458]
- Academy of Finland (AKA) [312747, 312652, 312747, 312652] Funding Source: Academy of Finland (AKA)
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The article discusses the challenges that environmental changes pose to social-ecological-technological systems (SETs) and emphasizes the effectiveness of adaptive governance in managing complexity. It points out that new forms of adaptive governance are emerging, but they have not yet been able to adapt rapidly enough to the pace of environmental change, and lack the legitimacy and capacity to address disparities between winners and losers from change.
The speed and uncertainty of environmental change in the Anthropocene challenge the capacity of coevolving social-ecological-technological systems (SETs) to adapt or transform to these changes. Formal government and legal structures further constrain the adaptive capacity of our SETs. However, new, selforganized forms of adaptive governance are emerging at multiple scales in natural resource-based SETs. Adaptive governance involves the private and public sectors as well as formal and informal institutions, self-organized to fill governance gaps in the traditional roles of states. While new governance forms are emerging, they are not yet doing so rapidly enough to match the pace of environmental change. Furthermore, they do not yet possess the legitimacy or capacity needed to address disparities between the winners and losers from change. These emergent forms of adaptive governance appear to be particularly effective in managing complexity. We explore governance and SETs as coevolving complex systems, focusing on legal systems to understand the potential pathways and obstacles to equitable adaptation. We explore how governments may facilitate the emergence of adaptive governance and promote legitimacy in both the process of governance despite the involvement of nonstate actors, and its adherence to democratic values of equity and justice. To manage the contextual nature of the results of change in complex systems, we propose the establishment of long-term study initiatives for the coproduction of knowledge, to accelerate learning and synergize interactions between science and governance and to foster public science and epistemic communities dedicated to navigating transitions to more just, sustainable, and resilient futures.
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