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"Ryan Plummer"
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Can Adaptive Comanagement Help to Address the Challenges of Climate Change Adaptation?
A shift is taking place within environmental governance that draws attention to modes and instruments that respond to system dynamics, uncertainty, and contested values. Adaptive comanagement is one process being advanced to make governance operational as it emphasizes collaboration among diverse actors, functions across scales and levels, and fosters learning though iterative feedback. Although extensive experience with adaptive comanagement has been gained in relation to other environmental and resource issues, its potential contribution to the governance of adaption is largely unexplored. This paper probes how adaptive comanagement might offer support to climate change adaptation and identifies gaps in knowledge requiring attention. In drawing upon existing literature and applied experiences, it is argued that adaptive comanagement may contribute to climate change adaptation by building generalized adaptive capacity as well as providing a novel institutional arrangement to generate adaptive responses. At the same time, several questions emerge about adaptive comanagement in this context. Considerations are thus discussed for adaptive comanagement scholarship and application in addressing the challenge of climate change adaptation.
Journal Article
The Adaptive Co-Management Process
Collaborative and adaptive approaches to environmental management have captured the attention of administrators, resource users, and scholars. Adaptive co-management builds upon these approaches to create a novel governance strategy. This paper investigates the dynamics of the adaptive co-management process and the variables that influence it. The investigation begins by summarizing analytical and causal models relevant to the adaptive co-management process. Variables that influence this process are then synthesized from diverse literatures, categorized as being exogenous or endogenous, and developed into respective analytical frameworks. In identifying commonalities among models of the adaptive co-management process and discerning influential variables, this paper provides initial insights into understanding the dynamic social process of adaptive co-management. From these insights conjectures for future inquires are offered in the conclusion.
Journal Article
Fit for performance? Examining the complexities of flood planning in relationship to effectiveness
Social-ecological (SE) fit has been posited as a prerequisite for decision-making performance. However, empirical research linking indicators of SE fit to performance are limited. Current studies rarely consider how multiple overlapping interdependencies that constitute social-ecological systems (SES) influence fit and performance. This research investigates flood planning to probe the relationship between SE fit and functional performance. We incorporate aspects of complexity from the ecological system through interconnected sub-basins and from the collective action problem through interdependent functions. Applying a multi-level network approach, we assessed how patterns of collaboration believed to support positive outcomes in social-ecological systems (i.e., SE fit) impact task performance when accounting for different SE fit challenges. When actors were working in the same sub-basin, collaboration that aligned to interdependent functions did not influence performance. When actors collaborated across sub-basins, collaboration that aligned with interdependent functions enhanced performance. Our findings highlight that SE fit is crucial for enhancing performance specifically when contextual factors will increase the transaction cost of collaborative relationships.
Journal Article
A scoping review of how the seven principles for building social-ecological resilience have been operationalized
Just over ten years ago, resilience scholars proposed seven principles for enhancing the resilience of social-ecological systems. The authors argued that there was a pressing need for a better understanding of how the principles can be operationalized. Through a scoping review we evaluate how these principles have been operationalized, which we define as a process of moving a concept from the theoretical to the measurable using, in this case, resilience principles divided into component dimensions and identifying measurable indicator(s) for each dimension. Here we show that the seven resilience principles have been vastly underutilized as a tool for operationalizing social-ecological resilience. Of more than 750 articles citing the principles, just 23 operationalized them and only seven of these articles operationalized all seven principles. Several of those 23 articles were unclear in the ways in which operationalization occurred. In terms of geography, the focus of the majority of articles was in the Global North. Articles that operationalized the principles used a wide variety of dimensions and indicators. To advance the scholarship and practice of building social-ecological resilience, we recommend the use of a consistent set of dimensions, or “parts that make up the whole” for each resilience principle combined with contextualized indicators or measures. Following these recommendations will create the capacity for global analyses and insights while honoring the local context that creates unique conditions in each place. Further, using contextualized indicators allows for plural approaches to operationalizing social-ecological resilience.
Journal Article
Assessing social-ecological fit of flood planning governance
Social-ecological fit demands that governance systems align with and function at the appropriate scales of social and ecological processes being governed. While multilevel social-ecological network analysis has been applied to assess fit in various contexts, it has not yet been applied to understand transboundary flood planning. We investigate the social-ecological fit of collaborative flood planning efforts in the St. John River Basin, located in New Brunswick and Quebec in Canada and Maine in the United States, focusing on two social-ecological fit challenges: shared management of ecological resources and management of interconnected resources. Our results displayed organizations have a tendency to collaborate with others located in the same sub-sub-basin and not with those working in different sub-sub-basins, indicating limited social-ecological fit of the collaboration network to flooding at the basin scale. Qualitative analysis identified collaboration provided increased knowledge and technical resources to engage in flood planning, but it was hindered by a lack of financial resources, time constraints, and a lack of shared commitment. Collaborative relationships among organizations working in different sub-sub-basins are essential for cohesive flood planning at the basin level, and in this case, there is potential for an increase in collaboration among ecological neighbors to govern for ecological connectivity.
Journal Article
Transdisciplinary partnerships for sustainability: an evaluation guide
Transdisciplinary research, in which academics and actors from outside the academy co-produce knowledge, is an important approach to address urgent sustainability challenges. Indeed, to meet these real-world challenges, governments, universities, development agencies, and civil society organizations have made substantial investments in transdisciplinary partnerships. Yet to date, our understanding of the performance, as well as impacts, of these partnerships for sustainability is limited. Here, we provide a guide to assess the performance and impacts of transdisciplinary partnerships for sustainability. We offer key steps to navigate and examine the partnership process for continuous improvement, and to understand how transdisciplinary partnership is contributing to sustainable futures.
Journal Article
Adaptive Comanagement
This paper outlines the results of a systematic review of the literature on adaptive comanagement (ACM). Adaptive comanagement is an emergent governance approach for complex social–ecological systems that links the learning function of adaptive management (experimental and experiential) and the linking (vertically and horizontally) function of comanagement. Given the rapid growth of adaptive comanagement scholarship, there is value in a systematic analysis of how the concept is being conceptualized to elucidate agreement and discrepancies and to examine the challenges this presents for cross-case comparisons and the possibility of arriving at more generalizable insights. A synthesis-based methodology has been developed involving a comprehensive search and screening of academic databases and the internet. A detailed analysis of 108 documents was undertaken to characterize the state of the ACM literature, unpack the construct of ACM, and examine relationships among aspects of ACM based on accumulated experiences to date. The systematic review and analysis reveals imprecision, inconsistency, and confusion with the concept. Robust evidentiary insights into how the variables or components of ACM interrelate as well as relate to goals and outcomes are, therefore, presently not possible. These findings lead to the discussion of a series of challenges for ACM scholarship. Opportunities remain for ACM scholars to pursue theoretical development in rigorous ways that facilitate empirically based cross-site comparisons.
Journal Article
How do environmental governance processes shape evaluation of outcomes by stakeholders? A causal pathways approach
Multi-stakeholder environmental management and governance processes are essential to realize social and ecological outcomes. Participation, collaboration, and learning are emphasized in these processes; to gain insights into how they influence stakeholders' evaluations of outcomes in relation to management and governance interventions we use a path analysis approach to examine their relationships in individuals in four UNESCO Biosphere Reserves. We confirm a model showing that participation in more activities leads to greater ratings of process, and in turn, better evaluations of outcomes. We show the effects of participation in activities on evaluation of outcomes appear to be driven by learning more than collaboration. Original insights are offered as to how the evaluations of outcomes by stakeholders are shaped by their participation in activities and their experiences in management and governance processes. Understanding stakeholder perceptions about the processes in which they are involved and their evaluation of outcomes is imperative, and influences current and future levels of engagement. As such, the evaluation of outcomes themselves are an important tangible product from initiatives. Our research contributes to a future research agenda aimed at better understanding these pathways and their implications for engagement in stewardship and ultimately social and ecological outcomes, and to developing recommendations for practitioners engaged in environmental management and governance.
Journal Article
Adaptive Comanagement and Its Relationship to Environmental Governance
We provide a systematic review of the adaptive comanagement (ACM) literature to (i) investigate how the concept of governance is considered and (ii) examine what insights ACM offers with reference to six key concerns in environmental governance literature: accountability and legitimacy; actors and roles; fit, interplay, and scale; adaptiveness, flexibility, and learning; evaluation and monitoring; and, knowledge. Findings from the systematic review uncover a complicated relationship with evidence of conceptual closeness as well as relational ambiguities. The findings also reveal several specific contributions from the ACM literature to each of the six key environmental governance concerns, including applied strategies for sharing power and responsibility and value of systems approaches in understanding problems of fit. More broadly, the research suggests a dissolving or fuzzy boundary between ACM and governance, with implications for understanding emerging approaches to navigate social-ecological system change. Future research opportunities may be found at the confluence of ACM and environmental governance scholarship, such as identifying ways to build adaptive capacity and encouraging the development of more flexible governance arrangements.
Journal Article