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Japan experienced natural hazards during the COVID-19 pandemic as some other countries did. Kumamoto and Kagoshima prefectures, including many other parts of southern Japan, experienced record-breaking heavy rain on 4th July 2020. While many countries were affected by compound hazards, some cases such as the Kumamoto flood did not cause a spike of the COVID-19 cases even after going through massive evacuation actions. This study aims to understand how COVID-19 made an impact on people’s response actions, learn the challenges and problems during the response and recovery phases, and identify any innovative actions and efforts to overcome various restrictions and challenges through a questionnaire survey and interviews with the affected people. With an increase in the risk of compound hazards, it has become important to take a new, innovative, and non-traditional approach. Proper understanding and application of adaptive governance can make it possible to come up with a solution that can work directly on the complex challenges during disasters. This study identified that a spike of COVID-19 cases after the disaster could be avoided due to various preventive measures taken at the evacuation centers. It shows that it is possible to manage compound hazard risks with effective preparedness. Furthermore, during emergencies, public-private-partnership as well as collaboration among private organizations and local business networks are extremely important. These collaborations generate a new approach, mechanism and platform to tackle unprecedented challenges.

We start this article by seeking analogies between the cultural landscape and socio-ecological system concepts. Whereas the former has played a pivotal role in geographical research since its introduction in the nineteenth century, the latter has only recently become popular in inter- and transdisciplinary science. The results of this theoretical and conceptual endeavour are used to build a distinctive analytical category: the ‘complex socio-ecological landscape’. We then apply this novel concept to the Coffee Cultural Landscape of Colombia, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2011. In doing so, we demonstrate that this landscape in fact exhibits complex adaptive behaviour. We end the article with an analysis of the Cañamomo-Lomaprieta indigenous reservation in the north of the Coffee Cultural Landscape. Participatory mechanisms of transdisciplinary knowledge production have stimulated the emergence of an ancestral governance system in Cañamomo-Lomaprieta, which has reduced the vulnerability of its socio-ecological systems to the effects of small-scale gold mining activities. This case provides important insights into how to stimulate transdisciplinarity in other complex socio-ecological landscapes in Latin America that bear the brunt of extractive activities.  Comenzamos este artículo buscando analogías entre los conceptos de paisaje cultural y sistema socioecológico. Mientras que el primero ha desempeñado un papel fundamental en la investigación geográfica desde su introducción en el siglo XIX, el segundo se ha hecho popular solo recientemente en la ciencia inter y transdisciplinaria. Los resultados de este esfuerzo teórico y conceptual se utilizan para construir una categoría analítica distintiva: el ‘paisaje socioecológico complejo’. Luego aplicamos este novedoso concepto al Paisaje Cultural Cafetero de Colombia, declarado Patrimonio de la Humanidad por la UNESCO en 2011. Mostramos que este paisaje efectivamente exhibe un comportamiento adaptativo complejo. Finalizamos el artículo con un análisis del resguardo indígena Cañamomo-Lomaprieta en el norte de este paisaje. Mecanismos participativos de producción de conocimiento transdisciplinario han estimulado el surgimiento de un sistema de gobernanza ancestral en Cañamomo-Lomaprieta, lo que ha reducido la vulnerabilidad de sus sistemas socioecológicos ante los efectos de las actividades de minería aurífera a pequeña escala. Este caso permite comprender cómo se puede estimular la transdisciplinariedad en otros paisajes socioecológicos complejos en América Latina afectados por actividades extractivas. 

This study investigated a community-managed irrigation system, the Wang hilltop pond irrigation system (WHPIS) in Guangdong, China. Via a field survey and case study, this paper describes the WHPIS’s two-stage process of evolutionary governance since the 1960s. First, it explains how the WHPIS achieved 50 years of successful self-governance and robust operation. Then, based on the requirements for adaptive governance outlined by Dietz et al. (2003), it addresses how the WHPIS, when faced with a climate-anomaly, has achieved robustness through institutional change. It finds that with strong social capital based on lineage events, the community, working in partnership with the local government, collectively revised investment, maintenance, and water distribution rules, and developed a new patroller rule. These new rules were effectively enforced by the community through social capital, which enabled the WHPIS to adapt to the climate anomaly. Last, this study concludes that a long-term self-governing irrigation system disturbed by abrupt change can be restored to a robust state via institutional measures enabling adaptive governance. Strong social capital enables a community to absorb the external power from the local government and internalize it, enforce incremental rule changes, and efficiently achieve a robust irrigation system subject to adaptive governance.

Looking at two cases of community forests (CF) in Eastern North America, this article examines their institutional features in order to assess whether they are conducive to adaptive governance. To do so, this article presents CFs as manifestations of polycentric governance, which allow identifying the complex networks of relations existing between different actors involved in governance at many scales. Polycentric governance is assumed to have a higher adaptability to changing factors. To better capture the variables conducive to adaptive governance in CFs, we draw on the socio-ecological system (SES) framework. The study shows that variables from the SES framework are useful in identifying features of polycentricity in CFs. Moreover, these variables highlight mechanisms of adaptability in CF governance, namely: interaction between organizations and actors, multiplicity of complementary rules from different organizations and structures of governance. Moreover, ongoing communication with the forest users and learning among actors appear key for CF governance’s adaptability.

Under present conditions of economic globalization, social-ecological systems undergo rapid changes. In this context, internal and external forces put heavy pressure on the governance systems of commons to adapt effectively. While institutional learning has been identified as a key element for the adaptive governance of social-ecological systems, there is still limited knowledge of what roles communities and governmental actors play in these processes. In this study, we take the case of yarshagumba (English: caterpillar fungus), a formerly non-valued product in the Himalayas, which has recently been transformed into a highly valuable resource within a short time. We compare the governance systems in collection sites in the Kailash Landscape in India and Nepalby using an analytical framework developed by Pahl-Wostl. Our findings show that in these remote mountain areas, communities and community-led organizations are highly flexible in responding to immediate resource value changes by establishing communal management arrangements. At the same time, however, communities have difficulties to enforce their newly developed informal and formal arrangements. During the process of learning the link between the amendment of arrangements on community-level and the revision of formal policies and frames at the state or national level is only partly established. Against this background, we argue that in the context of rapid change, adaptive governance requires the concerted interaction of actors at the local and the national levels in order to enable the sustainable use of common pool natural resources.

Adaptive governance is an emergent form of environmental governance that is increasingly called upon by scholars and practitioners to coordinate resource management regimes in the face of the complexity and uncertainty associated with rapid environmental change. Although the term “adaptive governance” is not exclusively applied to the governance of social-ecological systems, related research represents a significant outgrowth of literature on resilience, social-ecological systems, and environmental governance. We present a chronology of major scholarship on adaptive governance, synthesizing efforts to define the concept and identifying the array of governance concepts associated with transformation toward adaptive governance. Based on this synthesis, we define adaptive governance as a range of interactions between actors, networks, organizations, and institutions emerging in pursuit of a desired state for social-ecological systems. In addition, we identify and discuss ambiguities in adaptive governance scholarship such as the roles of adaptive management, crisis, and a desired state for governance of social-ecological systems. Finally, we outline a research agenda to examine whether an adaptive governance approach can become institutionalized under current legal frameworks and political contexts. We suggest a further investigation of the relationship between adaptive governance and the principles of good governance; the roles of power and politics in the emergence of adaptive governance; and potential interventions such as legal reform that may catalyze or enhance governance adaptations or transformation toward adaptive governance.

The term “governance” encompasses both governmental and nongovernmental participation in collective choice and action. Law dictates the structure, boundaries, rules, and processes within which governmental action takes place, and in doing so becomes one of the focal points for analysis of barriers to adaptation as the effects of climate change are felt. Adaptive governance must therefore contemplate a level of flexibility and evolution in governmental action beyond that currently found in the heavily administrative governments of many democracies. Nevertheless, over time, law itself has proven highly adaptive in western systems of government, evolving to address and even facilitate the emergence of new social norms (such as the rights of women and minorities) or to provide remedies for emerging problems (such as pollution). Thus, there is no question that law can adapt, evolve, and be reformed to make room for adaptive governance. In doing this, not only may barriers be removed, but law may be adjusted to facilitate adaptive governance and to aid in institutionalizing new and emerging approaches to governance. The key is to do so in a way that also enhances legitimacy, accountability, and justice, or else such reforms will never be adopted by democratic societies, or if adopted, will destabilize those societies. By identifying those aspects of the frameworks for adaptive governance reviewed in the introduction to this special feature relevant to the legal system, we present guidelines for evaluating the role of law in environmental governance to identify the ways in which law can be used, adapted, and reformed to facilitate adaptive governance and to do so in a way that enhances the legitimacy of governmental action.

This article assesses the institutional prescriptions of adaptive (co-)management based on a literature review of the (water) governance literature. The adaptive (co-)management literature contains four institutional prescriptions: collaboration in a polycentric governance system, public participation, an experimental approach to resource management, and management at the bioregional scale. These prescriptions largely resonate with the theoretical and empirical insights embedded in the (water) governance literature. However, this literature also predicts various problems. In particular, attention is called to the complexities associated with participation and collaboration, the difficulty of experimenting in a real-world setting, and the politicized nature of discussion on governance at the bioregional scale. We conclude this article by outlining a common research agenda that invites the collaborative efforts of adaptive (co-)management and governance scholars.

Panarchy provides a heuristic to characterize the cross-scale dynamics of social-ecological systems and a framework for how governance institutions should behave to be compatible with the ecosystems they manage. Managing for resilience will likely require reform of law to account for the dynamics of social-ecological systems and achieve a substantive mandate that accommodates the need for adaptation. In this paper, we suggest expansive legal reform by identifying the principles of reflexive law as a possible mechanism for achieving a shift to resilience-based governance and leveraging cross-scale dynamics to provide resilience-based responses to increasingly challenging environmental conditions.

Legal and institutional structures fundamentally shape opportunities for adaptive governance of environmental resources at multiple ecological and societal scales. Properties of adaptive governance are widely studied. However, these studies have not resulted in consolidated frameworks for legal and institutional design, limiting our ability to promote adaptation and social-ecological resilience. We develop an overarching framework that describes the current and potential role of law in enabling adaptation. We apply this framework to different social-ecological settings, centers of activity, and scales, illustrating the multidimensional and polycentric nature of water governance. Adaptation typically emerges organically among multiple centers of agency and authority in society as a relatively self-organized or autonomous process marked by innovation, social learning, and political deliberation. This self-directed and emergent process is difficult to create in an exogenous, top-down fashion. However, traditional centers of authority may establish enabling conditions for adaptation using a suite of legal, economic, and democratic tools to legitimize and facilitate self-organization, coordination, and collaboration across scales. The principles outlined here provide preliminary legal and institutional foundations for adaptive environmental governance, which may inform institutional design and guide future scholarship.