Download 1.1. Adaptive Governance And Scientific Management

ADAPTIVE GOVERNANCE
Proposals for Climate Change Science, Policy and Decision Making
Amanda H. Lynch1 and Ronald D. Brunner2
1 School of Geography and Environmental Science,
Monash University
Clayton, Victoria, 3800
AUSTRALIA
2 Center
for Public Policy Research, University of Colorado
Email: [email protected]
Abstract
Worldwide, the threefold increase in the incidence of extreme weather events since 1960 was been
accompanied by a ninefold increase in damages, reaching a peak of US$219 billion in 2005. There is
strong evidence that the increases in extremes, particularly heat wave and flood, are related to climate
change. In the face of this evidence, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
One reason for this policy failure is the framing of climate change as a problem susceptible to scientific
management at large scales.
Adaptive governance is a means of directing attention to otherwise neglected options that can help
reduce our vulnerability to climate change. It has emerged more or less spontaneously as a looselycoordinated array of pragmatic responses to manifest failures of scientific management at the local
level. Not surprisingly, recognition of the pattern in the last decade or two and the term itself followed
innovations in practice.
We propose opening up the established frame, based on insights from adaptive governance fieldtested in Alpine Shire, Victoria, and independently corroborated by other research. First, we propose
more intensive research centered on case studies of local communities and extreme events, each of
which is unique under a comprehensive description. Second, in terms of policy, we support a
procedurally-rational approach, one that accommodates inevitable uncertainties, integrates scientific
and local knowledge into policies to advance the community’s common interest, and relies on learning
from experience. Third, in terms of constitutive decisions, we suggest structural changes that begin
with harvesting experience from the bottom-up, to make policies that have worked anywhere on the
ground available for voluntary adaptation by similar communities elsewhere, and to inform higher-level
officials about local resource needs.
The common interest lies in reducing the vulnerability of people, property and other cultural artifacts,
and the natural environment to climate change. Both adaptation and mitigation are means to this
end.
1. INTRODUCTION: THE CLIMATE CHANGE CONTEXT
The climate change regime was formally established in March 1994 when the fiftieth national
government ratified the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The
Convention was opened for signature at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. Since then
191 national governments have ratified it. The ultimate objective of the Convention, as stated in
Article 2, is “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would
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prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system.” In December 1997, the
Conference of the Parties to the Convention negotiated a successor policy, the Kyoto Protocol. The
Protocol went into effect in February 2005, after ratification by the Russian Federation. Each of the
parties to the Protocol formally committed itself to reducing the CO2-equivalent emissions of six
greenhouse gases by 5% to 8% below 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012, using whatever joint
implementation and national means they deemed appropriate. As early as 2004, attention turned to
negotiating another emissions-reductions policy to follow termination of the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. i
The significance of these and other policies in light of the ultimate objective depends on the standards
applied. To be sure, some progress has been made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions by the
counter-factual standard – the level of emissions that would have occurred without the UNFCCC -- but
this standard is relatively difficult to estimate as a gauge of progress. A more widely used standard is
the level of greenhouse gas emissions that occurred in 1990. Using this standard, the United States
and 22 other industrialized countries increased their aggregate emissions by 12.1% from 1990 to
2004.ii When 10 industrialized countries in transition to market economies are folded in, aggregate
emissions decreased by 4.9% during the same period. However, it has been convincingly argued that
this reflects primarily the depth of economic decline in the former Soviet bloc after the end of the Cold
War, not policies implemented under UNFCCC auspices. Meanwhile, developing countries not
included in Annex I to the Convention have significantly added to global greenhouse gas emissions,
but their reporting capabilities are not sufficient to gauge aggregate emissions trends. iii
These outcomes are especially disappointing in light of the magnitude of the task implied by the
ultimate objective of the UNFCCC. According to one scientist, “‘it might take another 30 Kyotos over
the next century’ to cut global warming down to size.”iv A lack of political will is manifest in the
reservations of developing countries, the history of the regime’s establishment, and the disappointing
outcomes to date.v In a viewpoint published in Global Environmental Change in 2000, David Cash
observed that nearly all international and regional treaties “require scientific assessment and
monitoring to support decision-making.”vi He cited the assessments of the IPCC as an example, and
acknowledged their benefits in understanding large-scale phenomena and informing international
negotiations. However, “In doing so, traditional centralized assessments have failed in assisting local
decision-makers in taking actions to help prevent global environmental problems, or in implementing
responses to adapt to local impacts of global change.”
1.1.
Adaptive Governance And Scientific Management
Adaptive governance is a pattern that began to emerge from conflicts over natural resources in the
American West a few decades ago, as a pragmatic response to the manifest failures of scientific
management. Around the turn of the twentieth century, “Scientific management aspired to rise above
politics, relying on science as the foundation for efficient policies made through a single central
authority – a bureaucratic structure with the appropriate mandate, jurisdiction, and expert personnel.”vii
But during the last century it became increasingly clear that effective control was dispersed among
multiple authorities and interest groups, that efficiency was only one of the many goals to be
reconciled in policy decision processes, and that science itself was politically contested. Scientific
management typically leads to policy gridlock in these circumstances. Adaptive governance addresses
these twenty-first century realities by proceeding principally but not exclusively from the bottom up
rather than the top down. Each local community can integrate scientific and local knowledge into
policies to advance its common interest, recognizing that politics are unavoidable. Many communities
working in parallel can harvest their collective experience, to make successful innovations anywhere
available for voluntary adaptation elsewhere, and to clarify their common needs for higher-level
authorities. The emerging pattern of adaptive governance is not limited to natural resource
problems.viii
The climate change regime, however, relies on scientific management. For example, in the 1995
Synthesis of the Second Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
presents climate change as an “irreducibly global problem.”ix This global framing acknowledges that
carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, regardless of their geographic origins, are dispersed
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more or less uniformly in the atmosphere through the global circulation. But this global framing also
implies that the important decisions on climate change are made by national governments working
together as the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC and working separately to implement their
commitments. By defining climate change as an irreducibly global problem, the established frame
leaves out of the picture the citizens of diverse local communities whose support and cooperation are
necessary for effective international and national mandates.
Adaptive governance suggests an opportunity to factor the global problem into many local problems,
each of which is much simpler than the global problem and can be addressed concurrently, in parallel
with other efforts. The recommendation is to open up the established frame to enlist people in local
communities as active participants in the global effort to reduce near-term damage from extreme
weather events and longer-term damage from climate change. Consistent with that recommendation,
the present purpose is to introduce some proposals inspired by adaptive governance for climate
change science, policy, and decision making. For the sake of concreteness, we will use examples
from Alpine Shire, Victoria, where we have applied and field-tested insights from adaptive governance.
Alpine Shire is situated in northeast Victoria, 270km from Melbourne. The Shire encompasses 4397
square kilometres and has a population of approximately 13,168. The area is dominated by forested
mountain ranges, 92% of which is State or Federal land, and surrounds, but does not incorporate, the
alpine regions and ski resorts. Given the importance of ecosystem services to the continuing viability
of the Alpine Shire economy, residents and Shire council officers have been consistent in their
concerns. These include the potential for decreasing quality and quantity of water resources and the
potential for extremes. Fire, flood and frost are extremes that have seen increases in frequency and/or
severity in recent years.
1.2.
Science
First, in terms of science, we propose more intensive research centered on case studies of local
communities and extreme events. Each extreme event and each community is unique under a
comprehensive description, and differences among them must be taken into account to understand past
damages or reduce vulnerabilities. In contrast, in the established frame, the priority is to generalize across
events and communities, either to aggregate statistical data for higher-level authorities or to abstract
relationships for numerical models designed to make long-range predictions. These are important goals,
but often do little to reduce the vulnerability of the community in question.
As an example of intensive research, consider the flash flood that struck Alpine Shire on 26 February
2003. On the evening of 7 January 2003, a weather system swept across eastern Victoria and southern
New South Wales. Lightning associated with this weather system started over 80 fires in Victoria which
burned for nearly two months, resulting in Victoria's largest bushfire since the fires of 1939. In the Alpine
Shire, the fires were immediately followed by storms and localized flash flooding in late February. A utility
truck was crossing Dingo Creek when the area experienced the flash flooding and as a result there was
one fatality. The valley was filled with a high quantity of debris, such as mud, fallen trees and boulders. In
the weeks after the event, this led to serious water quality problems in northeast Victoria.
The total economic cost of the fires in the Shire was estimated to be AUS$49 millionx, with many different
sectors impacted. The fires occurred during the peak tourist season and resulted in a sharp decline of the
number of tourists visiting the area. It has taken several years for tourists to return to pre-fire numbers.
The fires also had a devastating impact on the grape growers. Smoke from the bushfires permeated
through the skin of the grapes and the entire crop had to be discarded. The estimated loss for Alpine
Shire grape growers was between AUS$5 and $8 million. The prolonged time that the fires burnt had a
marked impact on the physical and physiological health of the people as well as on the social fabric of the
community. There was considerable disruption to family life with many children sent away during the
duration of the fires. People felt very isolated because of road closures and the temporary loss of
community services such as schooling, the mobile library, and telephone lines. The blanket of smoke that
hung over the towns for weeks caused problems for those with respiratory conditions.
No single factor tells the story of this event. The significance of each factor for understanding the
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losses experienced by this community depends on its interactions with other factors in the same
context. This is an empirical result easily understood in terms of the conjunction rule of probability; we
expect it to hold for other extreme events and other communities. This implies that our ability to predict
our future vulnerability to flood under climate change, even as we improve our ability to forecast
individual flood events, is quite limited: uncertainties in each of the many vulnerability factors in an
extreme event are compounded in their conjunction, and no conjunction is replicated even in the same
community. But this does not mean that analysis of such events is not useful. The context and
linkages must be constructed, not assumed or taken as given. Once this is achieved “the role of
scientific work in human relations is freedom [through insight] rather than prediction.”xi Scientific
insights free us from past ignorance of unconscious or unknown factors in making future choices and
decisions.
1.3.
Policy
Second, in terms of policy, we suggest a procedurally-rational approach, one that accommodates
inevitable uncertainties, integrates scientific and local knowledge into policies to advance the common
interest, and relies on incremental learning from experience through policy appraisal and the
termination of failed policies. In contrast, scientific management relies on planning that takes policy
goals as given and presumes that the scientific reduction of uncertainty is a prerequisite for rational
policy decisions.
Alpine Shire illustrates how uncertainties arising from human factors, social and political, compound
uncertainties in the natural environment. Many studies into flood risk in the area have been
performed, with the problems of urban encroachment on the floodplain and the potential avulsion of
the Ovens River identified more than 20 years ago, but it is only recently that the community has come
to any decisions on the mitigation works. The most recent study for a Flood Mitigation Scheme for
Myrtleford (completed in 2000) identified four possible schemes (Options A-D). During community
meetings designed to promote the schemes, significant community opposition emerged, and as a
result Options E and F were developed. This cycle of selective intelligence followed by unsuccessful
promotion repeated itself over several years until finally Option H was accepted by the community and
works could proceed. Commencement of the works has recently been delayed due to problems in
contacting affected landowners, many of whom are engaged in illegal tobacco cultivation. The success
of Option H in reducing the vulnerability of the Myrtleford community cannot be appraised until the
arrival of the next flood. The financial difficulties and high turnover of staff and elected officials of the
Alpine Shire local government have been well documented in the media, and it is unclear at this stage
whether they will be able to fail gracefully if the flood mitigation works do not succeed.
The Shire’s policy decisions, implemented or pending, are not simply a matter of reducing its
vulnerability to flooding, or adapting to climate change. Instead these decisions integrate or balance
multiple other interests in the community. Integrating or balancing diverse community interests, each
subject to change on various time scales, is inevitably a political process. Thus “It is procedurally
rational to act on the most promising alternative in a situation, despite projected uncertainties in costs
and benefits – provided the alternative is modest enough to assess in an appropriate time frame, to
fail gracefully if it does fail, and to learn from the experience.”xii In contrast, scientific management
draws heavily on normative theories of rationality that postulate how people should behave if they
were perfectly rational and informed.
1.4.
Decision Making
Third, in terms of decision-making, we suggest structural changes that begin with harvesting
experience from processes such as the Myrtleford Flood Plain Mitigation Scheme, to make policies
that have worked anywhere on the ground available for voluntary adaptation by similar communities
elsewhere, to highlight unsuccessful or costly strategies, and to inform state, national, or international
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officials about resource needs on the ground. Experience in the Alpine Shire illustrates the basic
rationale for this proposal. In each community the problem of understanding damage and reducing
vulnerability is sufficiently different, complex, and dynamic that only people on the ground and their
advisors can have the information and knowledge necessary to make procedurally rational and
politically-feasible policy decisions. Moreover, people on the ground are also responsible because
they must live with the consequences of their decisions.
In climate change research, Rayner and Malone asked: “If decision-makers cannot predict the
unpredictable, how can society face the prospect of profound change occurring at an accelerating
pace?” Their answer was “to build responsive institutional arrangements to monitor change and
maximize the flexibility of human populations to respond creatively and constructively to it.” xiii A
strategy that harvests more experience for decision-makers throughout the decision-making structure
is a step toward more responsive institutional arrangements. Such a strategy would begin with
harvesting experience from each community on what has worked to reduce flood damage and the
influence of conditioning factors such as fire, but also what has not worked, and why. Experience
informs the selection of more promising trials, an important factor in accelerating progress. xiv Progress
does not depend on the success of any particular trials, but on cumulative learning from a diversity of
many trials. Such a strategy also facilitates democratic participation without compromising
competence and economy in decision making.
2.
THE COMMON INTEREST
“In the simplest terms, the common interest is composed of interests widely shared by members of a
community. It would benefit the community as a whole and be supported by most community members, if
they can find it. By definition, a special interest is incompatible with the common interest. It is pursued by
some part of the community for its own benefit, at net cost to the community as a whole.”xv Operationally,
the common interest is not to be assumed or taken as given. It must be constructed in each community,
with or without outside help, on the basis of the valid and appropriate interests of community members;
invalid and inappropriate interests may be discounted. At the local level are diverse interests too specific
and numerous for outsiders to understand in the aggregate, although outsiders can gain some
dependable insights on a selective basis through direct contacts. Thus to advance the common interest
of a community, multiple interests must be integrated if possible or balanced if necessary, and differences
among communities must be reconciled when they come into conflict. Thus once again, politics are
unavoidable, whether acknowledged or not. And the normative and empirical judgments grounding any
claim about the common interest are politically contestable.
Each damaging fire, flood, or other disaster identified with climate change tends to motivate if not force
action, providing a window of opportunity to field-test promising policies to reduce vulnerability in the
community impacted. In effect nature penalizes with severe sanctions past policies, including inaction, that
have allowed significant losses from an extreme event to occur. And nature in this role can serve as a
surrogate for the political will to act that has been lacking so far. In this sense a disaster is a terrible thing
to waste.xvi To capitalize on such opportunities, it is sufficient to focus selectively on recently damaged or
highly vulnerable communities already motivated to address their own problems. It is neither feasible
under various resource constraints nor necessary to address all communities at once. Improvements in
policies to reduce vulnerability can be evolved by harvesting experience from policies field-tested in
selected communities for possible adaptation on a voluntary basis by similar communities elsewhere.
Important contextual details can be moved directly from one community to the next without being
obscured and generalized for higher-level authorities.
In conclusion, intensive research in Alpine Shire brings back into the picture important considerations all
but deleted in the framing of climate change as an irreducibly global problem. Similar research on any
other local community, we believe, would also demonstrate that differences and changes on the ground
must be taken into account for effective adaptation and mitigation policies. Bureaucracies are designed
for the efficient application of standardized rules and procedures. But the presumption that “‘One-size-fits-
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all’ seldom fits at all.”xvii In a dynamic world of global change, adaptability is a requirement for the
sustainability of things we value.xviii The emerging pattern of adaptive governance is an opportunity to
open up the established frame to reduce the vulnerability of things we value, by field-testing in parallel
promising alternatives for adapting to those changes we cannot avoid, and for mitigating those changes
we can.
3.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work would not have been possible without the participation, support and interest of the people of
Alpine Shire. Thanks are also due to Lee Tryhorn for her invaluable contributions. This work has been
supported by the Australian Research Council though FF0348550.
4.
NOTES
i
David A. King, “Climate Change Science: Adapt, Mitigate, or Ignore?” Science 303 (9
January 2004), 176-177. At the time King was science advisor to her majesty’s government in the
United Kingdom.
ii
This figure and the following figures include adjustments for land use, land-use change and
forestry, and are limited to countries reporting emissions for both 1990 and 2004. The figures can be
found in UNFCCC, National Greenhouse Gas Inventory Data for the Period 1990-2004 and Status of
Reporting, FCCC/SBI/2006/26 (19 October 2006), Table 5, p. 13.
iii
However, some data are starting to be analyzed. Michael Raupach and colleagues (Michael
R. Raupach, Gregg Marland, Philippe Ciais, Corinne Le Quéré, Josep G. Canadell, Gernot Klepper,
and Christopher B. Field, “Global and regional drivers of accelerating CO2 emissions,” Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences 104(24) (June 12, 2007), 10288-10293 (DOI
10.1073/pnas.0700609104) note that “Together, the developing and least-developed economies
(forming 80% of the world's population) accounted for 73% of global emissions growth in 2004 but only
41% of global emissions and only 23% of global cumulative emissions since the mid-18th century.”
iv
Jerry Mahlman, then director of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton,
quoted in David Malakoff, “Thirty Kyotos Needed to Control Warming,” Science 278 (19 December
1997), 2048.
v
Compare the assessment in Boehmer-Christiansen, “Global Climate Protection Policy,” Part
II, 192: “The policy outcome so far … is a weak, research intensive framework treaty which reflects a
political balance of power rather than any firm direction derived from science.” Compare the
assessment in Bodansky, “The Emerging Climate Change Regime,” 438: “The basic problem is that
few countries have been willing to make difficult political decisions to limit emissions.” Also Unger in
“Social Scares and Global Warming,” 448, suggested that acceptance of the UNFCCC was predicated
on a “no regrets” strategy in which actions would be justified on grounds other than climate change;
hence there would be no regrets if climate change failed to materialize.
vi
David W. Cash, “Viewpoint: Distributed Assessment Systems: An Emerging Paradigm of
Research, Assessment and Decision-Making for Environmental Change,” Global Environmental
Change 10 (2000), 241-244
vii
Ronald D. Brunner, Toddi A. Steelman, Lindy Coe-Juell, Christina M. Cromley, Christine M.
Edwards, and Donna W. Tucker, Adaptive Governance: Integrating Science, Policy, and Decision
Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 2. For more on scientific management, see
also Ronald D. Brunner, Christine H. Colburn, Christina M. Cromley, Roberta A. Klein, and Elizabeth
A. Olson, Finding Common Ground: Governance and Natural Resources in the American West (New
Haven: Yale University Press 2002).
viii
For example, variants of adaptive governance can be found in Hedrick Smith, Rethinking
America: A New Game Plan from the American Innovators: Schools, Business, People, and Work
(New York: Random House: 1995); Lisbeth B. Schorr, Common Purpose: Strengthening Families and
Neighborhoods to Rebuild America (New York: Doubleday, 1997); and Thomas Petzinger, Jr., The
New Pioneers: The Men and Women Who Are Tranforming the Workplace and the Marketplace (New
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York: Simon & Schuster, 1999). George Packer, “Knowing the Enemy,” New Yorker (December 18,
2006):60-69 emphasizes disaggregating (or factoring) security problems.
ix
IPPC, Second Assessment Synthesis of Scientific-Technical Information Relevant to
Interpreting Article 2 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (1995), sec. 1.9. For a
more recent example of the global framing see Thomas R. Karl and Kevin E. Trenberth, “Modern
Global Climate Change,” Science 302 (5 December 2003, 1719-1723, at 1722: “Climate change is
truly a global issue, one that may prove to be humanity’s greatest challenge. It is very unlikely to be
addressed without greatly improved international cooperation and action.” See also King, “Climate
Change Science: Adapt, Mitigate, or Ignore?” 177: “But any alternative would need to accept that
immediate action is required and would need to involve all countries in tackling what is truly a global
problem.”
x
Gangemi, M., J. Martin, R. Marton, S. Phillips and M. Stewart, 2003: A Report on the socioeconomic impact of bushfires on rural communities and local government in Gippsland North East
Victoria. RMIT - Centre for Regional and Rural Development, Timber Towns Victoria.
xi
Harold D. Lasswell, Democratic Character (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1951), p. 524, his
emphasis, which elaborates and concludes that “it is the growth of insight, not simply of the capacity
of the observer to predict the future operation of an automatic compulsion, or of a non-personal factor,
that represents the major contribution of the scientific study of interpersonal relations to policy.”
xii
Ronald D. Brunner, “Predictions and Policy Decisions,” Technological Forecasting and
Social Change 62 (1999):73-78, at p. 75. Emphasis added.
xiii
Steve Rayner and Elizabeth L. Malone, “Ten Suggestions for Policymakers,” in Human
Choice & Climate Change, Vol. 4: What Have We Learned? (Columbus, Ohio: Battelle Press, 1998)
p. 120.
xiv
Simon, Sciences of the Artificial, pp. 195-196.
xv
Brunner, Colburn, et al., Finding Common Ground, 8. The emphasis is ours. For fuller
development of the concept and applications, see pp. 8-18 and the literature cited there.
xvi
This paraphrases Stanford economist Paul Romer who is quoted in Thomas L. Friedman,
“It’s a Flat World After All,” New York Times Magazine (April 3, 2005).
xvii
Rayner and Malone, “Ten Suggestions,” p. 129.
xviii
Alex Farrell and Maureen Hart, “What Does Sustainability Really Mean? The Search for
Usable Indicators,” Environment 40 (November 1998):4-9, 26-31, offers a working definition of
sustainability that is compatible with the common interest as defined here: “improving the quality of
human life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems” (p. 7). But both the
quality of life and the carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems are contingent on differences and
changes in contexts.
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