Resilience and Water Governance: Adaptive Governance in the Columbia River Basin (original) (raw)
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Efficiency and resistance to rapid change are hallmarks of both the judicial and legislative branches of the United States government. These defining characteristics, while bringing stability and predictability, pose challenges when it comes to managing dynamic natural systems. As our understanding of ecosystems improves, we must devise ways to account for the nonlinearities and uncertainties rife in complex social-ecological systems. This paper takes an in-depth look at the Platte River basin over time to explore how the system's resilience-the capacity to absorb disturbance without losing defining structures and functions-responds to human driven change. Beginning with pre-European settlement, the paper explores how water laws, policies, and infrastructure influenced the region's ecology and society. While much of the post-European development in the Platte River basin came at a high ecological cost to the system, the recent tri-state and federal collaborative Platte River Recovery and Implementation Program is a first step towards flexible and adaptive management of the social-ecological system. Using the Platte River basin as an example, we make the case that inherent flexibility and adaptability are vital for the next iteration of natural resources management policies affecting stressed basins. We argue that this can be accomplished by nesting policy in a resilience framework, which we describe and attempt to operationalize for use across systems and at different levels of jurisdiction. As our current natural resources policies fail under the weight of looming global change, unprecedented demand for natural resources, and shifting land use, the need for a new generation of adaptive, flexible natural resources governance emerges. Here we offer a prescription for just that, rooted in the social, ecological and political realities of the Platte River basin.
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Transboundary water resources, such as international river basins, pose complex and often contentious management challenges. In response to the failures associated with the state-centric approach to the governance of international waters, discussions on transboundary water resources governance over the last two decades or so have focused largely on public involvement. The need to build resilience into such governance systems has been virtually overlooked. Based on a conceptualization of transboundary water resources as complex social-ecological systems, the manuscript proposes adaptive governance as a unifying framework for informing policies aimed at promoting the conservation of transboundary water resources in an increasingly unpredictable future. The key attributes of adaptive governance satisfy the requirements for good governance of transboundary water resources, as well as preparing the coupled social-ecological system to respond to unpredictable drivers of change.
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There is growing recognition that the sustainable governance of water resources requires building social-ecological resilience against future surprises. Adaptive comanagement, a distinct institutional mechanism that combines the learning focus of adaptive management with the multilevel linkages of comanagement, has recently emerged as a promising mechanism for building social-ecological resilience. This paper employs the concept of adaptive comanagement to analyze ongoing institutional reforms in the Cache River watershed of southern Illinois. Since the 1970s, efforts have been made to promote collaborative decisionmaking aimed at the restoration of the watershed. However, the current governance system remains vulnerable because little attention has been given to building the capacity of the watershed for learning and adaptation. Adaptive comanagement can contribute to building resilience in the watershed by creating awareness, generating interest, creating opportunities, and building capacity for adaptation. Acheson, J.M. 2006. Institutional failure in resource management. Annual Review of Anthropology. 35: 117-134. Adams, J.; Kraft, S.; Ruhl, J.B.; Lant, C.; Loftus, T.; Duram, L. 2005. Watershed planning: pseudo-democracy and its alternatives-the case of the Cache River watershed, Illinois. Agriculture and Human Values. 22: 327-338. Adger, N.W.; Hughes, T.P.; Folke, C.; Carpenter, S.R.; Rockstrom, J. 2005. Social-ecological resilience to coastal disasters. Science. 309: 1036-1039. Akamani, K. 2012. A community resilience framework for understanding and assessing the sustainability of forest-dependent communities. Human Ecology Review. 19: 99-109. Akamani, K. 2013. Transitions toward adaptive water governance: the case of the Cache River watershed in southern Illinois, U.S.
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In the U.S. portion of the Columbia Bassin, salmon populations are five times lower than 150 years ago. They are co-managed by federal, state and tribal protagonists in order to restore them. On this territory larger than France, the federal government dominates the governance relating to the co-management of endangered and threatened species of salmon. The NOAA Fisheries Service writes up recovery plans and biological opinions that guide the actions on the ground. State and tribal agencies carry out multiple tasks on the ground, including the reintroduction of local salmon populations, the restoration of riparian areas, the management of salmon hatcheries or the enforcement of fishing rules. At the same time, a federal court in Oregon has authority to change the federal plans and biological opinions if the latter do not comply with the 1973 Endangered Species Act. During the 2000s, this court notably contributed to reduce the lethal impact of dams on salmon. If some local salmon populations have been partially restored, major problems remain unresolved: large dams keep hindering the overall recovery, just like continuing pollution and environmental degradation in parts of watersheds. Conflicts of interest between different groups go on. Environmental and fishing groups as well as Indian tribes call for more ambitious recovery targets. They come up against major agricultural and industrial interests generally protected by federal and state governments. These two governmental protagonists are opposed to the development of elements of tribal projects related to salmon hatcheries. The adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by the Obama administration in 2010 could defuse conflicts and bring about changes in the governance.
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Journal of environmental management, 2016
Adaptive governance and adaptive management have developed over the past quarter century in response to institutional and organizational failures, and unforeseen changes in natural resource dynamics. Adaptive governance provides a context for managing known and unknown consequences of prior management approaches and for increasing legitimacy in the implementation of flexible and adaptive management. Using examples from iconic water systems in the United States, we explore the proposition that adaptive management and adaptive governance are useful for evaluating the complexities of trade-offs among ecosystem goods and services.