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Governance, complexity, and resilience
Global Environmental Change 20 (2010) 363–368
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Global Environmental Change journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/gloenvcha
Introduction
Governance, complexity, and resilience
A B S T R A C T
Keywords: Global environmental change Governance Institutions Resilience Social–ecological systems
This special issue brings together prominent scholars to explore novel multilevel governance challenges posed by the behavior of dynamic and complex social-ecological systems. Here we expand and investigate the emerging notion of ‘‘resilience’’ as a perspective for understanding how societies can cope with, and develop from, disturbances and change. As the contributions to the special issue illustrate, resilience thinking in its current form contains substantial normative and conceptual difficulties for the analysis of social systems. However, a resilience approach to governance issues also shows a great deal of promise as it enables a more refined understanding of the dynamics of rapid, interlinked and multiscale change. This potential should not be underestimated as institutions and decision-makers try to deal with converging trends of global interconnectedness and increasing pressure on social-ecological systems. ß 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
1. Introduction Despite the fact that the world is becoming increasingly interconnected by flows of information, trade, and technology, many perceive human decision making and institution-building to be fragmented, poorly coordinated, and inapt in dealing with the escalating speed of technical and ecological change (Berkes et al., 2006; Young et al., 2006). Signs of increasing fragmentation of institutional landscapes include the decentralization of government authority, the growth of public–private partnership arrangements, and the augmented influence of non-governmental organizations and epistemic communities on policy processes at a number of political levels (Pierre and Peters, 2005). These developments, together with the growing impact of multilateral agreements on domestic policy and the spread of policy innovations across different nations, have implications for our ability to deal with both rapid and incremental social–ecological change (Biermann, 2007; Duit and Galaz, 2008; Galaz et al., 2008). This special issue of Global Environmental Change brings together prominent scholars to explore novel multilevel governance challenges posed by the behavior of dynamic and complex systems. The purpose has been to investigate, question, and expand the emerging notion of ‘‘resilience’’ as a perspective for understanding how co-evolving societies and natural systems can cope with, and develop from, disturbances and change (Gunderson and Holling, 2002; Folke, 2006). The topics covered in this issue range from the robustness of international environmental regimes; the ‘framing’ of health risks at the national and international level; the need to understand changing patterns of vulnerability in developing countries at the community level; to legal perspectives on dynamic social–ecological change at the global level.
DOI of original article: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2009.01.004 0959-3780/$ – see front matter ß 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2010.04.006
We are not only interested in how governance and institutions are confronted with the complex behavior of coupled social– ecological systems, but also in advancing a deeper understanding of the politics of science, learning, multilevel interactions, and decision-making for understanding and harnessing change. More precisely, contributions to this special issue focus on one or several of the following questions: Why a complex system perspective on governance? What is the analytical utility of a complex systems approach to governance issues in an era of global environmental change? Resilience and governance. Is ‘‘resilience’’ a useful concept for scholars of governance, institutions, law, and policy? Which are the benefits, and which are the potential drawbacks? Are new models of governance needed to improve societies’ ability to govern complex social–ecological systems? If so, what would such governance models look like?
2. Why a complex system perspective on governance? What then, if anything, is gained analytically by viewing ongoing processes of global environmental change through the lens of complex systems and resilience theory? To be sure, complexity theory has received a fair amount of justified criticism for being prone to buzz-word production, for having limited explanatory power, and for being of questionable applicability in the social sciences (Sawyer, 2005). Similar critiques have been voiced towards resilience theory (in the sense of Gunderson and Holling, 2002; Folke, 2006) in a number of fora (e.g. Klein et al., 2003; Berkhaut in Leach, 2008; Hornborg, 2009). Complexity theory and resilience thinking both clearly have a long way to go before they can be considered part of main-stream social science. It is, however, important to recognize that
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complexity theory and resilience thinking are not unitary constructs, but rather multifaceted and diverse perspectives employed by scholars in both the natural and social sciences on a wide range of research topics. Hence criticisms directed at earlier or different versions of theoretical developments might not be relevant for later versions. This is especially true for social sciences, in which earlier waves of complexity theory applications were criticized for being too close to their origin in natural science, and therefore ill-suited for dealing with the fundamentally different dynamics encountered in the social sphere. However, during the last decade, a ‘‘third wave’’ of the application of complex systems thinking has emerged within the social sciences. Unlike earlier attempts at whole-sale imports of complexity methods and concepts used in the natural sciences (cf. Brown, 1995; Byrne, 1998), third wave applications carry with them less of their natural science heritage and are more sensitive towards the characteristics endogenous to the social realm (i.e. language, organization, reflexivity, and power (Sawyer, 2005)). All contributions to this special issue can be viewed as part of this third wave. In our mind, this also includes Elinor Ostrom’s shift from studying the governance of natural resources at single – often local – levels (Ostrom, 1990), to an increased emphasis on crosssystem interactions and dynamic social–ecological systems (Ostrom, 2005, 2007). Theories of the second component in a complex system approach to governance – the system – have a long tradition in the social sciences, dating back to the seminal works of sociologist Parsons (1951), and later on political scientists Easton (1965a,b). Another first-generation system theorist was Niklas Luhmann, who introduced systems theory in social science analysis of societal systems, criticizing Weber for not taking into account complex interactions and behavior in bureaucracies. Luhmann (1995) emphasized trust, risk, power and autopoiesis of both individuals and systems. In these earlier structural functionalist applications, societies and communities where modeled as systems in which a number of key system functions contributed to preserving system equilibrium. As such, the core research task for systems theory was to understand and model stability in the social system, and one of the criticisms contributing to the rapid fall of first-generation systems theory argued that the theory was incapable of explaining change. Another shortcoming was the implicit reliance on functionalist explanations in which system functions were tautologically explained in terms of their usefulness for maintaining equilibrium of the greater system (Elster, 1982). In contrast, the contributions to this special issue are all based on the notion of open social–ecological systems characterized by multiple equilibria, in which the core question is about how to understand their dynamics. Rather than assuming a social system characterized by stability and equilibrium, analytical focus is placed on understanding processes of change and surprises and on how governance arrangements try to cope with and adapt to a constantly dynamic and changing environment. The main reason for adopting a complexity perspective on issues of environmental change has to do with what we perceive to be limited usefulness of more ‘‘traditional’’ analytical models and methodological tools currently in circulation in the social sciences. As among others Hall (2003) and Pierson (2004) have convincingly shown, research methods in social science, almost regardless of underlying epistemologies, have to a large extent been based on a linear and static ontology. By and large, there has been a strong tendency within mainstream social science to view the world as governed by linear and probabilistic relationships that are, in principle, knowable through analytical techniques based on the principles of methodological individualism and aiming at reducing variation in empirical data to uncover regularities and correlational patterns (cf. King et al., 1994).
As a consequence, processes and events that are not linear, sufficiently short-term, or possible to reduce to the actions of individual actors will tend to be overlooked or misinterpreted by traditional social science analyses. Most contemporary theoretical models and analytical techniques in the social sciences are therefore insufficient for adequately capturing processes of complex change in natural as well as social systems (Wimmer and Ko¨ssler, 2006; Morco¨l, 2005). In contrast, a complexity perspective focuses, for instance, on emergent properties arising from the interaction between different parts be they systems or agents; on identifying thresholds and tipping-points; and on understanding system dynamics over time. Not only can the natural world be analyzed as a complex dynamic system. It is also possible to view human-made governance systems consisting of institutions, networks, bureaucracies, and policies as examples of complex systems in which adaptive agents respond to external and internal impulses (cf. Jervis, 1997; Arthur, 1999; Kooiman, 2003; Teisman et al., 2009). A full-blown application of complex systems theory in the study of coupled social–ecological systems thus requires modeling highly complex interactions between linked human and ecological systems. Consequently, the methodological tool of choice for scholars of complex systems has often consisted in some sort of modeling software through which adaptive virtual agents interact with each other within the bounds of system structures (the socalled agent-based modeling, see Cederman, 1997; Sawyer, 2005; Miller et al., 2007). However, as Melissa Leach and colleagues, Koko Warner, and Susan Owens show in their respective contributions, this is by no means an inescapable methodological choice. Analyses of governance and complex systems can gainfully be conducted using qualitative and case-study based approaches. The key is to direct the analysis towards identifying system dynamics and governance efforts to handle such effects. Koko Warner for example, examines environmentally induced migration, including the multicausal drivers as well as the political and institutional implications of such migration. From field work across the world, the 23 case studies reveal a rich variety of circumstances ranging from environmental emergency migrants, flooding and resettlement suggesting an analytical distinction between rapid- and slow-onset events. She notes that the development community often characterizes migration as a failure of adaptation, rather than as a form of adaptation to environmental and climate change. The evidence from the field research informs multiple aspects of the resilience thinking and the governance challenges posed by the dynamics of complex and coupled systems, in particular the demands for new approaches for human mobility. Such modes of governance will need to address both the role of social framing of system boundaries and risks, the relationship between institutional responses in affluent countries vs. those developing countries most affected by environmentally induced migration. It will also have to consider the need for cooperation across sectors dealing with rapid urbanization, local land use patterns, and shifts in social and economic structures. The question of how to understand change in multilevel governance systems is a central theme of Susan Owens’ article. She takes an evolutionary perspective to discuss the paradox of progress and the difficulty in theorizing change. She notes that we must understand changes that take place at three levels: in the mind sets, in policies and practices, and ultimately in socialnatural environments, and that knowledge(s) matters in those changes but are not always acknowledged. Hence, knowledge has an important quasi-independent role in itself. She uses the longterm influence of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution in the UK to examine the role of knowledge in the policy process, showing how the macro, meso- and micro-levels
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interact. In particular, she stresses the theoretical richness and the methodological obstacles involved in tracing these processes, and notes the need for in depth and longitudinal research. The study brings the issue of context, the question of contingency on particular agents of change and policy framing to the fore in theorizing about the governance of complexity and change. 3. Resilience and governance The concept of resilience, with its origins in ecology, has only recently begun to make inroads into the social sciences (Folke, 2006). However, resilience is a cumbersome concept for social science, at least when trying to speak of the resilience of social systems. It is difficult to avoid clashes with cornerstone concepts in social science such as power, democracy, and the right to selfdetermination when attempting to apply the concept of resilience to questions of politics and governance. The reason for this is quite straightforward: even though some similarities can be identified, societies and ecosystems are also fundamentally different in many ways. For one thing, a governance system consists of individuals who are capable of reflecting over their situation and actions, and who are endowed with intrinsic moral rights and who hold normative convictions (Folke and Rockstro¨m, 2009). Another aspect is that human societies are able – at least in principle – to translate such normative convictions into collective action in order to produce and distribute collective goods. Furthermore, notions of resilience as the ability to ‘‘bounce back’’, ‘‘return to equilibrium’’ and to ‘‘reorganize after a disturbance’’ may have wholly different meanings, depending on how the social system was configured to begin with and from whose viewpoint resilience is assessed. A drastic example might illustrate this point: if a long-standing and authoritarian regime is toppled as a result of a sudden fluctuation in world market prices in the base commodity of the country’s economy, and if a democratic but fragile regime replaces it, how should we think of this process in resilience terms? Has resilience decreased or increased? How do we differentiate ‘‘good’’ resilience form ‘‘bad’’? This is essentially a normative issue, as it is ultimately linked to questions of what a good society or a good life should be like. However, in some cases this is less of a problem: for most societies, famines, drought, floods, etc., are undeniably bad things. In other cases, such as the outcome of social conflicts or the distribution of collective goods, the moral value of resilience is another thing entirely. Such thorny normative and conceptual issues notwithstanding, resilience thinking also holds a great deal of potential for renewing the wider governance research agenda. In particular, it invites us to consider fundamental issues of change and stability, adaptation and design, hierarchy and self-organization in the study of multilevel governance systems. Moreover, in addition to ‘‘traditional’’ benchmarks such as efficacy, accountability, and equity used when assessing public governance, a resilience perspective on governance would also consider issues of human–environmental interactions, vulnerability resulting from mal-adaptations, and innovation capacity as integral parts of evaluating a given governance system (Nelson et al., 2007). One approach to unpacking resilience in social–ecological systems taken by Melissa Leach and colleagues in this volume involves recognizing that resilience is inherently a matter of social framing by actors with different preferences and resources. Assessment of resilience in social–ecological systems should therefore not only consider the most general system level, but also take into account possible trade-offs and asymmetries in resilience between different groups and communities within the system, especially when the framing of system boundaries is a matter of conflict. When assessing the resilience of a particular
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system, it is therefore crucial to consider the question ‘‘resilience of what, and for whom?’’. Oran Young’s approach to the same problem is slightly different. Drawing a distinction between ‘‘ecosystem resilience’’ and ‘‘engineering resilience’’, he argues that the former is better suited for the analysis of institutions and social–ecological systems by virtue of not being based on a notion of equilibrium towards which the system must return. By ridding the resilience concept of the assumption of return-to-equilibrium, Young argues that the term should be understood as ‘‘the ability to handle stress in an adaptive manner’’ in institutions and regimes. Young also points out that resilience is always a matter of degree, and never a matter of complete immunity towards disturbance and stress. Societies and ecosystems can be more or less resilient, but if system stresses become too powerful or merge into a specific kind of stress towards which the system is not adapted, even highly robust systems will eventually crumble (Janssen and Anderies, 2007). Jonas Ebbesson discusses both normative and analytical aspects of what law and legal thinking in relation to governance of complex social–ecological changes, with particular focus on resilience research on social systems. The tensions are sometimes apparent: while the literature on resilience identifies flexibility and adaptability as core factors and conditions, the legal perspective emphasizes certainty and predictability as fundamental notions for legitimate and equal treatment. Nevertheless, Ebbesson shows that basic notions law, such as legal certainty, are not necessarily incompatible with concerns for flexibility in governance of social– ecological systems, and may support openness and broad participation to cope with complexities and common risk. In addition, he calls for a more nuanced picture of the flexibility and adaptability concerns, linking those to different forms of institutions for liability and accountability. His contribution brings critical remarks to the applicability of the resilience concept to the study of governance, law and policy—and vice versa. In order for the concept of resilience to contribute rather than to clash with the social sciences, it seems that notions of ‘‘social resilience’’ should be avoided. For reasons stated above, a simple and unreflecting re-application of the ‘‘natural science’’ resilience concept onto social and political matters will inevitably run into substantial normative and conceptual difficulties. Resilience scholars are aware of this problematique, yet the point is often raised as a critique of the field (Berkhaut in Leach, 2008; Hornborg, 2009). However, the wider notion of resilience of social–ecological systems appears to be a more viable alternative, as it focuses on the more limited question how well a given social–ecological system is able to maintain the basic ecological properties it is ultimately dependent upon. This is not a normatively uncontroversial route either, but at least it acknowledges that resilience-based policy solutions and institutions will – as most other forms of public policy – have distributional and thereby moral consequences. 4. New models of governance: fighting complexity with complexity? A wide-spread notion in the contemporary literature is that in order to govern processes of complex change, complexity in the external world must be matched by complexity in the governance system. This idea can be labeled the diversity hypothesis, as it assumes that institutional and organizational diversity is the most effective way to cope with complexity. This notion can be traced back to the works of psychologist and pioneer cyberneticist W. Ross Ashby and the now classic ‘‘Law of Requisite Variety’’, which states that for a manager to control a system she must be able to elicit a unique response for every possible state of the system: only ‘‘variety can destroy variety’’ (Ashby, 1956, p. 207). Although Ashby in passing did consider the effects of hierarchy on requisite
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variety, he had very little to say about how different types of institutions, networks, markets, and organizations might influence the ability to regulate fluctuating systems. Subsequent authors have argued that one of the benefits of emerging forms of public steering such as network governance, public–private partnerships, self-organization and stakeholder involvement consists in a more flexible and responsive governance process, better able to deal with increasing external complexity (Koppenjan and Klijn, 2004; Morco¨l, 2005; Kooiman, 2003). In other words, ongoing transformations of public steering towards new forms of governance are thought to enhance requisite variety of society. Applications of diversity-hypothesis can also be found in literature on ‘‘institutional redundancy’’ in which overlapping and seemingly overcrowded institutional configurations within the same domain are thought to be effective for regulating common pool resources (Low et al., 2003). Similarly, it has been argued that ‘‘polycentrism’’, or multiple and overlapping cores of control hierarchies are more effective in addressing difficult problems of policy implementation and governance (McGinnis, 2000; Ostrom, 2005). In addition, concepts such as decentralization, anti-hierarchy, deliberation, stakeholder participation, and self-regulation has long been core components in green political theory, as well as in more applied discussions on environmental policy and politics (Durant et al., 2004; Dryzek, 2005; Duit et al., 2009). Additional cases of this tradition can be found in the more recent policy paradigms of adaptive co-management (Dietz et al., 2003; Folke et al., 2005), adaptive governance (Olsson et al., 2006), and reflexive governance (Voss et al., 2006), which emphasize combinations of stakeholder involvement, trial-and-error-based policy experiments, and context-specific and network-based incremental policy making for achieving long-term sustainability in managing oscillating social–ecological resource systems. The idea that institutional and organizational diversity and decentralization increase the capacity of governance systems to handle complex systems is thus well-established in contemporary policy discourses. However, it is ultimately an empirical question which type of governance system has the largest set of available actions. It might be that a governance system consisting of large numbers of diverse semi-independent networks and organizations – through their diversity and flexibility – will have, among them, a larger set of viable action alternatives. But it might also be the case that such a governance system, through its lack of coordination, fragmented communication, and limited stock of accumulated resources has a more constricted repertoire of action than, for example, a Weberian-type bureaucracy. To conclude, these issues point to a need to move beyond the simple distinction between diversity and hierarchy in the search for new models of complexity governance. A central question is whether there are certain forms of governance that are better equipped for addressing and managing processes characterized by complex change? A closely related issue is whether institutions and governance systems can be designed or retrofitted for enhanced complexity-handling performance? We currently have very little systematic knowledge about how different types of real-world governance systems differ in their ability to cope with different types of complex change. An emerging notion holds that this task seems to require both institutional stability and change (Duit and Galaz, 2008) as well as bridging multilevel linkages (Cash et al., 2006; Folke et al., 2005). As Douglass North and other scholars of institutional economics have shown (North, 1990, 2005), stable and predictable institutions are necessary for accumulation of resources and human wellbeing in times when change is slow and relatively predictable. Institutional instability leads to increased transaction costs and lower returns from cooperative ventures. Over time, any set of
institutional will tend to create high sunk costs and lead to processes of institutional path dependency and inertia (Pierson, 2004), which in turn makes it increasingly hard to adapt institutions to changing circumstances. But at the same time, governance systems need to be flexible, i.e. able to change, in order to adapt to novel circumstances. As noted by several contributions (e.g. Jonas Ebbesson, and Oran Young), there is a fundamental opposition between the dual needs for stability and flexibility that goes to the core of the question of how governance systems can cope with complexity. An international climate change agreement faces precisely this sort of challenge. On the one hand, there is a need to create stable and predictable international rules to be able to reduce free-riding behavior amongst nation states, and create transparent incentives for non-state actors such as business, to act in a new regulatory environment. On the other hand, such agreement must allow for adaptation in response to rapid scientific progress within climate sciences, as well as emerging insights on how climate affects other critical biophysical systems such as coral reef ecosystems, marine biodiversity and resilience, and food-producing ecosystems (Walker et al., 2009). An important task for further research is to investigate if and how the stability-flexibility tension is resolved in real-word examples of governance in social–ecological systems. As Ebbesson points out, it is also important to identify what kind of flexibility we seek. Both Melissa Leach and colleagues, and Arild Underdal in this volume contribute with typologies of complexity handling strategies. Leach and colleagues bring to light the possibility of alternative problem definitions in the context of emerging and reemerging infectious diseases such as Ebola hemorrhagic fevers and avian influenza. As they elaborate, one possible strategy to reduce complexity both in problem definition and in complicated actor settings, is by organizing collective action around a simple ‘‘outbreak narrative’’—a story that includes the sudden emergence and often global spread of EID, together with a particular notion of adequate responses. This narrative has important consequences not only for the sort of science and interventions that gain priority on the international agenda, but also has substantial distributional consequences for the livelihood of local communities all over the world. Arild Underdal explores the nexus of long-term decisionmaking, complex ecosystems, and global collective goods. Underdal notes that many of the problems related to global environmental change share three fundamental characteristics; they require decision-making in which costs and benefits are separated by very long time-lags; they are about intrinsically complex coupled social–ecological systems; and they are all about producing global collective goods that go beyond the scope of unilateral ‘‘single-best efforts’’ of any actor. Underdal goes on to investigate how two basic response models–a centralized, hierarchical, and top-down ‘‘Collective action model’’ and a distributed, bottom-up, ‘‘Adaptive management model’’—fit with the requirements of global environmental change. The conclusion is that there is merit in both types of responses, but that the applicability is dependent on the scoping conditions of specific problems, i.e. varies over different types of complex problems. In fact, policy makers and policy scholars have, as of yet, been unable to even envision (and much less implement) a governance system that is able handle virtually every task put before it. As there is no ideal form of governance in other areas, it would be something of a surprise if there was a panacea for governing complex systems (Ostrom et al., 2007). As Young’s and Underdal’s respective contributions in this volume make abundantly clear, the search for ways to govern or at least mitigate the effects of complex systems should take into consideration that the resilience of
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different governance systems will, in all likelihood, exhibit a high degree of variation over different types of complex dynamic processes. In addition, the profound difficulties involved in policymaking and steering even in ‘‘non-complex’’ settings that can be observed in most societies (Pierre and Peters, 2005), together with Underdals argument about the near-impossible incentive structures present in long-term decision making, should work as a corrective against overly naı¨ve conceptions of a cure-all form of governance model for coping with complexity. At the end of the day, governance solutions for many of those problems rooted in complex systems dynamics will, as always, consist in incrementally implemented, heterogenic, and piecemeal mixes of policy instruments, institutions, networks and organizations. 5. Conclusion complexity, resilience and governance The contributions to this special issue are all – by means of theoretical pieces or empirical investigations – addressing one or several of the issues identified in the beginning of this paper: (1) the analytical utility of a complex system approach to governance issues, (2) the need for new governance models to improve society’s ability to handle processes of complex change, and (3) the usefulness of the resilience concept in governance studies. While not providing any definitive answers to theses questions, the combined efforts from contributors to this special issue have nevertheless provided some tentative conclusions that might serve as stepping stones for further research efforts. What is the leverage or ‘‘added value’’ of a complex systems approach to governance? After all, governance systems have always operated under conditions of uncertainty and surprise, and policy scholars have long emphasized the profound problems of information deficit and unpredictability confronting most areas of public steering (Klijn, 2008). For instance, Charles Lindblom’s classic paper on policy making as the art of ‘‘muddling through’’ (Lindblom, 1959) marks the beginning of a long line of policy scholarship based on the acknowledgement of the incremental, random, non-rational, and sub-optimized nature of public governance. In this sense, governance has always been about managing complexity and uncertainty, and governance solutions to problems are regularly thought to be less than optimal solutions to very complex problems (Voss et al., 2006). Neither has the world ever been simple and non-complex, but current converging trends of global interconnectedness and increasing pressures on ecological systems are pushing the tasks confronting policy- and decision makers at multiple levels of societal organization into a new and different state. For example, an International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) synthesis report speaks of the Earth System now having entered a ‘‘no-analogue state’’ (Steffen et al., 2004) in which past behavior of the system is no longer a reliable predictor of future behavior, even when circumstances are similar. Taken together, these developments do indeed paint a rather gloomy picture in which the conventional set of policy instruments, laws, and institutional configurations used to address social problems seem almost hopelessly impotent in the face of processes of rapid, fundamental, and possibly detrimental change. But as many of the contributions to this special issue show, governance systems are not static and inert. New governance structures for addressing the spread of global pandemic diseases, the probable increase in forced environmental migration, and the management of global marine resources are emerging as a response to changes in ecological systems. In the bigger picture, the by now well-established transition from ‘‘government’’ to ‘‘governance’’ taking place in many countries is a prime example of how public steering and institutions is constantly being re-defined and re-invented in order to co-evolve with a dynamic environment. As demonstrated by the analyses in their respective articles
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Warner, Owens, and Leach et al., a complex system perspective is essential for understanding and analytically capturing the dynamics of rapid, interlinked, and multifaceted processes of change in social–ecological systems. And as shown in the articles by Ebbesson, Young, and Underdal, rethinking problems of governance and law in a resilience perspective can often prove very helpful in identifying strengths and weaknesses of contemporary governance systems. With regards to the question of what new governance models are needed to handle complex social–ecological systems, it seems that there is a need to move beyond the simple diversity hypothesis towards considering if and how governance systems handle both change and stability simultaneously. A contention found in several of the contributions to this special issue (e.g. Ebbesson, Underdal, and Young) is that complexity management requires of governance systems to be both flexible and stable at the same time (cf. Voss et al., 2006). Flexibility is needed to adapt to novel and unexpected circumstances, but stability is of equal importance for ensuring that governance systems retain their ability to regulate behavior and provide a predictable arena for interaction between actors. As these dual and apparently incompatible demands for stability and flexibility are difficult to combine in the same governance model, the question of matching governance models with different types of processes of complex change becomes all the more central to the governance and complexity research agenda. Finally there is the question of what a resilience perspective can bring to the debate on issues of governance. As Jonas Ebbesson, Melissa Leach et al. and Oran Young show in their respective articles the concept of resilience harbors a great potential for renewing the governance research agenda, but it needs to be applied with a high degree of sensitivity about the risk of overshadowing crucial normative issues. In fact, recognizing that resilience is an inherently normative concept might be the key to bringing it to bear on a wider governance debate. By linking the resilience concept to classic themes in social science such as power, justice, discourse, and the rule of law, the contributions from Ebbesson, Leach et al., and Young signify important first steps towards a more integrated. A sizable amount of work remains to be done in this respect, but an important lesson to be learned from the studies in this special issue is that to speak of resilience of social– ecological systems is to engage in a discussion of fundamental normative issues. For this reason, it is also important to avoid the misconception that ‘‘resilience’’ implies the return-to-equilibrium, as this invariably will not only include assumptions about the ‘‘true’’ equilibrium of a society, but also make us increasingly vulnerable to the growing predicaments of rapid global environmental change. Acknowledgement This work was supported by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and by grants from the Swedish Research Council for Environmental Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning (Formas) and the Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research (Mistra). We are grateful to the editors of the journal, the contributors to this special issue, and the reviewers for their support and work throughout the process. References Ashby, W.R., 1956. An Introduction to Cybernetics. Chapman & Hall, London. Arthur, B.W., 1999. Complexity and the economy. Science 284, 107–109. Berkes, F.T., Hughes, T.P., Steneck, R.S., Wilson, J.A., Bellwood, D.R., Crona, B., Folke, ¨ sterblom, C., Gunderson, L.H., Leslie, H.M., Norberg, J., Nystro¨m, M., Olsson, P., O H., Scheffer, M., Worm, B., 2006. Globalization, roving bandits, and marine resources. Science 311, 1557–1558.
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Biermann, F., 2007. ‘Earth system governance’ as a crosscutting theme of global change research. Global Environmental Change 17, 326–337. Brown, C., 1995. Serpents in the Sand. Essays on the Nonlinear Nature of Politics and Human Destiny. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbour. Byrne, D., 1998. Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences: An Introduction. Routledge, London. Cash, D.W., Adger, W., Berkes, F., Garden, P., Lebel, L., Olsson, P., Pritchard, L., Young, O., 2006. Scale and cross-scale dynamics: governance and information in a multilevel world. Ecology and Society 11 (2), 8. Cederman, L.-E., 1997. Emergent Actors in World Politics: How States and Nations Develop and Dissolve. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Dietz, T., Ostrom, E., Stern, P., 2003. The struggle to govern the commons. Science 302 (5652), 1907–1912. Dryzek, J.S., 2005. The Politics of The Earth. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Duit, A., Galaz, V., Lo¨f, A., 2009. Fragmenterad fo¨rvirring eller kreativ arena? Fra˚n ‘‘government’’ till ‘‘governance’’ i svensk naturva˚rdspolitik. In: Sundstro¨m, G., och, J., Pierre, (Eds.), Samha¨llsstyrning i fo¨ra¨ndring. Liber, Stockholm. Duit, A., Galaz, V., 2008. Governance and complexity—emerging issues for governance theory. Governance 21, 311–335. Durant, R.F., Fiorino, D.J., O’Leary, R. (Eds.), 2004. Environmental Governance Reconsidered. Challenges, Choices, and Opportunities. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Easton, D., 1965a. A Framework for Political Analysis. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Easton, D., 1965b. A Systems Analysis of Political Life. Wiley, New York. Elster, J., 1982. The case for methodological individualism. Theory and Society 11 (4), 453–482. Folke, C., Hahn, T., Olsson, P., Norberg, J., 2005. Adaptive governance of social– ecological systems. Annual Review of Environmental Resources 30, 441–473. Folke, C., 2006. Resilience: the emergence of a perspective for social–ecological systems analyses. Global Environmental Change 16 (3), 253–267. Folke, C., Rockstro¨m, J., 2009. Turbulent times. Global Environmental Change 19 (1), 1–3. Galaz, V., Olsson, P., Hahn, T., Folke, C., Svedin, U., 2008. The problem of fit between ecosystems and governance systems: insights and emerging challenges. In: Young, O., King, L.A., Schroeder, H. (Eds.), The Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change: Principal Findings and Future Directions. MIT Press, Boston, MA, USA. Gunderson, L.H., Holling, C.S., 2002. Panarchy—Understanding Transformations in Systems of Humans and Nature. Island Press, Washington, DC. Hall, P.A., 2003. Aligning ontology and methodology in comparative politics. In: Mahoney, J., Rueschemeyer, D. (Eds.), Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 373–404. Hornborg, A., 2009. Zero-sum world challenges in conceptualizing environmental load displacement and ecologically unequal exchange in the world-system. International Journal of Comparative Sociology 50 (3–4), 237–262. Janssen, M., Anderies, M., 2007. Robustness trade-offs in social–ecological systems. International Journal of the Commons 1 (1). Jervis, R., 1997. System Effects—Complexity in Political and Social Life. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Koppenjan, J., Klijn, E.H., 2004. Managing Uncertainties in Networks. Routledge, London. King, G., Keohane, R.O., Verba, S., 1994. Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Klein, R., Nicholls, R.J., Thomalla, F., 2003. Resilience to natural hazards: how useful is this concept? Global Environmental Change Part B: Environmental Hazards 5 (1–2), 35–45. Klijn, E.-H., 2008. Complexity theory and public administration: what’s new? Public Management Review 10, 299–317. Kooiman, J., 2003. Governing as Governance. SAGE, London. Leach, M. (ed.) (2008) Re-framing Resilience: a Symposium Report, STEPS Working Paper 13, Brighton: STEPS Centre. Lindblom, C.E., 1959. The science of ‘‘Muddling Through’’. Public Administration Review 19 (2), 79–88. Low, B., Ostrom, E., Simon, C., Wilson, J., 2003. Redundancy and diversity: do they influence optimal management? In: Berkes, F., Colding, J., Folke, C. (Eds.), Navigating Social–Ecologial Systems. Building Resilience for Complexity and Change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 83–114. Luhmann, N., 1995. Social Systems. Stanford University Press, Stanford. McGinnis, M.D. (Ed.), 2000. Polycentric Games and Institutions: Readings from the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbour.
Miller, J.H., Page, S.E., LeBaron, B., 2007. Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Morco¨l, G., 2005. A new systems thinking: implications of the sciences of complexity for public policy and administration. Public Administration Quarterly 298–320. Nelson, D.R., Adger, W.N., Brown, K., 2007. Adaptation to environmental change: contributions of a resilience framework. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 32 (1), 395–419. North, D.C., 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, NY. North, D.C., 2005. Understanding the Process of Economic Change. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Olsson, P., Gunderson, L.H., Carpenter, S.R., Ryan, P., Lebel, L., Folke, C., Holling, C.S., 2006. Shooting the rapids: navigating transitions to adaptive governance of social–ecological systems. Ecology and Society 11(1): 18. [online] URL: http:// www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol11/iss1/art18/. Ostrom, E., 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Ostrom, E., 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Ostrom, E., 2007. A diagnostic approach for going beyond panaceas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, 15181–15187. Ostrom, E., Janssen, M.A., Anderies, J.M., 2007. Going beyond panaceas special feature: going beyond panaceas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104 (39), 15176–15178. Parsons, T., 1951. The Social System. Free Press, Glencoe, IL. Pierre, J., Peters, G.B., 2005. Governing Complex Societies. Palgrave McMillan. Pierson, P., 2004. Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Sawyer, R.K., 2005. Social Emergence. Societies as Complex Systems. Cambridge University Press, New York. Steffen, W., Sanderson, A., Tyson, P.D., Ja¨ger, J., Matson, P.M., Moore III, B., Oldfield, F., Richardson, K., Schellnhuber, H.J., Turner II, B.L., Wasson, R.J., 2004. Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet under Pressure. Springer, New York. Teisman, G., van Buuren, A., Gerrits, L.M., 2009. Managing Complex Governance Systems—Dynamics, Self-Organization and Coevolution in Public Investments. Routledge, London. Voss, J.-P., Bauknecht, D. (Eds.), 2006. Reflexive Governance for Sustainable Development. Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham. Walker, B., Barrett, S., Polasky, S., Galaz, V., Folke, C., Engstrom, G., Ackerman, F., Arrow, K., Carpenter, S., Chopra, K., Daily, G., Ehrlich, P., Hughes, T., Kautsky, N., Levin, S., Maler, K.-G., Shogren, J., Vincent, J., Xepapadeas, T., de Zeeuw, A., 2009. Looming global-scale failures and missing institutions. Science 325 (5946), 1345–1346. Wimmer, A., Ko¨ssler, R. (Eds.), 2006. Understanding Change. Models, Methodologies, and Methaphors. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Young, O.R., Berkhout, F., Gallopin, G.C., Janssen, M.A., Ostrom, E., van der Leeuw, S., 2006. The globalization of socio-ecological systems: an agenda for scientific research. Global Environmental Change 16, 304–316.
Andreas Duita,b Victor Galaza,* Katarina Eckerberga,c Jonas Ebbessona,d a Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Sweden b Department of Political Science, Stockholm University, Sweden c Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), Stockholm, Sweden d Faculty of Law, Stockholm University, Sweden *Corresponding author. Tel.: +46 8 6747083 E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected] (V, Galaz) Received 20 April 2010
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Global Environmental Change journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/gloenvcha
Introduction
Governance, complexity, and resilience
A B S T R A C T
Keywords: Global environmental change Governance Institutions Resilience Social–ecological systems
This special issue brings together prominent scholars to explore novel multilevel governance challenges posed by the behavior of dynamic and complex social-ecological systems. Here we expand and investigate the emerging notion of ‘‘resilience’’ as a perspective for understanding how societies can cope with, and develop from, disturbances and change. As the contributions to the special issue illustrate, resilience thinking in its current form contains substantial normative and conceptual difficulties for the analysis of social systems. However, a resilience approach to governance issues also shows a great deal of promise as it enables a more refined understanding of the dynamics of rapid, interlinked and multiscale change. This potential should not be underestimated as institutions and decision-makers try to deal with converging trends of global interconnectedness and increasing pressure on social-ecological systems. ß 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
1. Introduction Despite the fact that the world is becoming increasingly interconnected by flows of information, trade, and technology, many perceive human decision making and institution-building to be fragmented, poorly coordinated, and inapt in dealing with the escalating speed of technical and ecological change (Berkes et al., 2006; Young et al., 2006). Signs of increasing fragmentation of institutional landscapes include the decentralization of government authority, the growth of public–private partnership arrangements, and the augmented influence of non-governmental organizations and epistemic communities on policy processes at a number of political levels (Pierre and Peters, 2005). These developments, together with the growing impact of multilateral agreements on domestic policy and the spread of policy innovations across different nations, have implications for our ability to deal with both rapid and incremental social–ecological change (Biermann, 2007; Duit and Galaz, 2008; Galaz et al., 2008). This special issue of Global Environmental Change brings together prominent scholars to explore novel multilevel governance challenges posed by the behavior of dynamic and complex systems. The purpose has been to investigate, question, and expand the emerging notion of ‘‘resilience’’ as a perspective for understanding how co-evolving societies and natural systems can cope with, and develop from, disturbances and change (Gunderson and Holling, 2002; Folke, 2006). The topics covered in this issue range from the robustness of international environmental regimes; the ‘framing’ of health risks at the national and international level; the need to understand changing patterns of vulnerability in developing countries at the community level; to legal perspectives on dynamic social–ecological change at the global level.
DOI of original article: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2009.01.004 0959-3780/$ – see front matter ß 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2010.04.006
We are not only interested in how governance and institutions are confronted with the complex behavior of coupled social– ecological systems, but also in advancing a deeper understanding of the politics of science, learning, multilevel interactions, and decision-making for understanding and harnessing change. More precisely, contributions to this special issue focus on one or several of the following questions: Why a complex system perspective on governance? What is the analytical utility of a complex systems approach to governance issues in an era of global environmental change? Resilience and governance. Is ‘‘resilience’’ a useful concept for scholars of governance, institutions, law, and policy? Which are the benefits, and which are the potential drawbacks? Are new models of governance needed to improve societies’ ability to govern complex social–ecological systems? If so, what would such governance models look like?
2. Why a complex system perspective on governance? What then, if anything, is gained analytically by viewing ongoing processes of global environmental change through the lens of complex systems and resilience theory? To be sure, complexity theory has received a fair amount of justified criticism for being prone to buzz-word production, for having limited explanatory power, and for being of questionable applicability in the social sciences (Sawyer, 2005). Similar critiques have been voiced towards resilience theory (in the sense of Gunderson and Holling, 2002; Folke, 2006) in a number of fora (e.g. Klein et al., 2003; Berkhaut in Leach, 2008; Hornborg, 2009). Complexity theory and resilience thinking both clearly have a long way to go before they can be considered part of main-stream social science. It is, however, important to recognize that
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complexity theory and resilience thinking are not unitary constructs, but rather multifaceted and diverse perspectives employed by scholars in both the natural and social sciences on a wide range of research topics. Hence criticisms directed at earlier or different versions of theoretical developments might not be relevant for later versions. This is especially true for social sciences, in which earlier waves of complexity theory applications were criticized for being too close to their origin in natural science, and therefore ill-suited for dealing with the fundamentally different dynamics encountered in the social sphere. However, during the last decade, a ‘‘third wave’’ of the application of complex systems thinking has emerged within the social sciences. Unlike earlier attempts at whole-sale imports of complexity methods and concepts used in the natural sciences (cf. Brown, 1995; Byrne, 1998), third wave applications carry with them less of their natural science heritage and are more sensitive towards the characteristics endogenous to the social realm (i.e. language, organization, reflexivity, and power (Sawyer, 2005)). All contributions to this special issue can be viewed as part of this third wave. In our mind, this also includes Elinor Ostrom’s shift from studying the governance of natural resources at single – often local – levels (Ostrom, 1990), to an increased emphasis on crosssystem interactions and dynamic social–ecological systems (Ostrom, 2005, 2007). Theories of the second component in a complex system approach to governance – the system – have a long tradition in the social sciences, dating back to the seminal works of sociologist Parsons (1951), and later on political scientists Easton (1965a,b). Another first-generation system theorist was Niklas Luhmann, who introduced systems theory in social science analysis of societal systems, criticizing Weber for not taking into account complex interactions and behavior in bureaucracies. Luhmann (1995) emphasized trust, risk, power and autopoiesis of both individuals and systems. In these earlier structural functionalist applications, societies and communities where modeled as systems in which a number of key system functions contributed to preserving system equilibrium. As such, the core research task for systems theory was to understand and model stability in the social system, and one of the criticisms contributing to the rapid fall of first-generation systems theory argued that the theory was incapable of explaining change. Another shortcoming was the implicit reliance on functionalist explanations in which system functions were tautologically explained in terms of their usefulness for maintaining equilibrium of the greater system (Elster, 1982). In contrast, the contributions to this special issue are all based on the notion of open social–ecological systems characterized by multiple equilibria, in which the core question is about how to understand their dynamics. Rather than assuming a social system characterized by stability and equilibrium, analytical focus is placed on understanding processes of change and surprises and on how governance arrangements try to cope with and adapt to a constantly dynamic and changing environment. The main reason for adopting a complexity perspective on issues of environmental change has to do with what we perceive to be limited usefulness of more ‘‘traditional’’ analytical models and methodological tools currently in circulation in the social sciences. As among others Hall (2003) and Pierson (2004) have convincingly shown, research methods in social science, almost regardless of underlying epistemologies, have to a large extent been based on a linear and static ontology. By and large, there has been a strong tendency within mainstream social science to view the world as governed by linear and probabilistic relationships that are, in principle, knowable through analytical techniques based on the principles of methodological individualism and aiming at reducing variation in empirical data to uncover regularities and correlational patterns (cf. King et al., 1994).
As a consequence, processes and events that are not linear, sufficiently short-term, or possible to reduce to the actions of individual actors will tend to be overlooked or misinterpreted by traditional social science analyses. Most contemporary theoretical models and analytical techniques in the social sciences are therefore insufficient for adequately capturing processes of complex change in natural as well as social systems (Wimmer and Ko¨ssler, 2006; Morco¨l, 2005). In contrast, a complexity perspective focuses, for instance, on emergent properties arising from the interaction between different parts be they systems or agents; on identifying thresholds and tipping-points; and on understanding system dynamics over time. Not only can the natural world be analyzed as a complex dynamic system. It is also possible to view human-made governance systems consisting of institutions, networks, bureaucracies, and policies as examples of complex systems in which adaptive agents respond to external and internal impulses (cf. Jervis, 1997; Arthur, 1999; Kooiman, 2003; Teisman et al., 2009). A full-blown application of complex systems theory in the study of coupled social–ecological systems thus requires modeling highly complex interactions between linked human and ecological systems. Consequently, the methodological tool of choice for scholars of complex systems has often consisted in some sort of modeling software through which adaptive virtual agents interact with each other within the bounds of system structures (the socalled agent-based modeling, see Cederman, 1997; Sawyer, 2005; Miller et al., 2007). However, as Melissa Leach and colleagues, Koko Warner, and Susan Owens show in their respective contributions, this is by no means an inescapable methodological choice. Analyses of governance and complex systems can gainfully be conducted using qualitative and case-study based approaches. The key is to direct the analysis towards identifying system dynamics and governance efforts to handle such effects. Koko Warner for example, examines environmentally induced migration, including the multicausal drivers as well as the political and institutional implications of such migration. From field work across the world, the 23 case studies reveal a rich variety of circumstances ranging from environmental emergency migrants, flooding and resettlement suggesting an analytical distinction between rapid- and slow-onset events. She notes that the development community often characterizes migration as a failure of adaptation, rather than as a form of adaptation to environmental and climate change. The evidence from the field research informs multiple aspects of the resilience thinking and the governance challenges posed by the dynamics of complex and coupled systems, in particular the demands for new approaches for human mobility. Such modes of governance will need to address both the role of social framing of system boundaries and risks, the relationship between institutional responses in affluent countries vs. those developing countries most affected by environmentally induced migration. It will also have to consider the need for cooperation across sectors dealing with rapid urbanization, local land use patterns, and shifts in social and economic structures. The question of how to understand change in multilevel governance systems is a central theme of Susan Owens’ article. She takes an evolutionary perspective to discuss the paradox of progress and the difficulty in theorizing change. She notes that we must understand changes that take place at three levels: in the mind sets, in policies and practices, and ultimately in socialnatural environments, and that knowledge(s) matters in those changes but are not always acknowledged. Hence, knowledge has an important quasi-independent role in itself. She uses the longterm influence of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution in the UK to examine the role of knowledge in the policy process, showing how the macro, meso- and micro-levels
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interact. In particular, she stresses the theoretical richness and the methodological obstacles involved in tracing these processes, and notes the need for in depth and longitudinal research. The study brings the issue of context, the question of contingency on particular agents of change and policy framing to the fore in theorizing about the governance of complexity and change. 3. Resilience and governance The concept of resilience, with its origins in ecology, has only recently begun to make inroads into the social sciences (Folke, 2006). However, resilience is a cumbersome concept for social science, at least when trying to speak of the resilience of social systems. It is difficult to avoid clashes with cornerstone concepts in social science such as power, democracy, and the right to selfdetermination when attempting to apply the concept of resilience to questions of politics and governance. The reason for this is quite straightforward: even though some similarities can be identified, societies and ecosystems are also fundamentally different in many ways. For one thing, a governance system consists of individuals who are capable of reflecting over their situation and actions, and who are endowed with intrinsic moral rights and who hold normative convictions (Folke and Rockstro¨m, 2009). Another aspect is that human societies are able – at least in principle – to translate such normative convictions into collective action in order to produce and distribute collective goods. Furthermore, notions of resilience as the ability to ‘‘bounce back’’, ‘‘return to equilibrium’’ and to ‘‘reorganize after a disturbance’’ may have wholly different meanings, depending on how the social system was configured to begin with and from whose viewpoint resilience is assessed. A drastic example might illustrate this point: if a long-standing and authoritarian regime is toppled as a result of a sudden fluctuation in world market prices in the base commodity of the country’s economy, and if a democratic but fragile regime replaces it, how should we think of this process in resilience terms? Has resilience decreased or increased? How do we differentiate ‘‘good’’ resilience form ‘‘bad’’? This is essentially a normative issue, as it is ultimately linked to questions of what a good society or a good life should be like. However, in some cases this is less of a problem: for most societies, famines, drought, floods, etc., are undeniably bad things. In other cases, such as the outcome of social conflicts or the distribution of collective goods, the moral value of resilience is another thing entirely. Such thorny normative and conceptual issues notwithstanding, resilience thinking also holds a great deal of potential for renewing the wider governance research agenda. In particular, it invites us to consider fundamental issues of change and stability, adaptation and design, hierarchy and self-organization in the study of multilevel governance systems. Moreover, in addition to ‘‘traditional’’ benchmarks such as efficacy, accountability, and equity used when assessing public governance, a resilience perspective on governance would also consider issues of human–environmental interactions, vulnerability resulting from mal-adaptations, and innovation capacity as integral parts of evaluating a given governance system (Nelson et al., 2007). One approach to unpacking resilience in social–ecological systems taken by Melissa Leach and colleagues in this volume involves recognizing that resilience is inherently a matter of social framing by actors with different preferences and resources. Assessment of resilience in social–ecological systems should therefore not only consider the most general system level, but also take into account possible trade-offs and asymmetries in resilience between different groups and communities within the system, especially when the framing of system boundaries is a matter of conflict. When assessing the resilience of a particular
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system, it is therefore crucial to consider the question ‘‘resilience of what, and for whom?’’. Oran Young’s approach to the same problem is slightly different. Drawing a distinction between ‘‘ecosystem resilience’’ and ‘‘engineering resilience’’, he argues that the former is better suited for the analysis of institutions and social–ecological systems by virtue of not being based on a notion of equilibrium towards which the system must return. By ridding the resilience concept of the assumption of return-to-equilibrium, Young argues that the term should be understood as ‘‘the ability to handle stress in an adaptive manner’’ in institutions and regimes. Young also points out that resilience is always a matter of degree, and never a matter of complete immunity towards disturbance and stress. Societies and ecosystems can be more or less resilient, but if system stresses become too powerful or merge into a specific kind of stress towards which the system is not adapted, even highly robust systems will eventually crumble (Janssen and Anderies, 2007). Jonas Ebbesson discusses both normative and analytical aspects of what law and legal thinking in relation to governance of complex social–ecological changes, with particular focus on resilience research on social systems. The tensions are sometimes apparent: while the literature on resilience identifies flexibility and adaptability as core factors and conditions, the legal perspective emphasizes certainty and predictability as fundamental notions for legitimate and equal treatment. Nevertheless, Ebbesson shows that basic notions law, such as legal certainty, are not necessarily incompatible with concerns for flexibility in governance of social– ecological systems, and may support openness and broad participation to cope with complexities and common risk. In addition, he calls for a more nuanced picture of the flexibility and adaptability concerns, linking those to different forms of institutions for liability and accountability. His contribution brings critical remarks to the applicability of the resilience concept to the study of governance, law and policy—and vice versa. In order for the concept of resilience to contribute rather than to clash with the social sciences, it seems that notions of ‘‘social resilience’’ should be avoided. For reasons stated above, a simple and unreflecting re-application of the ‘‘natural science’’ resilience concept onto social and political matters will inevitably run into substantial normative and conceptual difficulties. Resilience scholars are aware of this problematique, yet the point is often raised as a critique of the field (Berkhaut in Leach, 2008; Hornborg, 2009). However, the wider notion of resilience of social–ecological systems appears to be a more viable alternative, as it focuses on the more limited question how well a given social–ecological system is able to maintain the basic ecological properties it is ultimately dependent upon. This is not a normatively uncontroversial route either, but at least it acknowledges that resilience-based policy solutions and institutions will – as most other forms of public policy – have distributional and thereby moral consequences. 4. New models of governance: fighting complexity with complexity? A wide-spread notion in the contemporary literature is that in order to govern processes of complex change, complexity in the external world must be matched by complexity in the governance system. This idea can be labeled the diversity hypothesis, as it assumes that institutional and organizational diversity is the most effective way to cope with complexity. This notion can be traced back to the works of psychologist and pioneer cyberneticist W. Ross Ashby and the now classic ‘‘Law of Requisite Variety’’, which states that for a manager to control a system she must be able to elicit a unique response for every possible state of the system: only ‘‘variety can destroy variety’’ (Ashby, 1956, p. 207). Although Ashby in passing did consider the effects of hierarchy on requisite
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variety, he had very little to say about how different types of institutions, networks, markets, and organizations might influence the ability to regulate fluctuating systems. Subsequent authors have argued that one of the benefits of emerging forms of public steering such as network governance, public–private partnerships, self-organization and stakeholder involvement consists in a more flexible and responsive governance process, better able to deal with increasing external complexity (Koppenjan and Klijn, 2004; Morco¨l, 2005; Kooiman, 2003). In other words, ongoing transformations of public steering towards new forms of governance are thought to enhance requisite variety of society. Applications of diversity-hypothesis can also be found in literature on ‘‘institutional redundancy’’ in which overlapping and seemingly overcrowded institutional configurations within the same domain are thought to be effective for regulating common pool resources (Low et al., 2003). Similarly, it has been argued that ‘‘polycentrism’’, or multiple and overlapping cores of control hierarchies are more effective in addressing difficult problems of policy implementation and governance (McGinnis, 2000; Ostrom, 2005). In addition, concepts such as decentralization, anti-hierarchy, deliberation, stakeholder participation, and self-regulation has long been core components in green political theory, as well as in more applied discussions on environmental policy and politics (Durant et al., 2004; Dryzek, 2005; Duit et al., 2009). Additional cases of this tradition can be found in the more recent policy paradigms of adaptive co-management (Dietz et al., 2003; Folke et al., 2005), adaptive governance (Olsson et al., 2006), and reflexive governance (Voss et al., 2006), which emphasize combinations of stakeholder involvement, trial-and-error-based policy experiments, and context-specific and network-based incremental policy making for achieving long-term sustainability in managing oscillating social–ecological resource systems. The idea that institutional and organizational diversity and decentralization increase the capacity of governance systems to handle complex systems is thus well-established in contemporary policy discourses. However, it is ultimately an empirical question which type of governance system has the largest set of available actions. It might be that a governance system consisting of large numbers of diverse semi-independent networks and organizations – through their diversity and flexibility – will have, among them, a larger set of viable action alternatives. But it might also be the case that such a governance system, through its lack of coordination, fragmented communication, and limited stock of accumulated resources has a more constricted repertoire of action than, for example, a Weberian-type bureaucracy. To conclude, these issues point to a need to move beyond the simple distinction between diversity and hierarchy in the search for new models of complexity governance. A central question is whether there are certain forms of governance that are better equipped for addressing and managing processes characterized by complex change? A closely related issue is whether institutions and governance systems can be designed or retrofitted for enhanced complexity-handling performance? We currently have very little systematic knowledge about how different types of real-world governance systems differ in their ability to cope with different types of complex change. An emerging notion holds that this task seems to require both institutional stability and change (Duit and Galaz, 2008) as well as bridging multilevel linkages (Cash et al., 2006; Folke et al., 2005). As Douglass North and other scholars of institutional economics have shown (North, 1990, 2005), stable and predictable institutions are necessary for accumulation of resources and human wellbeing in times when change is slow and relatively predictable. Institutional instability leads to increased transaction costs and lower returns from cooperative ventures. Over time, any set of
institutional will tend to create high sunk costs and lead to processes of institutional path dependency and inertia (Pierson, 2004), which in turn makes it increasingly hard to adapt institutions to changing circumstances. But at the same time, governance systems need to be flexible, i.e. able to change, in order to adapt to novel circumstances. As noted by several contributions (e.g. Jonas Ebbesson, and Oran Young), there is a fundamental opposition between the dual needs for stability and flexibility that goes to the core of the question of how governance systems can cope with complexity. An international climate change agreement faces precisely this sort of challenge. On the one hand, there is a need to create stable and predictable international rules to be able to reduce free-riding behavior amongst nation states, and create transparent incentives for non-state actors such as business, to act in a new regulatory environment. On the other hand, such agreement must allow for adaptation in response to rapid scientific progress within climate sciences, as well as emerging insights on how climate affects other critical biophysical systems such as coral reef ecosystems, marine biodiversity and resilience, and food-producing ecosystems (Walker et al., 2009). An important task for further research is to investigate if and how the stability-flexibility tension is resolved in real-word examples of governance in social–ecological systems. As Ebbesson points out, it is also important to identify what kind of flexibility we seek. Both Melissa Leach and colleagues, and Arild Underdal in this volume contribute with typologies of complexity handling strategies. Leach and colleagues bring to light the possibility of alternative problem definitions in the context of emerging and reemerging infectious diseases such as Ebola hemorrhagic fevers and avian influenza. As they elaborate, one possible strategy to reduce complexity both in problem definition and in complicated actor settings, is by organizing collective action around a simple ‘‘outbreak narrative’’—a story that includes the sudden emergence and often global spread of EID, together with a particular notion of adequate responses. This narrative has important consequences not only for the sort of science and interventions that gain priority on the international agenda, but also has substantial distributional consequences for the livelihood of local communities all over the world. Arild Underdal explores the nexus of long-term decisionmaking, complex ecosystems, and global collective goods. Underdal notes that many of the problems related to global environmental change share three fundamental characteristics; they require decision-making in which costs and benefits are separated by very long time-lags; they are about intrinsically complex coupled social–ecological systems; and they are all about producing global collective goods that go beyond the scope of unilateral ‘‘single-best efforts’’ of any actor. Underdal goes on to investigate how two basic response models–a centralized, hierarchical, and top-down ‘‘Collective action model’’ and a distributed, bottom-up, ‘‘Adaptive management model’’—fit with the requirements of global environmental change. The conclusion is that there is merit in both types of responses, but that the applicability is dependent on the scoping conditions of specific problems, i.e. varies over different types of complex problems. In fact, policy makers and policy scholars have, as of yet, been unable to even envision (and much less implement) a governance system that is able handle virtually every task put before it. As there is no ideal form of governance in other areas, it would be something of a surprise if there was a panacea for governing complex systems (Ostrom et al., 2007). As Young’s and Underdal’s respective contributions in this volume make abundantly clear, the search for ways to govern or at least mitigate the effects of complex systems should take into consideration that the resilience of
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different governance systems will, in all likelihood, exhibit a high degree of variation over different types of complex dynamic processes. In addition, the profound difficulties involved in policymaking and steering even in ‘‘non-complex’’ settings that can be observed in most societies (Pierre and Peters, 2005), together with Underdals argument about the near-impossible incentive structures present in long-term decision making, should work as a corrective against overly naı¨ve conceptions of a cure-all form of governance model for coping with complexity. At the end of the day, governance solutions for many of those problems rooted in complex systems dynamics will, as always, consist in incrementally implemented, heterogenic, and piecemeal mixes of policy instruments, institutions, networks and organizations. 5. Conclusion complexity, resilience and governance The contributions to this special issue are all – by means of theoretical pieces or empirical investigations – addressing one or several of the issues identified in the beginning of this paper: (1) the analytical utility of a complex system approach to governance issues, (2) the need for new governance models to improve society’s ability to handle processes of complex change, and (3) the usefulness of the resilience concept in governance studies. While not providing any definitive answers to theses questions, the combined efforts from contributors to this special issue have nevertheless provided some tentative conclusions that might serve as stepping stones for further research efforts. What is the leverage or ‘‘added value’’ of a complex systems approach to governance? After all, governance systems have always operated under conditions of uncertainty and surprise, and policy scholars have long emphasized the profound problems of information deficit and unpredictability confronting most areas of public steering (Klijn, 2008). For instance, Charles Lindblom’s classic paper on policy making as the art of ‘‘muddling through’’ (Lindblom, 1959) marks the beginning of a long line of policy scholarship based on the acknowledgement of the incremental, random, non-rational, and sub-optimized nature of public governance. In this sense, governance has always been about managing complexity and uncertainty, and governance solutions to problems are regularly thought to be less than optimal solutions to very complex problems (Voss et al., 2006). Neither has the world ever been simple and non-complex, but current converging trends of global interconnectedness and increasing pressures on ecological systems are pushing the tasks confronting policy- and decision makers at multiple levels of societal organization into a new and different state. For example, an International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) synthesis report speaks of the Earth System now having entered a ‘‘no-analogue state’’ (Steffen et al., 2004) in which past behavior of the system is no longer a reliable predictor of future behavior, even when circumstances are similar. Taken together, these developments do indeed paint a rather gloomy picture in which the conventional set of policy instruments, laws, and institutional configurations used to address social problems seem almost hopelessly impotent in the face of processes of rapid, fundamental, and possibly detrimental change. But as many of the contributions to this special issue show, governance systems are not static and inert. New governance structures for addressing the spread of global pandemic diseases, the probable increase in forced environmental migration, and the management of global marine resources are emerging as a response to changes in ecological systems. In the bigger picture, the by now well-established transition from ‘‘government’’ to ‘‘governance’’ taking place in many countries is a prime example of how public steering and institutions is constantly being re-defined and re-invented in order to co-evolve with a dynamic environment. As demonstrated by the analyses in their respective articles
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Warner, Owens, and Leach et al., a complex system perspective is essential for understanding and analytically capturing the dynamics of rapid, interlinked, and multifaceted processes of change in social–ecological systems. And as shown in the articles by Ebbesson, Young, and Underdal, rethinking problems of governance and law in a resilience perspective can often prove very helpful in identifying strengths and weaknesses of contemporary governance systems. With regards to the question of what new governance models are needed to handle complex social–ecological systems, it seems that there is a need to move beyond the simple diversity hypothesis towards considering if and how governance systems handle both change and stability simultaneously. A contention found in several of the contributions to this special issue (e.g. Ebbesson, Underdal, and Young) is that complexity management requires of governance systems to be both flexible and stable at the same time (cf. Voss et al., 2006). Flexibility is needed to adapt to novel and unexpected circumstances, but stability is of equal importance for ensuring that governance systems retain their ability to regulate behavior and provide a predictable arena for interaction between actors. As these dual and apparently incompatible demands for stability and flexibility are difficult to combine in the same governance model, the question of matching governance models with different types of processes of complex change becomes all the more central to the governance and complexity research agenda. Finally there is the question of what a resilience perspective can bring to the debate on issues of governance. As Jonas Ebbesson, Melissa Leach et al. and Oran Young show in their respective articles the concept of resilience harbors a great potential for renewing the governance research agenda, but it needs to be applied with a high degree of sensitivity about the risk of overshadowing crucial normative issues. In fact, recognizing that resilience is an inherently normative concept might be the key to bringing it to bear on a wider governance debate. By linking the resilience concept to classic themes in social science such as power, justice, discourse, and the rule of law, the contributions from Ebbesson, Leach et al., and Young signify important first steps towards a more integrated. A sizable amount of work remains to be done in this respect, but an important lesson to be learned from the studies in this special issue is that to speak of resilience of social– ecological systems is to engage in a discussion of fundamental normative issues. For this reason, it is also important to avoid the misconception that ‘‘resilience’’ implies the return-to-equilibrium, as this invariably will not only include assumptions about the ‘‘true’’ equilibrium of a society, but also make us increasingly vulnerable to the growing predicaments of rapid global environmental change. Acknowledgement This work was supported by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and by grants from the Swedish Research Council for Environmental Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning (Formas) and the Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research (Mistra). We are grateful to the editors of the journal, the contributors to this special issue, and the reviewers for their support and work throughout the process. References Ashby, W.R., 1956. An Introduction to Cybernetics. Chapman & Hall, London. Arthur, B.W., 1999. Complexity and the economy. Science 284, 107–109. Berkes, F.T., Hughes, T.P., Steneck, R.S., Wilson, J.A., Bellwood, D.R., Crona, B., Folke, ¨ sterblom, C., Gunderson, L.H., Leslie, H.M., Norberg, J., Nystro¨m, M., Olsson, P., O H., Scheffer, M., Worm, B., 2006. Globalization, roving bandits, and marine resources. Science 311, 1557–1558.
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Andreas Duita,b Victor Galaza,* Katarina Eckerberga,c Jonas Ebbessona,d a Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Sweden b Department of Political Science, Stockholm University, Sweden c Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), Stockholm, Sweden d Faculty of Law, Stockholm University, Sweden *Corresponding author. Tel.: +46 8 6747083 E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected] (V, Galaz) Received 20 April 2010