A decade of adaptive governance scholarship: synthesis and future directions

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