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Cementing “Stakeholder Collaboration” into Flood Risk Management
Published in Saeid Eslamian, Faezeh Eslamian, Flood Handbook, 2022
Stakeholder collaboration offers great transformative power, by broadening disciplinary expertise and offering more forward-looking sustainability-focused ideas and adaptive management tools. However, the powerful engineering tradition in flood risk management is to date overlooked as one of the key challenges to the uptake of adaptive approaches, due to the continued preference for traditional system robustness and infrastructural measures (Van Buuren et al., 2018). Finally, it is crucially important to further a critical understanding of the motivations of the neoliberal state. Does stakeholder collaboration in FRM represent a shift in governance or a shift in risk responsibilities? Government regulation and enforcement still remain the largest motivators of change for private sector actors (Newig et al., 2016), the “collaborative” approach needs re-evaluating with respect to private-sector-led partnerships tasked with resilience and the public responsibilization of risk for flood-prone communities, for which the un-managed retreat of the state should not be an option.
Design Options, Implementation Issues and Evaluating Success of Ecologically Engineered Shorelines
Published in S.J. Hawkins, A.L. Allcock, A.E. Bates, L.B. Firth, I.P. Smith, S.E. Swearer, P.A. Todd, Oceanography and Marine Biology, 2019
Rebecca L. Morris, Eliza C. Heery, Lynette H.L. Loke, Edward Lau, Elisabeth M.A. Strain, Laura Airoldi, Karen A. Alexander, Melanie J. Bishop, Ross A. Coleman, Jeffery R. Cordell, Yun-Wei Dong, Louise B. Firth, Stephen J. Hawkins, Tom Heath, Michael Kokora, Shing Yip Lee, Jon K. Miller, Shimrit Perkol-Finkel, Andrew Rella, Peter D. Steinberg, Ichiro Takeuchi, Richard C. Thompson, Peter A. Todd, Jason D. Toft, Kenneth M.Y. Leung
Adaptive management is a structured decision-making strategy to govern social-ecological systems that embraces their complexity and uncertainty, providing opportunities for learning and adapting to change (Folke et al. 2005). It rests on the recognition that urban landscapes and seascapes need to be understood and managed as complex, adaptive social-ecological systems and points to the importance of actively managing resilience, here defined as the capacity to persist with functional integrity under changing social and environmental conditions. The feedback between learning and decision-making is a defining feature of adaptive management, with learning contributing to management by helping to inform decision-making and management contributing to learning through interventions that are useful for investigating resource processes and impacts (Williams 2011). Fundamental steps in the process include the articulation of clear objectives (ecological, engineering and socioeconomic), identification of management alternatives, predictions of management consequences, recognition of key uncertainties and quantitative assessment of outcomes.
The feasibility and value of adaptive strategies for extreme risks
Published in Vicki Bier, Risk in Extreme Environments, 2018
The ability to observe and adapt to changing circumstances is a desirable attribute for organizations that must respond to environmental and other sorts of threats. When there is substantial uncertainty about how events might develop over time and about how well particular response measures will work, flexible responses matched to changes as they are occurring are more likely to be effective. There is thus a strong case for attempting to put adaptive approaches into practice. “Adaptive management,” a term drawn from the field of ecosystem management (Holling 1978; Walker et al. 2004), is by now used widely, and rather loosely, to describe a practical preparation for and reliance on this type of flexibility. There are two key aspects of this wider sense of adaptive management: (1) learning from experience, especially learning as situations develop over time, and (2) monitoring conditions and adjusting responses accordingly (Cox 2015; Smithson and Ben-Haim 2015). In planning to sail a boat from one island to another, you might want to learn in advance about the local shoreline and rocks, tides and weather patterns, and you certainly would not set a course without making provision for adjusting to the wind and currents that you will actually encounter.
Urban forest restoration ecology: a review from Hamilton, New Zealand
Published in Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 2019
Kiri Joy Wallace, Bruce D. Clarkson
Ongoing monitoring is crucial in gauging success or failure, yet it does not occur in most restoration projects. Ruiz-Jaen and Aide (2006) conducted a review of 468 studies that employed seeding or planting techniques for terrestrial restoration and found only 14% evaluated restoration success afterward. If benchmarks of success are defined initially, and monitoring reveals whether they are attained, adaptive management can occur. Adaptive management allows precious resources to be allocated to the most effective, efficient management methods. These may be different from initial methods, or those used elsewhere because restoration approaches are rarely a one-size-fits-all. Waiwhakareke Natural Heritage Park has permanent monitoring plots that are surveyed regularly to measure long-term progress (Grove et al. 2006; Cornes et al. 2008), as well as ground-truthing after new plantings to determine immediate establishment success (Nepia et al. 2015). Findings are then carefully discussed in an advisory group and management approaches adapted where necessary to minimise wasted resources.
Adaptive or aspirational? Governance of diffuse water pollution affecting Australia’s Great Barrier Reef
Published in Water International, 2018
Derived from resilience theory, adaptive management acknowledges that environmental management actions need to respond to changes in the social–environmental system; and in a feedback loop, any changes that management actions set off require monitoring and further management response (Gunderson, Holling, & Light, 1995; Lee, 1993). Extending that concept, adaptive governance incorporates the social and political context in which adaptive management takes place (Gunderson & Light, 2006). The focus is on bridges and barriers to implementing adaptive management (Gunderson et al., 1995; Lee, 1993). Such barriers may include deeply held values about how a geographical area should be developed, vested interests driving people to militate for or against proposed management actions, short-term political incentives that frame issues as win-or-lose battles, or a history of conflict that precludes dialogue (Lewicki, Gray, & Elliott, 2003). Transformational adaptive governance requires opening debates to different perspectives, allowing the questioning of assumptions and reconsideration of beliefs and values, and new approaches to managing uncertainty (Pahl-Wostl, 2009).
Adaptive and sustainable water management: from improved conceptual foundations to transformative change
Published in International Journal of Water Resources Development, 2020
Adaptive management is one approach to increase the flexibility of management approaches and to foster learning. It explicitly recognizes uncertainty and the complexity of the systems to be managed and tries to overcome the limitations of natural resource management approaches that rely on prediction and control. Adaptive management was first developed and promoted in the context of ecosystem management (Holling, 1978; Walters, 1986). Management interventions have been perceived as experiments that generate new knowledge. Stated more broadly, adaptive management implies that management processes must be designed such that they support systematic and structured learning-by-doing. Originally the approach had a focus on the complexity of ecosystems and paid little attention to the complexity that is inherent in the human dimension of changing management practices (Lee, 1999). Such negligence was a major flaw and may also explain many failures of adaptive management projects (Allan & Curtis, 2005; Allen & Gunderson, 2011). But perceptions have changed, and more attention is now given to social learning and social capital as major outcomes of adaptive management processes (Allan & Watts, 2018; Collins & Ison, 2010; Wallis & Ison, 2011; Webb, Watts, Allan, & Conallin, 2018). However, increasing the flexibility of management approaches requires more than simply changing management processes. As highlighted by Pahl-Wostl (2007), adaptive water management requires an understanding and integrated design and major structural transformations of human-technology-environment systems to enable learning processes. The construction of large-scale infrastructure and associated sunk costs, for example, may severely limit options for learning and change. Or rigid regulations and formal use rights may hinder adaptation to changing resource conditions. In an adaptive paradigm, management goals and instruments are reviewed, negotiated, and if necessary reconstructed, to meet the needs of a changing world. But this puts great demands on the quality of governance processes. It must transparent who decides, on what kind of evidence, to change management goals and instruments (Pahl-Wostl et al., 2007).