Practical Panarchy for Adaptive Water Governance

322 Pages·2018·6.94 MB·English

by  Barbara Cosens

Barbara Cosens
Lance Gunderson
Editors
Practical Panarchy
for Adaptive Water
Governance
Linking Law to Social-Ecological
Resilience
Practical Panarchy for Adaptive Water
Governance
Barbara Cosens • Lance Gunderson
Editors
Practical Panarchy for
Adaptive Water
Governance
Linking Law to Social-Ecological Resilience
Editors
Barbara Cosens Lance Gunderson
College of Law and Waters of the West Department of Environmental Sciences
Program Emory University
University of Idaho Atlanta, GA, USA
Moscow, ID, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-72470-6 ISBN 978-3-319-72472-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72472-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018934386
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Preface
The authors appearing in this volume came together with the Adaptive Water
Governance Project, inspired by a shared interest in helping inform the deliberate
adaptation and transformation of water-dependent social-ecological systems in the
Anthropocene. The project brought together ecologists, geographers, political sci-
entists, and legal scholars, all expressing the concern that although science has
existed for decades showing that human development and increasing use of water
pose a threat to ecosystems and the social systems reliant on them, the uptake of this
information has been slow to enter law and policy and, as a result, slow to lead to
actual change. Dialogue surrounding these issues tends to view future scenarios as
solely based on tradeoffs within a zero-sum game. Further, while science has made
great strides in exploring how climate change may affect specific water systems,
environmental law, the tool relied on to institutionalize collective choice on the
mediation between social and ecological systems in western democracies, has its
foundation in an understanding of systems as linear and its primary goal as facilitat-
ing social and economic stability. Thus, at first glance, law leaves society woefully
unprepared to manage the dynamic and nonlinear nature of water-based ecological
systems that will evolve in unpredictable and complex ways. Yet history has shown
that legal systems incapable of evolution in the face of change are themselves desta-
bilizing and that modern societies have addressed this need for evolution and the
desire for a broad societal voice in how it plays out through the development of
democratic institutions and more recently the emergence of new governance that
involves public and private actors. In the context of social-ecological systems, much
of the literature and hope focuses on the emergence of adaptive governance. The
inspiration for the Adaptive Water Governance Project lays not only in the desire to
remove legal barriers to adaptation but to consider how law in democratic systems
might be a tool in the facilitation of the emergence of adaptive water governance.
The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), funded by the
US National Science Foundation, provided the venue for the Adaptive Water
Governance team to meet in a series of five workshops over a three-year period.
Despite disciplinary differences, team members had all turned to resilience theory
v
vi Preface
to guide their understanding of social-ecological systems. The ecologists on the
team came out of the C.S. Holling school of ecological resilience which views resil-
ience as a system property describing both the capacity of a system to adapt and its
ability to exist in alternative states, yet lacking a normative overlay. This perspective
formed the foundation for a common lexicon that would form the bridge among
members. The team also began with a dialogue developed by the Toolbox Project
developed by faculty and Michigan State University and the University of Idaho, to
facilitate team-based research through an understanding of value-based differences
across disciplines. It was, however, the initial effort to gather information on North
American water basins that led to the use of the most powerful boundary object for
cross-disciplinary dialogue and integration: place.
Teams led by members with policy and ecology backgrounds engaged with
external participants in resilience assessment of six North American water basins.
This was, in effect, the data gathering stage of the project. The focus on place was
key to the ability of the team to integrate across disciplines. Theoretical and vision-
ary concepts in the abstract are difficult to grasp from divergent disciplinary per-
spectives. Yet, how they play out in a particular place, within a particular ecosystem,
inhabited by a particular society, brings abstract concepts to life, allowing deep
understanding across disciplinary divides. The second step of cross-team sharing
and reviewing of basin assessments for publication allowed teams to move beyond
the contextual and begin to identify potential areas of synthesis and transferrable
knowledge. The basins chosen reflected the heavily regulated water systems in
which the economic systems had grown dependent on water development. From the
viewpoint of the project, this allowed consideration of the intersection of resilience,
governance, and law and the potential for the emergence of adaptive processes in
the context of social-ecological systems with substantial barriers to change.
The six assessments, and a seventh which tested the approach in Australia to
move outside both the legal and social settings of North America, provided the con-
text for understanding how the complex interaction among law, governance, society,
and the environment plays out and allowed the development of a deeper understand-
ing of the conditions under which adaptive governance emerges and the barriers to
that emergence. The assessments and the common threads that flow from them form
the basis for this volume.
The Adaptive Water Governance Project is merely a first step in bringing policy
disciplines to the understanding of the dynamic nature of ecological systems. In
doing so, the authors are aware both of the hubris of such an endeavor and its limi-
tations. The effort has not yet engaged those with deep knowledge of political
ecology and the role of power and agency in the adaptation of social systems and
would welcome that addition as a next step. At the same time, the project is aware
that in a democracy, law is a manifestation of agency and the exercise of political
power. As a result, the readers will find that regardless of their relation to an objec-
tive definition of resilience, issues of fairness, equity, transparency, accountability,
Preface vii
legitimacy, and the balance between stability and flexibility are essential compo-
nents of any framework for the role of law in adaptation and transformation.
Without attention to these aspects, this would be little more than an academic
exercise with little prospects for change. In the end, the common value spanning
the Adaptive Water Governance team is the desire to play a role in advancing the
capacity of social-ecological systems to adapt and transform, hence the need for a
reality-based framework.
Moscow, ID, USA Barbara Cosens
Atlanta, GA, USA Lance Gunderson
Acknowledgments
As the editors of this volume, we would like to acknowledge that it has been an
honor and a privilege to work with the Adaptive Water Governance team whose
effort is reflected in the chapters in this volume, and without whom, this endeavor
would not have been possible. This work would also not have been possible without
the funding from the US National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC)
under the funding from the US National Science Foundation, NSF DBI-1052875.
The authors would like to thank Margaret Palmer and Jonathan Kramer of SESYNC
for their belief in and support of this project. Finally, we would like to thank
University of Idaho JD student Christopher Murray and JD/MS Water Resources
student Jon Rezabek for their long hours of citation editing. We hope this work
helps to inspire others to realize that simply bringing together people from different
backgrounds and perspectives can advance knowledge and begin to address some of
the more difficult problems faced in a time when humans have become not only an
integral part of natural systems but dominate those systems. Engaging in this work
is not only a privilege but an obligation as we find ourselves living in the
Anthropocene.
The views set forth by the contributors to this volume represent their own and
do not represent the views of any public or private entity the contributors are
affiliated with.
Barbara Cosens
Lance Gunderson
ix
Contents
1 An Introduction to Practical Panarchy: Linking Law,
Resilience, and Adaptive Water Governance of Regional
Scale Social- Ecological Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Barbara Cosens and Lance Gunderson
Part I Assessing Resilience of Regional Scale Social-Ecological Systems
2 Case Studies in Adaptation and Transformation of Ecosystems,
Legal Systems, and Governance Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Lance Gunderson and Barbara Cosens
3 Resilience of the Anacostia River Basin: Institutional, Social,
and Ecological Dynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Craig Anthony (Tony) Arnold, Olivia Odom Green, Daniel DeCaro,
Alexandra Chase, and Jennifer-Grace Ewa
4 Social-Ecological Resilience in the Columbia River
Basin: The Role of Law and Governance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Barbara Cosens and Alex Fremier
5 Social, Legal, and Ecological Capacity for Adaptation
and Transformation in the Everglades . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Lance Gunderson, Ahjond S. Garmestani, Keith W. Rizzardi,
J. B. Ruhl, and Alfred R. Light
6 The Emergence of Adaptive Governance in the Klamath
River Basin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Brian C. Chaffin, Hannah Gosnell, and Robin K. Craig
7 Governing the Rio Grande: Challenges and Opportunities
for New Mexico’s Water Supply . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Melinda Harm Benson, Ryan R. Morrison, Dagmar Llewellyn,
and Mark Stone
xi
xii Contents
8 Resilience and Law in the Platte River Basin Social-Ecological
System: Past, Present, and Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Hannah E. Birgé, Craig R. Allen, Robin Kundis Craig,
and Dirac Twidwell
9 Assessing Adaptive Water Governance for Lake Eyre Basin
and Linked Portions of the Great Artesian Basin in Australia . . . . . . 131
Barbara Cosens and Angela H. Arthington
Part II The Role of Law in Adaptive Governance and Resilience
10 Legal Pathways to Adaptive Governance in Water Basins
in North America and Australia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Barbara Cosens, Robin Kundis Craig, Shana Hirsch,
Craig Anthony (Tony) Arnold, Melinda Harm Benson,
Daniel DeCaro, Ahjond S. Garmestani, Hannah Gosnell,
J. B. Ruhl, and Edella Schlager
11 Stability and Flexibility in the Emergence of Adaptive
Water Governance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
Robin Kundis Craig, Ahjond S. Garmestani, Craig R. Allen,
Craig Anthony (Tony) Arnold, Hannah Birgé, Daniel DeCaro,
and Hannah Gosnell
12 Finding Flexibility in Section 7 of the Endangered Species
Act Through Adaptive Governance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Hannah Gosnell, Brian C. Chaffin, J. B. Ruhl,
Craig A. (Tony) Arnold, Robin K. Craig, Melinda H. Benson,
and Alan Devenish
Part III Social-Ecological Resilience and Adaptive Governance
13 Cross-Basin Patterns of Systemic-Change Drivers and Adaptive
Governance Features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
Craig Anthony (Tony) Arnold, Hannah Gosnell,
Melinda Harm Benson, and Robin Kundis Craig
14 Trajectories of Change in Regional-Scale Social-Ecological
Water Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
Lance Gunderson, Barbara Cosens, and Brian C. Chaffin
15 Uncertainty and Trade-Offs in Resilience Assessments. . . . . . . . . . . . 243
Craig R. Allen, Hannah Birgé, David G. Angeler,
Craig Anthony (Tony) Arnold, Brian C. Chaffin, Daniel DeCaro,
Ahjond S. Garmestani, and Lance H. Gunderson