|
Abstract:
|
"The concept of adaptive governance has become increasingly advocated by scholars of social-ecological systems as essential for sustainability as we proceed into a more complex and less predictable world. This concept has become closely associated in this research community with polycentricity and related governance concepts. As the number of scholars identifying these concepts as elements of adaptive governance has increased, however, a number of issues have arisen which could impede clear communication both within the research community, and also between this community and the political, and policy-making and practitioners communities that could incorporate these concepts into their deliberations over how to achieve more adaptive forms of governance. This paper identifies a number of such these issues and proposes how they might be resolved. These proposals are summarised as follows: a governance arrangement should be regarded as polycentric when its constituent decision-making entities exhibit de facto considerable autonomy from one another, regardless of whether the entities are formally independent of one another; polycentricity should be understood generally as an attribute of polycentric governance arrangements rather than more specifically of polycentric governance systems; i.e., it should refer to the degree to which the decision-making entities comprising a governance arrangement exhibit de facto considerable autonomy from one another; a clear distinction needs to maintained between the coherence of a polycentric governance arrangement (where sufficient coherence connotes a polycentric governance system) and its performance, and the subsidiarity principle should be used as a key guide to crafting arrangements that are well-performing as well as coherent."
|