Browsing by Author "Munaretto, Stefania"

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Adaptive Comanagement in the Venice Lagoon? An Analysis of Current Water and Environmental Management Practices and Prospects for Change
(2012) Munaretto, Stefania; Huitema, Dave
"Adaptive comanagement (ACM) is often suggested as a way of handling the modern challenges of environmental governance, which include uncertainty and complexity. ACM is a novel combination of the learning dimension of adaptive management and the linkage dimension of comanagement. As has been suggested, there is a need for more insight on enabling policy environments for ACM success and failure. Picking up on this agenda we provide a case study of the world famous Venice lagoon in Italy. We address the following questions: first, to what extent are four institutional prescriptions typically associated with ACM currently practiced in the Venice system? Second, to what extent is learning taking place in the Venice system? Third, how is learning related to the implementation or nonimplementation of the prescriptions of ACM in the Venice system? Our analysis is based on interviews with stakeholders, participatory observation, and archive data. This paper demonstrates that the prescriptions of ACM are hardly followed in the Venice lagoon, but some levels of cognitive learning do take place, albeit very much within established management paradigms. Normative and relational learning are much rarer and when they do occur, they seem to have a relatively opportunistic reason. We propose that in particular the low levels of collaboration, because the governance system was deliberately set up in a hierarchical and mono-centric way, and the limited possibilities for stakeholder participation are implicated in this finding because they cause low levels of social capital and an incapacity to handle disagreements and uncertainty very well."
Integrating Adaptive Governance and Participatory Multicriteria Methods: A Framework for Climate Adaptation Governance
(2014) Munaretto, Stefania; Siciliano, Giuseppina; Turvani, Margherita
"Climate adaptation is a dynamic social and institutional process where the governance dimension is receiving growing attention. Adaptive governance is an approach that promises to reduce uncertainty by improving the knowledge base for decision making. As uncertainty is an inherent feature of climate adaptation, adaptive governance seems to be a promising approach for improving climate adaptation governance. However, the adaptive governance literature has so far paid little attention to decision-making tools and methods, and the literature on the governance of adaptation is in its infancy in this regard. We argue that climate adaptation governance would benefit from systematic and yet flexible decision-making tools and methods such as participatory multicriteria methods for the evaluation of adaptation options, and that these methods can be linked to key adaptive governance principles. Moving from these premises, we propose a framework that integrates key adaptive governance features into participatory multicriteria methods for the governance of climate adaptation."