Browsing by Author "Plummer, Ryan"

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Accommodating the Challenges of Climate Change Adaptation and Governance in Conventional Risk Management: Adaptive Collaborative Risk Management (ACRM)
(2011) May, Bradley; Plummer, Ryan
"Risk management is a well established tool for climate change adaptation. It is facing new challenges with the end of climate stationarity and the need to meaningfully engage people in governance issues. The ways in which conventional approaches to risk management can respond to these challenges are explored. Conventional approaches to risk management are summarized, the manner in which they are being advanced as a tool for climate change adaptation is described, and emerging themes in risk management and climate change adaption are documented. It is argued that conventional risk management for climate change adaptation can benefit from the insights and experiences of adaptive co-management. A hybrid approach termed adaptive collaborative risk management is thus envisaged that enriches conventional risk management with the critical features of adaptive co-management, i.e., collaboration and adaptation. Adaptive Collaborative Risk Management overcomes some of the challenges with conventional risk management, builds upon and complements other approaches to community climate change adaptation, and innovatively addresses both technical and governance concerns in a single integrated process."
The Adaptive Co-Management Process: An Initial Synthesis of Representative Models and Influential Variables
(2009) Plummer, Ryan
"Collaborative and adaptive approaches to environmental management have captured the attention of administrators, resource users, and scholars. Adaptive co-management builds upon these approaches to create a novel governance strategy. This paper investigates the dynamics of the adaptive comanagement process and the variables that influence it. The investigation begins by summarizing analytical and causal models relevant to the adaptive co-management process. Variables that influence this process are then synthesized from diverse literatures, categorized as being exogenous or endogenous, and developed into respective analytical frameworks. In identifying commonalities among models of the adaptive comanagement process and discerning influential variables, this paper provides initial insights into understanding the dynamic social process of adaptive co-management. From these insights conjectures for future inquires are offered in the conclusion."
Adaptive Comanagement and Its Relationship to Environmental Governance
(2013) Plummer, Ryan; Armitage, Derek; de Loë, Rob C.
"We provide a systematic review of the adaptive comanagement (ACM) literature to (i) investigate how the concept of governance is considered and (ii) examine what insights ACM offers with reference to six key concerns in environmental governance literature: accountability and legitimacy; actors and roles; fit, interplay, and scale; adaptiveness, flexibility, and learning; evaluation and monitoring; and, knowledge. Findings from the systematic review uncover a complicated relationship with evidence of conceptual closeness as well as relational ambiguities. The findings also reveal several specific contributions from the ACM literature to each of the six key environmental governance concerns, including applied strategies for sharing power and responsibility and value of systems approaches in understanding problems of fit. More broadly, the research suggests a dissolving or fuzzy boundary between ACM and governance, with implications for understanding emerging approaches to navigate social-ecological system change. Future research opportunities may be found at the confluence of ACM and environmental governance scholarship, such as identifying ways to build adaptive capacity and encouraging the development of more flexible governance arrangements."
Adaptive Comanagement: A Systematic Review and Analysis
(2012) Plummer, Ryan; Crona, Beatrice; Armitage, Derek; Olsson, Per; Tengö, Maria; Yudina, Olga
"This paper outlines the results of a systematic review of the literature on adaptive comanagement (ACM). Adaptive comanagement is an emergent governance approach for complex social–ecological systems that links the learning function of adaptive management (experimental and experiential) and the linking (vertically and horizontally) function of comanagement. Given the rapid growth of adaptive comanagement scholarship, there is value in a systematic analysis of how the concept is being conceptualized to elucidate agreement and discrepancies and to examine the challenges this presents for cross-case comparisons and the possibility of arriving at more generalizable insights. A synthesis-based methodology has been developed involving a comprehensive search and screening of academic databases and the internet. A detailed analysis of 108 documents was undertaken to characterize the state of the ACM literature, unpack the construct of ACM, and examine relationships among aspects of ACM based on accumulated experiences to date. The systematic review and analysis reveals imprecision, inconsistency, and confusion with the concept. Robust evidentiary insights into how the variables or components of ACM interrelate as well as relate to goals and outcomes are, therefore, presently not possible. These findings lead to the discussion of a series of challenges for ACM scholarship. Opportunities remain for ACM scholars to pursue theoretical development in rigorous ways that facilitate empirically based cross-site comparisons."
Can Adaptive Comanagement Help to Address the Challenges of Climate Change Adaptation?
(2013) Plummer, Ryan
"A shift is taking place within environmental governance that draws attention to modes and instruments that respond to system dynamics, uncertainty, and contested values. Adaptive comanagement is one process being advanced to make governance operational as it emphasizes collaboration among diverse actors, functions across scales and levels, and fosters learning though iterative feedback. Although extensive experience with adaptive comanagement has been gained in relation to other environmental and resource issues, its potential contribution to the governance of adaption is largely unexplored. This paper probes how adaptive comanagement might offer support to climate change adaptation and identifies gaps in knowledge requiring attention. In drawing upon existing literature and applied experiences, it is argued that adaptive comanagement may contribute to climate change adaptation by building generalized adaptive capacity as well as providing a novel institutional arrangement to generate adaptive responses. At the same time, several questions emerge about adaptive comanagement in this context. Considerations are thus discussed for adaptive comanagement scholarship and application in addressing the challenge of climate change adaptation."
Charting the New Territory of Adaptive Co-management: A Delphi Study
(2007) Plummer, Ryan; Armitage, Derek
"Complex systems understanding implies a world characterized by dynamic, nonlinear interactions, discontinuities, and surprises. Such conditions are not amenable to conventional resource management approaches that stress command and control, and therefore, novel governance approaches more suited to complexity and uncertainty are required. Adaptive co-management has emerged as an interdisciplinary response to this need, and blends the adaptive management and collaborative management narratives. However, concepts associated with adaptive co-management are relatively new and quickly expanding from multiple perspectives. The objective of this paper is to take stock of this relatively recent concept and synthesize current thinking in terms of: (1) the core components of adaptive co-management, (2) emerging research directions, (3) the barriers to implementation of adaptive co-management, and (4) criteria for success. To explore these four areas, a three-round, classical Delphi process was administered with an expert panel of 30 individuals. All members of the expert panel initially responded to open-ended questions, and the qualitative results were analyzed using QSR NVIVO. The subsequent two rounds of the Delphi required quantitative responses in which the expert panel was asked to indicate the level of importance using a seven point likert scale associated with specific items. Results of the Delphi survey reveal a high degree of consensus on several core areas within this emerging interdisciplinary governance approach. Results of this research should foster precision with respect to employment of the term, foster scholarly discourse, and indicate areas of practical importance to adaptive co-management."
An Evaluation Framework for Adaptive Co-Management: Towards Commons Governance in an Uncertain World
(2015) Trimble, Micaela; Berkes, Fikret; Johnson, Derek; Lázaro, Marila; Medeiros, Rodrigo P.; Plummer, Ryan
"Adaptive co-management is an important governance innovation because it recognizes that social-ecological resilience requires attention to changing and diverse livelihoods and the divergent capacities and power of different groups to engage in governance. Even though this is a growing research field, efforts to evaluate the process of adaptive co-management and the relationship between goals and outcomes have been scarce. Building on existing efforts, and drawing also from the field of public participation, we propose a formative evaluation framework for adaptive co-management, which focuses on its operation and the connections between process features and outcomes. The framework consists of four components and two evaluation approaches. The components of the evaluation framework are as follows: (i) Setting (ecological, social and social-ecological, institutional, external drivers); (ii) Process (participation, relationship building, social learning); (iii) Outcomes (social capital, social learning and adaptation, decision making) and (iv) Effects (ecological, social and socio-ecological). Methodologically, the two evaluation approaches integrated in our framework are conventional-constructivist and participatory or collaborative. This framework is being refined as we implement it in two case studies, one in Uruguay and the other in Brazil. We analyze how the twofold evaluation framework for adaptive co-management, aiming at improving practice, informing policy, and building capacity, may be a catalyst for collaboration and adaptation. The proposed framework may be transferable to other governance / management approaches involving multiple actors (e.g. community, government, non-government)."
Priming the Governance System for Climate Change Adaptation: The Application of a Social-Ecological Inventory to Engage Actors in Niagara, Canada
(2014) Baird, Julia; Plummer, Ryan; Pickering, Kerrie
"Climate change adaptation presents a challenge to current top-down governance structures, including the tension between provision of public goods and actions required by diverse stakeholders, including private actors. Alternative governance approaches that facilitate participation and learning across scales are gaining attention for their ability to bring together diverse actors across sectors and to foster adaptive capacity and resilience. We have described the method and outcomes from the application of a social-ecological inventory to 'prime,' i.e., hasten the development of, a regional climate change adaptation network. The social-ecological inventory tool draws on the social-ecological systems approach in which social and ecological systems are considered linked. The tool bridges the gap between conventional stakeholder analysis and biological inventories, drawing on a social-ecological systems approach, and incorporates local knowledge as an explicit component. The process, which is dynamic and iterative, includes six phases: preparations, preliminary identification, identification of key individuals, interviewing, reviewing and enriching the inventory, and engagement. By considering the social and ecological aspects of a system, a more comprehensive inventory is achieved that provides a foundational platform to facilitate or support climate change adaptation processes that are participatory and learning oriented. Although social-ecological inventories have been used for ecosystem management, the intent of this research was to understand the potential of the tool for climate change adaptation. A social-ecological inventory was undertaken in the Niagara Region of Canada to assemble and facilitate a regional governance group to champion climate change adaptation. Moreover, the social-ecological inventory was purposefully undertaken as the initial step in priming the governance system and led into an adaptive comanagement process for climate change adaptation. Early indicators suggest that the social-ecological inventory has been instrumental in facilitating a multisectoral adaptive comanagement governance approach to climate change in the Niagara Region."