Inspired by a recent course I taught, and my colleague’s Garry Peterson’s search for visualizations of social-ecological systems, (also here), I found myself looking for illustrations of adaptive governance – that is, modes of governance that play out at multiple levels, and that are able to link institutional, with ecosystem dynamics (see Folke et al. 2005 [PDF]. Here are a few examples of how this has been illustrated in the literature. If you have other examples, please add them in the comment field!
This first one is from Andersson and Ostrom (2008), and their analysis of decentralization of natural resource management, and the need to link these initiatives in a wider polycentric setting.
This second one is from Berkes (2007), and explores institutional linkages at multiple levels, for a conservation project in Guyana.
This illustration is from Hahn et al. (2006), and builds on several articles published about Kristianstad Vattenrike (Sweden).
This beautiful visualization is based on a network analysis by Ernstson et al (2010) about network governance of urban ecosystems in Stockholm.
And lastly, one illustration from a report [PDF] from the finalized European project Governance and Ecosystems Management for the CONservation of BIOdiversity (GEM-CON-BIO). The figure shows an analytical framework applied for a range of case studies recently published in PNAS.
These are really neat, but at the same time they strike me as a bit pie in the sky. They gloss over the presence of the private sector and the tension that arises due to the pressure to privatize gains and socialize cost and risks. So, these may be viable maps of coordination across space and scale, but they don’t really address the fundamental challenge of organizing diffuse agents to resist the depredations of focused interests.