Adaptation Actions for a Changing Arctic: Perspectives from the Barents Area

201

Chapter 8 · A resilien cepproac h to adaptat ion act

Table 8.1 Modes of policy learning (National Research Council, 2009).

Characteristics

Learning modes

Program evaluation b

Adaptive management c

Deliberation with analysis d

Unplanned a

Assumed decision environment Assumed decision-maker

Stable

Stable

Changing

Changing

Unitary

Unitary

Unitary

Diverse

Goals

Implicit

Set by decision-maker. Stable Explicit indicators. Evaluation at end Formal assessment. Usually summative Adjust after evaluation complete

Set by decision-maker. Stable Explicit indicators. Continual monitoring Formal or informal. Continuing

Emerge from collaboration. Potentially challenging Explicit indicators. Continual monitoring

Data for learning

Unsystemic

Means of appraisal

Ad hoc

Formal assessment with deliberation on its import. Continuing

Incorporation of learning

Unplanned

Continual

Continual

a Refers to actions undertaken without consideration of learning; b involves formal assessment and expectations of project adjustments; c actions are experiments designed to perturb the decision environment in iteration; d builds on the latter but starts with the many participants of a decision to work together defining its objective and staying involved during iterative information-producing, assessment and re-assessment stages.

to take such actions has itself been demonstrated to be an important property of resilience. Defined in these terms, the capacity for self-organization is influenced by a variety of factors that can be organized in terms of their location or source being either endogenous or exogenous to the community, and in terms of the social world (including economic and political factors) and biophysical world in which the community is embedded. Scale is an important element of both social and biophysical elements of the social-ecological system, in part because of the way the influence flows.The concept of multi-level governance (Hooghe and Marks, 2001) provides one useful example. Policy and decision authority differ by level, as does the mode of exerting influence. Nation-states operate as an exogenous, context- defining, factor for local communities engaged in their more localized governance activities. Yet, local communities may also exert significant (endogenous) influence on the national governments withinwhich they are embedded.Other sources of endogenous influence can be from outside the political-policy hierarchy, from other communities at a similar scale (whether within or outside the country of which the community is part), or higher scale such as other national or international actors – what was characterized by Ostrom (2009) as ‘polycentric’. Table 8.2 identifies some of the key factors influencing the capacity for self-organization on the basis of this endogenous/ exogenous distinction. These types of structure are considered within the work on ASI (Nymand Larsen et al., 2010, 2015) to be an indicator of capacity for fate control. For any such formal structure to be operationalized, however, capacities that are endogenous to the community are also required. These can be characterized generally in terms of a community’s ability to effectively organize itself within the externally given parameters and come together around particular courses of action.Endogenous characteristics that contribute to defining this internal community capacity include qualities such as social capital, trust, cultural capital, available traditional and conventional knowledge resources

through feedbacks ”.Although this particular definition is applied to ecosystem self-organization,it also provides a useful umbrella definition for the self-organization of social-ecological systems. As noted earlier, the capacity for self-organization is defined primarily in social terms, meaning the ability of a community to substantially influence its own direction and fate, bringing in the key element of human agency. Here it is important to note that the community in question can be defined at different geographic scales (for example, a village, a city or even a country). It can also be defined as a community of interest that transcends geographic location, such as groups of people that share particular cultural practices or economic interests. Capacity for self-organization is essential for the effective exercise of agency. Self-organization as used here applies primarily to the social component of social-ecological systems and overlaps with concepts used elsewhere that include governance or fate control. It encompasses the multiple factors that contribute to a community’s capacity to identify developments that require a collective response: to define the nature and cause(s) of those challenges, and to come to some measure of agreement on suitable responses and implement those responses.This capacity is also influenced by factors exogenous to the community, including legal rights or norms that may facilitate or constrain the ways in which such efforts might be organized, or which define ownership or authority over certain resources or activities. The self-organizational capacity of a community should therefore be understood in terms of its capacity to steer itself, both in its social context and in relation to the ecosystems upon which it is dependent for the various kinds of benefits or services it enjoys. As these are provided from across scales local to global, the self-organizational capacity of communities needs to reflect these various scales. In the context of social- ecological systems, the key feature is a community managing itself within the ecosystems and resource base in which it is embedded. Resilience is therefore influenced by the choices a community makes and carries out and the subsequent effects of those actions on social-ecological systems, and the capacity