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Can Law Foster Social-Ecological Resilience?
Citation:
Garmestani, A. S., C. R. Allen, AND M. H. Benson. Can Law Foster Social-Ecological Resilience? Ecology and Society. Resilience Alliance Publications, Waterloo, Canada, 18(2):37, (2013).
Impact/Purpose:
Resilience provides a conceptual framework for the integration of natural resource management with ecological responses. Achieving the goal of sustainability is complicated by uncertainty in the drivers of change, by non-linear responses in complex systems, and by the fragmentation of management and legal jurisdictions. Climate change, resource consumption patterns, deteriorating ecosystems and concomitant loss of services, the demand for energy, and aging infrastructure all have the capacity to trigger rapid non-linear change, as well as social and economic instability. Uncertainty in these factors challenges traditional approaches to governance, which often that rely on the assumption that historic data can be used to predict the future. In the face of uncertainty, greater flexibility for management across jurisdictional boundaries and among multiple sectors will be needed to foster resilience. For instance, administrative law governs the process of agency decision making and actions taken to implement substantive law. It is through administrative law that an agency might be given authority to, for example, coordinate and share information with other entities at the same or another hierarchical level. Research to translate resilience theory into specific legal reforms is needed to provide a road map to improve our ability to foster resilience.
Description:
Law plays an essential role in shaping natural resource and environmental policy. Unfortunately, many of the environmental laws now in place were developed around the prevailing scientific understanding in the 1960s and 1970s the natural world existed within an envelope of predictability – there was a “balance of nature” that could be managed and sustained. This view assumes that natural resource managers have the capacity to know how a system behaves, what its important functional components are, and how to predict the outcome of proposed activities.
