Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Ecological restoration is embedded within natural resource management and con-
servation actions that occur in land tenure, policy, and politics, which, in turn, are
subsets of spatial and institutional contexts of interdependent social-ecological sys-
tems that shape the emergent patterns of landscapes and regions. Many developed
countries, such as Australia, Canada, the United States and some European countries,
seem to have overemphasized an entrenched, narrow, and individualistic view of
property rights (especially individual tenure of land and resources) and related poli-
cies at the expense of other forms of tenure and resource rights that might facilitate
multiscale, sustainable resource governance and environmental restoration. Govern-
ment agencies and sectoral interests tend to reflect similarly narrow jurisdictional ap-
proaches. Conservation strategies have also tended to be constricted to an individually
bounded, public- or private-tenure approach. However, social-ecological systems op-
erating across landscapes of ecosystem processes, various land tenures, and policies
produce patterns and processes (slow and fast) reflecting complex systems properties,
including emergence. For sustainability purposes in the long term, continuing emer-
gence of resilience and reflexive reorganizing capacity is required to maintain essen-
tial ecosystem services and support institutional adaptation within and across social-
ecological scales of context—spaces with social and ecological meaning for human
and institutional engagement. Experiences related in this topic demonstrate that we
can be innovative; we can redesign current institutions and create new institutions to
operate across boundaries and jurisdictions to restore and adaptively manage social-
ecological systems.
Policies for secure property rights are crucial for sustainable resource governance
and environmental management, but they also create problems for the management
of externalities. Our systems of property rights, administrative jurisdictions, policy,
and resource management institutions need to be more seamlessly integrated at vari-
ous levels of resource governance and institutional arrangements to match landscape
scales of social-ecological interdependencies. In addition to the “operational rules” for
successful resource governance institutions, several other principles are considered
essential for the successful design of ecologically sustainable, cross-scale interact-
ions of social-ecological systems. An increasing number of “reality” projects—on-the-
ground, learning-by-doing trials by collaborators—demonstrate novel arrangements
for cross-scale, cross-boundary resource management and ecological restoration.
Building flexible adaptive capacity from novel, on-the-ground, cross-tenure, and cross-
jurisdictional, collective action will also provide transferable and adaptive solutions
with appropriate incentives to enhance multiple scales of resource management.
Power-sharing built on growing relationships of trust is required for successful col-
laboration or comanagement of resources and the environment. The power of poli-
tics, or the politics of power, will only promote adaptive sustainability outcomes if all
key players can genuinely influence the definition of context, circumstances, options,
decisions, and action. To be most effective and efficient, the powers of stakeholding
actors should be congruent with the smallest scale (most local) of civic-social and eco-
logical context and policy. Power sharing is not the starting point but emerges from
the process, often in itself an institutional evolution or rearrangement including
