Adaptive governance and connectivity conservation : examining the interplay between science, governance and scale

Abstract

Adaptive governance links diverse actors to address multi-scaled resource management challenges (Folke et al. 2005). Effective adaptive governance requires strong connections between science, governance and practice, however these are often conceptually segregated in theory and practice. Moving beyond polarizing notions of an unbridgeable divide, Jasanoff's 'idiom of co-production' proposes that science and governance are 'co-produced' through the relational interplay of cultural, social and political norms (2004). Used as a guiding heuristic, co-production highlights the contextual dimensions of adaptive governance. Through a case study of connectivity conservation, this thesis uses a co-productive lens to re-situate adaptive governance in a critical and contextualized space. Connectivity conservation promotes innovative collaborative governance models to connect landscape-scale science with local-scale action. Motivated by conservation science, these initiatives seek to ameliorate social, institutional and ecological fragmentation. These efforts are an attempt to overcome the incongruence of social, ecological and institutional systems, known as the 'problem of fit'. Connectivity conservation is an empirical example of adaptive governance, as governance arrangements intend to be flexible and responsive to local context while maintaining coherence and alignment across vertical (jurisdictions) and horizontal (land tenures) scales. Tensions between these scales of decision-making and action pose significant challenges for connecting science with practice. Drawing on two initiatives, one in North America and one in Australia, this research examines the interplay between science, governance and scale in connectivity conservation. Despite different social, ecological and institutional contexts, both cases construct similar science-based narratives to legitimise cross-scale collaborative governance. Both promote collaboration as critical to their goals, however, through implementation, the power of that narrative was undermined. Both cases faced challenges to their legitimacy, due in part to a disconnect between science and governance at the local scale. In these cases, scientific uncertainty and fraught local politics call into question assumptions that science and governance neatly translate across scale. The two theoretical frames used in this inquiry - co-production and adaptive governance - provide explanatory power to different aspects of connectivity conservation. Co-production emphasises the dynamic and co-evolutionary interactions between science and society, while adaptive governance specifies deliberate construction of collaborative, polycentric governance structures to overcome scale mismatches between social and ecological systems. However both cases found collaboration time and resource intensive, and both struggled to link actors across scales. Their experiences highlight challenges to the theoretical promise of collaborative polycentric governance and point to critical under-theorised dimensions of legitimacy in adaptive governance. The thesis proposes a novel approach, 'co-productive governance', where governance is viewed as relational and mediated by context. A direct counter-narrative to the design principles and diagnostics approach of adaptive governance, co-productive governance explicitly reframes the task of governance from linking scales and static domains to understanding the relationships between scales and sectors, science and practice. Moving beyond the conceptual separation of social and ecological systems, co-productive governance views the relationships between science and governance as co-evolutionary and symmetrical. Co-productive governance negotiates the normative, social, cognitive and material dimensions of a problem to support legitimate relationships that link knowledge with action. Show more