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Professor Robin Craig is a co-author of “Governing Complexity: Integrating science, governance, and law to manage accelerating change in the globalized commons,” which also proposes long-term interdisciplinary studies to determine how governance of water and other environmental rights should be strengthened or lightened in the time of climate change.
Researchers study how resilience theory clarifies emergence of adaptive governance
The research group, which includes scholars from University of California, Berkeley, University of Idaho College of Law, George Washington University, and universities in Finland and Sweden, builds upon the products of a five-year interdisciplinary research project funded through the Social-Ecological Synthesis Center (SESYNC) to study adaptive governance, resilience theory, and environmental change, focusing on six water basins across the United States. The question that this expanding group of researchers has been puzzling over: how does resilience theory illuminate the emergence of adaptive governance, a spontaneous, learning-based governance system aimed at managing changing social-ecological systems, and how do the two interact?
The initial grant group of researchers published a series of articles in law reviews and the journal Ecology and Society, as well as a book, as part of its ongoing research and reporting, which has broadened beyond water basins. Several group members were graduate students who later became professors, Craig says, including one who is currently working with Craig on an undergraduate textbook on water law and policy.
The PNAS paper is also intended to encourage scientists to invite lawyers into the research process at the start rather than dismissing them as obstacles. PNAS was a top choice for that reason, Craig says, noting that one of her scientist colleagues changed his view of lawyers during the process of researching the PNAS paper. “He and the other scientists came to see that if they tell us what they’re trying to accomplish, we can probably come up with a legal pathway to get there.”
With divided politics and widespread misinformation influencing governance for good or bad, it’s more important than ever for disciplines to come together and understand what each brings to solving the problem of climate change and managing it for the benefit of socio-economic systems, Craig says. And that means government still has a critical part to play.
“The paper makes the point that government as government has a role in overseeing the process and making sure that creative new approaches don’t end up subverting good governance and equity overall,” she says. “We need new interdisciplinary institutions and scientists of all kinds and lawyers working together, but we also need to continue to make sure there’s some sort of oversight.”
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