Interdependent Social-Ecological Systems and Adaptive Governance 145desired states in response to changing conditions and disturbance events (Walker
et al, 2004). This includes social sources of resilience for dealing with uncertainty
and change and a focus on adaptive capacity (Folke et al, 2003), learning and
innovation in social-ecological systems and even the capacity to transform into
improved pathways or trajectories (Folke et al, 2005).
Because of cross-scale interplay, positive feedbacks causing non-linear dynam-
ics and possible shifts between alternate states in interdependent social-ecological
systems, new approaches to governance will be required for guiding management
and policy of ecosystem services towards sustainability. Based on several case stud-
ies Folke et al (2003) identify four critical factors for social-ecological systems that
interact across temporal and spatial scales that seem to be required for dealing with
ecosystems dynamics during periods of rapid change and reorganization:
1 learning to live with change and uncertainty;
2 combining different types of knowledge for learning;
3 creating opportunity for self-organization toward social-ecological resilience;
4 nurturing sources of resilience for renewal and reorganization.
Governance and management systems have to be designed to incorporate these
factors. The emerging perspective of adaptive governance (Dietz et al, 2003; Folke
et al, 2005) represents one such approach. Adaptive governance conveys the diffi-
culty of control, the need to proceed in the face of substantial uncertainty, and the
importance of dealing with diversity and reconciling conflict among people and
groups who differ in values, interests, perspectives, power and the kinds of infor-
mation they bring to situations (Dietz et al, 2003). Such governance fosters social
coordination that enables adaptive co-management of ecosystems. Adaptive co-
management combines the dynamic learning characteristic of adaptive manage-
ment (Gunderson et al, 1995; Carpenter and Gunderson, 2001) with the linkage
characteristic of collaborative management (Wollenberg et al, 2000; Gadgil et al,
2000; Ruitenbeek and Cartier, 2001; Folke et al, 2003; Borrini-Feyerabend et al,
2004). For such governance to be effective it requires an understanding of both
ecosystems and social-ecological interactions.
Adaptive governance relies on multi-level arrangements, including local,
regional, national, transnational and global levels, where authority has been re-
allocated upward, downward and sideways away from central states. It refers to a
type of governance that is dispersed across multiple centres of authority (Hooghe
and Marks, 2003), ‘pluricentric’ rather than ‘unicentric’ (Kersbergen and Waarden,
2004), and characterized by non-hierarchical methods of control (Ostrom, 1998;
Stoker, 1998). The common property resource research refers to such nested, qua-
si-autonomous decision making units operating at multiple scales as polycentric
institutions (Ostrom, 1998; McGinnis, 2000; Dietz et al, 2003).
We have previously proposed that there are, at least, four interacting aspects to
be concerned about in adaptive governance of complex social-ecological systems
with cross-scale dynamics (Folke et al, 2005).