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9 - Policy Tools and Capacities for Adaptiveness in US Public Land Management

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 June 2021

By
Zachary Wurtzebach  and
Courtney Schultz
Edited by
Riyanti Djalante  and
Bernd Siebenhüner
Riyanti Djalante
Affiliation:
United Nations University, Tokyo
Bernd Siebenhüner
Affiliation:
Carl V. Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Germany
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Summary

Adaptive management and adaptive governance are key paradigms for improved adaptiveness in natural resource governance. Recent scholarship on adaptive governance highlights the importance of legal tools that provide elements of both flexibility and stability needed to enable collaborative and adaptive natural resource management across scales of socio-ecological organisation. However, a lack of understanding remains around the specific attributes of policies and the capacities needed to design and implement them in multilevel governance contexts where state bureaucracies retain significant authority for natural resource governance. In this chapter, we examine novel policy tools and capacities for adaptiveness in US federal forest management. Drawing on empirical research on collaborative forest restoration and multilevel monitoring for forest planning, we highlight the importance of different dimensions of policy capacity for the design and implementation of policy tools for improved adaptiveness. Our analysis underscores the importance of incorporating considerations of policy capacity into conceptualisations of institutional flexibility and draws attention to the importance of administrative policies, and agents in state bureaucracies, for more adaptive forms of governance.

Keywords

adaptive managementadaptive governancepolicy designpolicy capacityforest management
Type
Chapter
Information
Adaptiveness: Changing Earth System Governance , pp. 166 - 187
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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