Many of our oceans and seas are under threat. Strengthening the environmental rule of law for better protection and sustainable use of the oceans is therefore urgent. This Chapter introduces the concept of the environmental rule of law for oceans and the diverse perspectives and topics that will be addressed throughout the book.

This chapter explores how China’s authoritarian underpinnings may affect the trajectory of its environmental regulation. It examines whether rising environmental consciousness and a shift in social and economic norms will push China towards an era of greener growth, even if institutions take time to catch up. It then assesses how the regime’s current preference for a flexible, adaptive mode of governance will impact the future of pollution control. Will this spur on a process of “coevolution,” where local policy experimentation eventually produces an unexpected but effective set of institutions that can enforce sustainable solutions to pollution? Or will the regime’s deep-rooted principal–agent problems – combined with the bureaucracy’s growing wariness of experimentation – drive the leadership towards a pervasive “short-termism” in environmental governance?

To tackle hydrological hazards, an adaptive legal framework based on biophysical and social conditions is essential at emerging conurbations involving multiple water administrations. To secure sustainable natural resources and improve livelihoods, Chinese laws stipulate policies that guide water governance and regulate hazards. The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) in China is a regional development initiative which requires a novel and flexible transboundary legal framework for its increasingly complex and uncertain water systems due to unprecedented climate variability and socioeconomic connections. This legal framework should be able to deal with water availability, accessibility, and hazard prevention issues. It should also be able to address limitations of vagueness, rigidity, and fragmentation in the existing Chinese water legal framework. Therefore, this adaptive legal framework is suggested to manage complexities and uncertainties of regional water security issues, based on big data and social participation. Rapidly advancing big data approaches play important roles in visualizing biophysical conditions of water systems to provide tangible evidence for decision making processes. Meanwhile, participatory approaches aim to motivate the public to engage in decision making and legal reinforcement for collaborative social regulations. These approaches also facilitate efficient information flow for monitoring and evaluating hazards to support legal improvements within the China’s Five-Year Plan cycle. This chapter provides an integrated hazard management framework for dynamic sustainable development in changing climates by highlighting the importance of big data and social participation. Based on physical and social data over different locations, other regions in the world can draw lessons from this suggested framework to develop an adaptive legal framework for water governance.

The earth system is being transformed by human activities. The complex societal, technological, and environmental changes underway require governance systems that can anticipate, manage, and help steer these changes along more sustainable trajectories. A decade ago the Earth System Governance (ESG) Project proposed that adaptiveness is one of the key attributes and goals of governance in these situations. Adaptiveness is an umbrella concept encompassing and related to adaptive management and governance, adaptive capacity, vulnerability, resilience, robustness, and social learning. As part of the ESG Project Harvesting Initiative, this book aims to take stock and review a decade of research progress surrounding these themes. Its key research question is: How has adaptiveness, as an umbrella concept, been developed and applied in the context of earth system governance in the first decade after its inception, and what insights and practical solutions has it yielded? Here this ambitious question is divided into four specific questions based on the ESG Project 2009 Science Plan: (1) What are the politics of adaptiveness? (2) Which governance processes foster adaptiveness? (3) What attributes of governance systems enhance capacities to adapt? (4) How, when, and why does adaptiveness influence eartth system governance?

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.

In recent times, biomedical research has begun to tap into larger-than-ever collections of different data types. As a consequence, the notion of health data – data that are of relevance for health-related research or for clinical purposes – is expanding to include a variety of non-clinical data, as well as data provided by research participants themselves through commercially available products such as smartphones and fitness bands. To date, most scholarship and policy on these issues has focused on privacy and data protection. Less attention has been paid to addressing other aspects of the wicked challenges posed by big data health research and even less work has been geared towards the development of novel governance frameworks.  In this chapter, we make the case for adaptive and principle-based governance of big data research. We outline six principles of adaptive governance for big data research and propose key factors for their implementation into effective governance structures and processes.

Adaptivity, flexibility, and transformability are fundamental features of resilience governance. These features represent the need for governance to match the constant movements of the ecosystem and the effects of pressures on the ecosystem. It is also through adaptive and flexible features that transformability can be created. Adaptive or flexible mechanisms within law matching such governance features, could be described as legal structures and measures that create space for adaptive procedures and flexible responses also within the legal regime. However, it must be noted that law could also create a kind of resistance to flexible changes in the social-ecological system. This could be regarded as one main function connected to the institutional structure and the social resilience that law creates, where stability over time and the potential to anticipate and prevent certain developments are central. International and EU law can be seen as rather adaptive and flexible in their inherent design.

The overall study evaluates the role of law in governance for social-ecological resilience with the purpose to identify matching components for legal design. In order to review resilience governance and its compatibility with law, it is necessary to define more concrete prerequisites for effective resilience governance, in short, resilience features. This chapter defines such features, reviewed in depth throughout the study. In summary, these features are adaptivity; multilevel governance; stakeholder participation; and monitoring and control. Adaptive governance is central in resilience governance. It builds on a structure that includes actors across scales, or levels, that can gather knowledge. In large-scale international systems as the legal system, this includes science. An adaptive governance system also relies on monitoring and evaluation as part of the knowledge gathering that feeds in to the system. It allows for adjustments of the measures taken and thus transformation of the system into a more resilient state.