Stakeholder participation is key for resilience governance and management. Participation is important for bottom-up approaches in adaptive governance, where self-organization and local knowledge are important factors. Different kinds of participation are also important for structural and monitoring issues in multi-level governance. Stakeholders, or NGOs, are in this sense important both in transferring knowledge and information in multidimensional governance structures and for bridging structural or institutional gaps. Emphasizing the role of stakeholder participation can be seen as a democratic and decentralized approach. Participation by the public is seen as an important feature for assuring transparency, legitimacy, and accountability, which have been established as important for governance structures in general. Trust building and effectiveness are also closely tied to issues of participation. Law generally includes pathways for participation at all levels. However, the purpose of participation in legal structures is somewhat different than the purpose of participation in resilience governance.

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.