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?

This chapter concludes the edited volume and its quest to harvest findings on the conceptual development of adaptiveness, as proposed by the Earth System Governance (ESG) Project. Adaptiveness is both a key attribute and goal of governance to anticipate, manage, and help steer complex societal, technological, and environmental changes towards more sustainable trajectories. Reiterating the main question of the book: 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? We have found that adaptiveness encompasses and relates to concepts including adaptive management and governance, adaptive capacity, vulnerability, resilience, robustness, and social learning. We elucidate how these concepts and further Harvesting Initiative findings relate to the 2018 Science and Implementation Plan of the ESG Project, in which adaptiveness is considered alongside the concept of reflexivity. We then look back on 10 years of progress to answer the so-called 'Utrecht Questions', exploring both the relevance of adaptiveness concepts in practice and their generalisability. Finally, we touch upon the 2009 ESG Science Plan and suggest how adaptiveness offers lessons for broader societal transformation and achieving global sustainability agendas.

The Earth System Governance (ESG) Project developed a Science and Implementation Plan in 2009. Adaptiveness has been introduced as an umbrella term for vulnerability, resilience, adaptation, robustness, adaptive capacity, and social learning. Adaptiveness refers to changes taken by social groups in response to, or in anticipation of, challenges created through environmental change. This chapter employs a systematic literature review (SLR) method to answer the question of how adaptiveness has been taken in the literature related to earth system governance. It first analyses research progress over time including conducting a keyword analysis. Through analysis of the most-cited papers, the chapter tries to answer the 2009 Science Plan questions: What are the politics of adaptiveness? Which governance processes foster adaptiveness? What attributes of governance systems enhance capacities to adapt? How, when, and why does adaptiveness influence earth system governance? The chapter finds that adaptiveness has not been taken up as a term, but rather as an umbrella concept. The political nature and the conflicts of adaptiveness recognise that responses to massive changes in the ecological systems substantially impact on political relations and power structures on different governance levels. The learning processes in adaptation governance have a particular interest in transformative change.

This chapter analyzes the fragmentation of architectures of earth system governance. We start with a conceptualization of governance fragmentation and its relation to concepts such as polycentricity and institutional complexity. We then review the origins of governance fragmentation and its problematization, methodological approaches to studying fragmentation and the impacts and consequences of fragmentation. We conclude by identifying future research directions in this domain. Our research shows that fragmentation is ubiquitous, that it varies among policy areas and governance areas and that it is a variable that can be assessed in comparative research across policy areas and over time. The review is based on a comprehensive study of the literature on governance fragmentation over the last decade. We draw on a Scopus search on all articles published in the subject area of social sciences from 2009 to 2018, supplemented by additional studies, such as books, book chapters and a few policy briefs and working papers.