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Adaptive Governance

Experience over the past 25 years tells us that progress toward sustainable development cannot be charted in advance, but rather it must be navigated through process of learning and adaptation.^[1] Navigating such a journey requires new approaches to public management, policy-making and natural resources management—approaches that embrace the inherent uncertainty and complexity of our inter-related economic, social and environmental systems. Three current approaches are helping create a foundation for adaptive governance, namely: integrated assessment, adaptive management and adaptive policy-making. Relevant and timely information on the direction we are going and how fast we are getting there is a core element of each of these approaches. IISD is engaged in projects to advance these approaches:

Contents

• Capacity Building for Integrated Environmental Assessment (IEA)
  IISD is working with the United Nations Environment Programme in creating capacity building materials for national and sub-national governments in integrated environmental assessment and reporting. Two resource manuals have been developed and field-tested.

• Adaptive Policy-making
  Adaptive policy-making is an extension of the adaptive management approach and IISD is engaged in advancing this relatively new aspect of adaptive governance. Experience demonstrates that policies designed implicitly or explicitly to operate within a certain range of conditions are often faced with challenges outside of that range. The result is that many policies have unintended impacts and don't accomplish their goals. Therefore, in order to help policies help people, policy-makers need ways to design policies that can adapt to a range of anticipated and unanticipated conditions.

For more information please contact IISD Project Manager/Officer, Darren Swanson.

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