Exploring Adaptive Governance for Managing Tipping Points

Abstract

Adaptive governance explains processes of reaction and social learning through leadership, experience, and experimentation. Much of this is set in frameworks of culture, power, social relations, social justice, and vulnerability. Adaptive governance stipulates cooperative management, collective action to help prepare society, business, markets, and civil organizations for the characteristics of tipping points: convulsive and unpredictable change and outcomes, and huge uncertainty over the effectiveness of initial responses. Resilience comes about when resources are released by sudden events, or by social value shifts, leading to overall transformation. Examples are offered from drought in Amazonia and the Sahel and urban flooding in Mumbai. Adaptivity is neither easy nor assured and always unpredictable. Local to global institutional fits are required but often wanting. Yet resilience can be found even in the most adverse circumstances, so we need to discover more about its character and adaptiveness.