Ecosystems

A Decade of Adaptive Governance Scholarship: Synthesis and Future Directions

The authors survey the development of the adaptive governance concept, which they define as “A range of interactions between actors, networks, organizations, and institutions emerging in pursuit of a desired state for social-ecological systems” (p. 6). Flexible, polycentric networks of diverse stakeholders can better address the uncertainty and complexity of change in social-ecological systems than

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The Butterfly Defect

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do about it

Ian Goldin and Mike Mariathasan argue that systemic risk is endemic to globalization that cannot be removed. “It is a process to be managed rather than a problem to be solved” (p. xiii). But rather than retreat from globalization and forfeit its considerable benefits, the authors argue that systemic risk requires global governance reforms to

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Understanding the Complexity of Economic, Ecological, and Social Systems

C. S. Holling argues that ecosystems, economies, and societies periodically undergo four stages of an adaptive cycle in which their levels of resilience, connectivity, and wealth (or “potential”) vary in characteristic ways. Over time, a system gets locked-in to a particular way of operating in which it accumulates immense wealth, expands connectivity to maximize efficiency,

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