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Assessing the adaptive capacity of multi-level water governance: ecosystem services under climate change in Mälardalen region, Sweden

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Abstract

Adaptive and multi-level governance is often called for in order to improve the management of complex issues such as the provision of natural resources and ecosystem services. In this case study, we analyse the contemporary multi-level governance system that manages water resources and its ecosystem services in a fresh water lake in Sweden. We assess the relative importance and barriers of three commonly highlighted components of adaptive governance: “feeding ecological knowledge into the governance system”, “use of ecological knowledge to continuously adapt the governance system”, and “self-organisation by flexible institutions acting across multiple levels”. Findings reveal that the trickiest aspect of adaptive governance capacity to institutionalise is the iterative nature of feedbacks and learning over time, and that barriers to the spread of knowledge on social-ecological complexity through the governance systems are partly political, partly complexity itself, and partly a more easily resolved lack of coordination. We call for caution in trusting crisis management to build more long-lasting adaptive capacity, and we conclude that a process of institutionalising adaptive capacity is inherently contingent on political process putting issues on the agenda.

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Notes

  1. More than 100,000 lakes and 600,000 km of streams, and 23% of the land area constitute wetlands (Statistics Sweden 2008; Swedish Environmental Protection Agency 2012).

  2. For example, the annual Mälarkonferensen and a seminar series about local water management, both organised by the Mälaren Water Council.

  3. http://www.miljomal.nu/sv/Environmental-Objectives-Portal/.

  4. This is differently organised in different regions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), Stockholm, Sweden

    Björn Nykvist

  2. Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Björn Nykvist, Sara Borgström & Emily Boyd

  3. Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Department of Sustainable Development, Environmental Science and Engineering, Stockholm, Sweden

    Sara Borgström

  4. Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS), Lund, Sweden

    Emily Boyd

Authors
  1. Björn Nykvist
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  2. Sara Borgström
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  3. Emily Boyd
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Correspondence to Björn Nykvist.

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Editor: Helmut Haberl

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Nykvist, B., Borgström, S. & Boyd, E. Assessing the adaptive capacity of multi-level water governance: ecosystem services under climate change in Mälardalen region, Sweden. Reg Environ Change 17, 2359–2371 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-017-1149-x

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