Abstract
This chapter elaborates the proposals in Box 1.1 for opening the climate change regime to adaptive governance. For that purpose we pull together the historical case materials in previous chapters and relevant theoretical material. Recall that Chapter 2 reviewed the evolution of scientific management in the climate change regime and exceptions that point toward adaptive governance. Chapter 3 reviewed Barrow as a microcosm of things to come as signs of climate change become more obvious at lower latitudes, including steps toward adaptive governance. Beyond these historical case materials, however, various aspects of the proposals for adaptive governance have been accepted or recommended in general literature on climate change, environmental hazards, and related policies, and in more theoretical literature on science, policy, and decision making. These convergent sources from different and larger bodies of experience add support to the proposals for adaptive governance in climate change. In particular, these convergent sources document a latent but coherent frame of reference in which the case materials become more than mere historical curiosities. They become foundations for an alternative frame to understand and reduce net losses from climate change. The established frame in the climate change regime is not the only construction of the relevant past and possible futures.
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Notes
James R. Schlesinger, “Systems Analysis and the Political Process,” J. Law Economics 11 (October 1968), 281–298. Schlesinger later served in the cabinet of President Ford as Secretary of Defense and in the cabinet of President Carter as Secretary of Energy.
In pragmatism, the major American contribution to world philosophy, “inquiry” connotes knowing-in-action. See Abraham Kaplan, The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science (San Francisco, CA: Chandler Publishing, 1964), 43, as quoted before Chapter 1 of this book. Consider, e.g., Donald A. Schön, “Knowing-in-Action: the New Scholarship Requires a New Epistemology,” Change 27 (November/December 1995), 27–34, at 31: “In the domain of practice, we see what John Dewey called inquiry: thought intertwined with action—reflection in and on action—which proceeds from doubt to the resolution of doubt, to the generation of new doubt.” The policy sciences are part of the pragmatic tradition. In this chapter and elsewhere we have used conceptual and theoretical tools from the policy sciences as heuristics for contextual and problem-oriented inquiry. The major works include Lasswell and Kaplan, Power and Society; Harold D. Lasswell, A Pre-View of Policy Sciences (New York, NY: Elsevier, 1971), which includes a brief introduction to the framework in Ch. 2; and the most comprehensive statement in two volumes, Harold D. Lasswell and Myres S. McDougal, Jurisprudence for a Free Society: Studies in Law, Science, and Policy (New Haven, CT, and Dordrecht, Netherlands: New Haven Press and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1992).
From the Executive Summary of IPCC, Working Group III, chaired by Frederick M. Bernthal, Climate Change: The IPCC Response Strategies (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1991), xxv.
National Assessment Synthesis Team, Climate Change Impacts on the United States: The Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Global Change Research Program, November 2000), 9, 120.
IPCC Summary for Policymakers in Climate Change 2007: Impacts Adaptation and Vulnerability Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change M. L. Parry O. F. Canziani J. P. Palutikof P. J. van der Linder and C. E. Hanson Eds. (Cambridge U.K.: Cambridge University Press 2007) 12..
Compare Tim Sherratt, “Human Elements,” in Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths, and Libby Robin, Eds., A Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in Australia (Canberra: National Museum of Australia Press, 2005), 7: “Like the suffering of an elderly person in Chicago, or an immigrant mother in North Melbourne, the lived experience of drought is not contained within the event itself.”
Compare Stephen Jay Gould, “Evolution and the Triumph of Homology, or Why History Matters,” American Scientist 74 (January–February 1986), 60–69, at 61. “History is the domain of narrative—unique, unrepeatable, unobservable, largescale, singular events.” We would add small-scale and subjective events to the list.
Projections for the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report suggest the observed trend of increasing cyclones will continue, with the largest trends in the Bering Sea region: Cyclones originating in the Aleutians are projected to follow a more northerly storm track into the west coast of Alaska with increasing frequency. W. L. Chapman and J. E. Walsh, “Simulations of Arctic Temperature and Pressure by Global Coupled Models,” J. Climate 20 (2007), 609–632.
As concluded in, e.g., Roger Pielke, Jr., and Chris Landsea, “Normalized Hurricane Damages in the United States: 1925–95,” Wea. Forecasting 13 (1998), 621–631.
Steve Rayner and Elizabeth L. Malone, “Ten Suggestions for Policymakers,” in Steve Rayner and Elizabeth L. Malone, Eds., Human Choice & Climate Change, Volume 4: What Have We Learned? (Columbus, OH: Battelle Press, 1998), 134.
W. Neil Adger, “Social Vulnerability to Climate Change and Extremes in Coastal Vietnam,” World Development 27 (1999), 249–269, at 266.
Sarah Burch and John Robinson, “A Framework for Explaining the Links between Capacity and Action in Response to Global Climate Change,” Climate Policy 7 (2007), 306–316.
When politics are factored into adaptive management, the technical connotations of “management” become less descriptive of reality than “governance.” All quotations in this paragraph are from C. S. Holling, “What Barriers? What Bridges,” in Lance H. Gunderson, C. S. Holling, and Stephen S. Light, Eds., Barriers and Bridges to the Renewal of Ecosystems and Institutions (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1995), 3–34, at 13. For similar views on adaptive management, see Donald Ludwig, Ray Hilborn, and Carl Walters, “Uncertainty, Resource Exploitation, and Conservation: Lessons from History,” Science 260 (2 April 1993), 17, 36.
Some advocates of adaptive management reject trial-and-error learning in favor of the assessment of competing hypotheses based on the experimental ideal. See, e.g., Lance Gunderson and Stephen S. Light, “Adaptive Management and Adaptive Governance in the Everglades Ecosystem,” Policy Sciences 39 (2006), 323–334, at 326.
Paul C. Stern, “A Second Environmental Science: Human-Environment Interactions,” Science 260 (25 June 1993), 1897–1899, at 1897.
Ibid.
Ibid., 1989. At the macro level Stern recognized the importance of interactions among the multiple forces driving environmentally destructive behavior—forces such as population growth, economic development, technological change, changes in human values, and institutions. “What has become clear is that the driving forces interact—that each is meaningful only in relation to the impacts of others…” (1897).
Nearly a decade and a half later, other environmental researchers reiterated a similar demand “to promote efforts that create a science of coupled systems with both biophysical and socioeconomic elements fully endogenized.” Matthew J. Kotchen and Oran R. Young, “Meeting the Challenge of the Anthropocene: Towards a Science of Coupled Human-Biophysical Systems,” Global Environ. Change 17 (2007), 149–151, at 151.
Proponents include Jared Diamond in “Epilogue: The Future of Human Society as a Science,” in his Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2005), 403–425. His views on the historical sciences, especially pp. 420-426, are quite similar to Gould’s as described below. The critics of reductionism include Robert Frodeman in “Geological Reasoning: Geology as an Interpretive and Historical Science,” GSA Bulletin 107 (August 1995), 960-968, who distinguishes epistemologies and illustrates the epistemology appropriate for geology as an interpretive and historical science.
Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1989), 277.
Ibid., 278.
Ibid., 278.
Ibid., 283.
Ibid., 289, 290.
Edward N. Lorenz, “Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow,” J. Atmos. Sci. 20 (March 1963), 130–141. For a review of the social science equivalents, see Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (New York, NY: Little, Brown, 2002).
Philip W. Anderson, “More Is Different,” Science 177 (4 August 1972), 393–396, at 393 for this and the following quotes.
John Horgan in “From Complexity to Perplexity,” Scientific American (June 1995), 104–109, at 108.
Ibid., 109.
John H. Holland, “Complex Adaptive Systems,” Daedalus 121 (Winter 1992), 17–30, at 20. Compare Herbert A. Simon, The Science of the Artificial, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 48: “As in any dynamic system that has propensities for following diverging paths from almost identical starting points, equilibrium theories of an economy can tell us little about either its present or future state.” For more on the limitations of the equilibrium assumptions in economics, see Paul 368 Notes to Pages 199-202 Ormerod, Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2005).
Holland, “Complex Adaptive Systems,” 28.
Because of the magnitude of such obstacles, constructing an agent-based model cannot be considered analogous to constructing a global climate model or defended as such. Nevertheless, at least one climate researcher is optimistic about agent-based models: “The human, non-human, and inanimate agents in a complex adaptive system can be represented as nodes in a network, and the totality of the system’s dynamics represented by the interactions across the links of this network.” See John Finnegan, “Earth System Science in the Early Anthropocene,” Global Change NewsLetter No. 55 (October 2003), 8–11, at 10.
See Horgan, “From Complexity to Perplexity,” for more on critics as well as proponents of complexity as a newly emergent discipline. In Matthew Berman, C. Nicolson, G. Kofinas, J. Tetlichi, and S. Martin, “Adaptation and Sustainability in a Small Arctic Community: Results of an Agent-Based Simulation Model,” Arctic 57 (2004), 401–414, at 401, the authors note, “The economic and demographic outcomes suggest implications for less quantifiable social and cultural changes. The model can serve as a discussion tool for a fuller exploration of community sustainability and adaptation issues.”
John H. Holland, quoted in Horgan, “From Complexity to Perplexity,” 105.
Robert W. Kates and Thomas J. Wilbanks, “Making the Global Local: Responding to Climate Change Concerns from the Ground Up,” Environment 45 (April 2003), 12–23, at 14.
Milton Friedman, “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” in Essays in Positive Economics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1953), Part III, 16–23.
Ibid., 4.
Ibid., 25.
Friedman, “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” 42–43.
The classic appraisal is William Ascher, Forecasting: An Appraisal for Policy-Makers and Planners (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Upon being asked, Professor Ascher informed us that it would be impractical to update this appraisal based on post-hoc accuracy because the relevant forecasts are now qualified by contingencies not often realized. The emissions scenarios used by the IPCC are contingencies in this sense. See also William Ascher, “The Forecasting Potential of Complex Models, Policy Sciences 13 (1981), 247–267; William Ascher, Political Forecasting: The Missing Link, J. Forecasting 1 (1982), 227–239; and Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know It? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Alice M. Rivlin, “A Public Policy Paradox,” J. Public Policy Manage. 4 (1984), 17–22. Compare Ascher, “The Forecasting Potential of Complex Models,” 247: “[W]hile the accuracy of complex models in forecasting trends in such fields as economics and energy is, and will remain, undistinguished, complex models’ special virtues of preserving counter-intuitive results and representing subsystem interdependence could be used to better advantage than current practice permits.”
Brian Greene, “The Universe on a String,” New York Times (20 October 2006), A23.
Henri Pirenne, “What Are Historians Trying to Do?” in S. A. Rice, Ed., Methods in Social Science, 435–45, at 443 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1931). See also Carl J. Becker, “Everyman His Own Historian,” Amer. Historical Rev. XXXVII (January 1932), 221–236.
Herbert A. Simon, Models of Man: Social and Rational (New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, 1957), 198. Emphasis in original. The equivalent in economics is formulated in Ormerod, Why Most Things Fail, e.g., on 35, 56, 117. The equivalent in the policy sciences is the maximization postulate. “Since the actors are living forms, they participate selectively in what they do. We describe this selective characteristic by the maximization postulate, which holds that living forms are predisposed to complete acts in ways that are perceived to leave the actor better off than if he had completed them differently. The postulate draws attention to the actor’s own perception of alternative act completions open to him in a given situation.” Lasswell, A Pre-View of Policy Sciences, 16. Emphasis in original. Compare Simon, Models of Man, 199, on the first consequence of the principle of bounded rationality: “[T]he intended rationality of an actor requires him to construct a simplified model of the real situation in order to deal with it. He behaves rationally with respect to this model, and such behavior is not even approximately optimal with respect to the real world.”
A chunk is the smallest meaningful unit of information; these limits are surmounted by rechunking information into larger chunks. Thus, an unfamiliar long-distance telephone number in the United States consists of 10 chunks. But the number of chunks drops to six if the three-digit area code and the three-digit local exchange are recognized as one chunk each. This and other basic parameters are reviewed and qualified in Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), Ch. 3, “The Psychology of Thinking.” The seminal article is George A. Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” Psych. Rev. 63 (1956), 81–97.
Herbert A. Simon, “Human Nature in Politics: The Dialogue of Psychology with Political Science,” Amer. Pol. Sci. Rev. 79 (1985), 293–304, at 302.
Ibid., at 302.
Ibid., 301. Similarly, Lasswell and Kaplan, Power and Society, 70, spelled out one methodological implication of the maximization postulate: “Whenever a person chooses a course of action, we are to look for the specific values and expectations that make it appear to the actor most economical to him”—where “economical” refers to the expected ratio of gains to losses.
Simon, “Human Nature in Politics,” 301. On the limited mileage from general laws in the hard sciences, see C. Jakob, G. Tselioudis, and T. Hume, “The Radiative, Cloud and Thermodynamic Properties of the Major Tropical Western Pacific Cloud Regimes,” J. Climate, 18 (2005), 1203–1215. On the call for more empiricism in economics, see Wassily Leontief, “Letter on Academic Economics,” Science (9 July 1982), 104–105; and more recently Barbara R. Bermann, “Needed: A New Empiricism,” Economists’ Voice (March 2007), 1–4, at 3: “A knowledge of business behavior based on observation rather than conjecture could revolutionize the formation of public policy and the managing of the business cycle.” This article is accessible through www.bepress.com/ev.
Harold D. Lasswell, Daniel Lerner, and Ithiel deSola Poole, “Political Symbols,” in The Comparative Study of Symbols: An Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1952), 11. Emphasis in original.
Stephen Jay Gould, The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending the Gap between Science and the Humanities (New York, NY: Harmony Books, 2003), 256.
Donald T. Campbell, “‘Degrees of Freedom’ and the Case Study,” Comparative Political Studies 8 (July 1975), 178–193, at 182.
For examples, see Ronald D. Brunner, “A Paradigm for Practice,” Policy Sciences 39 (2006), 135–167, at 137–143.
Preface to J. T. Houghton et al., Eds., Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, Contribution of Working Group I to the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Andrew Revkin, “Skeptics on Human Climate Impact Seize on Cold Spell,” New York Times (2 March 2008), 14.
Ibid.
Susanne C. Moser and Lisa Dilling, “Making Climate Hot: Communicating the Urgency and Challenge of Global Climate Change,” Environment (December 2004), 32–46, at 38.
Quoted in Lasswell and Kaplan, Power and Society, 106n.
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York, NY: Free Press, 1965), 28, first published in 1922.
For the quote, components, and cross-cutting processes, see, respectively, 1, 2, and 3 in the Executive Summary to Bo Lim and Erika Spanger-Siegfried (Eds.) and Ian Burton, Elizabeth Malone and Saleemul Huq, Adaptation Policy Frameworks for Climate Change: Developing Strategies, Policies and Measures (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Lasswell, A Pre-View of Policy Sciences, 85–86.
If so, then Hans-Martin Füssel, “Vulnerability: a Generally Applicable Conceptual Framework for Climate Change Research,” Global Environ. Change 17 (2007), 155–167, is more constructive as a guide to translation across frames of reference than as an attempt to establish a consistent terminology. A decade ago Rayner and Malone, “Ten Suggestions,” 134, observed, “No standard framework exists for identifying different sources of vulnerability, but clearly they are many and complex.” A standard framework is not likely but neither is it necessary from our standpoint.
Lee J. Cronbach, “Beyond the Two Disciplines of Scientific Psychology,” Amer. Psych. (February 1975), 124–125. Emphasis in original. This was a Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award address to the American Psychological Association.
On analogues, see William B. Meyer, Karl W. Butzer, Thomas E. Downing, B. L. Turner II, George W. Wenzel, and James L. Westcoat, “Reasoning by Analogy,” in Steve Rayner and Elizabeth L. Malone, Eds., Human Choice & Climate Change, Volume 3: Tools for Policy Analysis (Columbus, OH: Battelle Press, 1998), 218–289.
Kaplan, The Conduct of Inquiry, 43. Pragmatism is one of the intellectual origins of the policy sciences.
Jim Collins, quoted in Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World (2004), 33, accessed at http://www.thebreakthrough.org/images/Death_of_Environmentalism. pdf.
Gould, Wonderful Life, 282.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed., Enlarged (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 188–189, for this and the previous quotes.
Ronald D. Brunner, “Myths, Scientific and Political,” 5–12, at 6, in The Objectivity Crisis: Rethinking the Role of Science in Society, Chairman’s Report to the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, House of Representatives, 103rd Congress 1st Session, Serial D (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, June 1993).
Harold D. Lasswell, Democratic Character (Glencoe, IL.: Free Press, 1951), 524. Emphasis in original.
Lasswell and Kaplan, Power and Society, xxii–xxiii.
Lasswell, A Pre-View of Policy Sciences, 39. Emphasis in the original.
In general, compare George E. Brown, Jr., “The Objectivity Crisis,” Amer. J. Physics 60 (September 1992), 779–781, at 789: “It seems to me that science-as articulated by scientists and policy-makers alike-has promised much more than it can deliver… At the same time, our faith in science, and the knowledge and technology that it creates, may be an explicit roadblock to social action.”
Lasswell, A Pre-View of Policy Sciences, 40.
Ibid., 28–29.
Gould, Wonderful Life, 290.
Amanda H. Lynch, principal investigator, and coprincipal investigators Ronald D. Brunner, Judith A. Curry, James A. Maslanik, Linda Mearns, Anne Jensen, and Glenn Sheehan, SGER: To Explore the Feasibility of Collaborative Resident-Scientist Climate Policy Research on the Alaskan North Slope Coastal Region (proposal to the National Science Foundation, 1999). The proposal also mentions that Jim Maslanik helped prepare the way: “[T]he objectives in this proposal were discussed with Barrow researchers and townspeople during a community meeting in Barrow [set up] by co-PI J. Maslanik on April 5, 1999, and during subsequent individual meetings. The response to the proposed idea was uniformly positive, and was reflected in an extended discussion period…” After the proposal, we dropped the term “stakeholder” in favor of “participants” in the project.
Amanda H. Lynch, principal investigator, and coprincipal investigators Ronald D. Brunner, Judith A. Curry, James A. Maslanik, and James P. Syvitski, An Integrated Assessment of the Impacts of Climate Variability on the Alaskan North Slope Coastal Region (proposal to the National Science Foundation, 2000), sec. 4. Other information in this paragraph can be found in the Project Summary.
Lynch et al., An Integrated Assessment of the Impacts of Climate Variability on the Alaskan North Slope Coastal Region, sec. 4.
Bob Harcharek, Ph.D. in sociology, in a signed review for the editor of Arctic of a manuscript published in slightly revised form as Ronald D. Brunner, Amanda H. Lynch, Jon C. Pardikes, Elizabeth N. Cassano, Leanne R. Lestak, and Jason M. Vogel, “An Arctic Disaster and Its Policy Implications,” Arctic 57 (December 2004), 336–346. The manuscript was received by the journal in October 2002; publication was delayed by other articles included in the same special issue.
Malone, “Ten Suggestions,” Ibid., 134, 136. Emphasis in original.
Malone, “Ten Suggestions,” Ibid., 111, 114. Emphasis in original.
Ibid., 113–114. Compare Richard J. T. Klein, E. Lisa F. Schipper, and Surage Dessai, “Integrating Mitigation and Adaptation into Climate and Development Policy: Three Research Questions,” Environ. Sci. Policy 8 (2005), 579–588, at 581: “[A] daptation typically works best on the scale of an impacted system, which is regional at best, but mostly local.”
Thomas L. Friedman, “The Power of Green,” New York Times Magazine (15 April 2007).
Rayner and Malone, “Ten Suggestions,” 130. However, the index at the end of the four volumes they edited has no entry for “politics,” only one entry under “political actor,” and three entries under “nation states” (as political actors).
Box 18.3 in the full report notes that “the term ‘mainstreaming’ has emerged to describe the integration of policies and measures that address climate change into development planning and ongoing sectoral decision-making.” R. J. T. Klein, S. Huq, F. Denton, T. E. Downing, R. G. Richels, J. B. Robinson, and F. L. Toth, “Inter-relationships Between Adaptation and Mitigation,” 768, in M. L. Parry, O. F. Canziani, J. P. Palutikof, P. J. van der Linden, and C. E. Hanson, Eds., Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 745–777.
Rayner and Malone, “Ten Suggestions,” 129. Emphasis in original.
Timothy O’Riordan, Chester L. Cooper, Andrew Jordan, Steve Rayner, Kenneth R. Richards, Paul Runci, and Shira Yoffe, “Institutional Frameworks for Political Action,” in Steve Rayner and Elizabeth Malone, Eds. (1998), Human Choice & Climate Change, Volume 1: The Societal Framework (Columbus, OH: Battelle Press, 1998), 345–439, at 428.
David. W. Cash and Susanne C. Moser, “Linking Global and Local Scales: Designing Dynamic Assessment and Management Processes,” Global Environ. Change 10 (2000), 109–120, at 117–118. “Experiment-based” in this context is better understood as action-based because intervention in an open, evolving system is neither controlled nor replicable in all of its aspects.
Felicity Barringer, “Paper Sets off A Debate on Environmentalism’s Future,” New York Times (6 February 2005), 1. We accessed Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, The Death of Environmentalism, 37 pp., at http://www.thebreakthrough. org/images/Death_of_Environmentalism.pdf. Their argument is developed further in Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Break Through: From the Death of Envirionmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).
Shellenberger and Nordhaus, The Death of Environmentalism, 15.
Nordhaus, The Death of Environmentalism Ibid., 9. Emphasis in original.
Nordhaus, The Death of Environmentalism Ibid., 8.
Nordhaus, The Death of Environmentalism Ibid., 10. A case in point is Bjorn Lomborg, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), in which the author accepts climate change science as sound but rejects the policy implications supported in the epistemic community, including the Kyoto Protocol.
Nordhaus, The Death of Environmentalism Ibid., 26. Shellenberger and Nordhaus used the term “special interest” in approximately the same sense as we used it in Ch. 1.
Nordhaus, The Death of Environmentalism Ibid., 26.
Nordhaus, The Death of Environmentalism Ibid., 26.
Nordhaus, The Death of Environmentalism Ibid., 5.
For example, Friedman’s green ideology supports public and private investments in the development of cleaner and more efficient energy technologies, which are expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, create new jobs, and reduce dependence on oil imports that finance terrorists and authoritarianism abroad. See Friedman, “The Power of Green.” See also Joshua W. Busby, “Climate Change and National Security: An Agenda for Action,” Council on Foreign Relations Special Report, CRS No. 32 (November 2007).
Steve Rayner and Elizabeth L. Malone, “Social Science Insights into Climate Change,” Steve Rayner and Elizabeth L. Malone, Eds., Human Choice & Climate Change, Volume 4: What Have We Learned? (Columbus, OH: Battelle Press, 1998), 71–107, at 73.
Dennis Wenger, “Hazards and Disasters Research: How Would the Past 40 Years Rate?” Natural Hazards Observer XXXI (September 2006), 1–3, at 2.
Drawing on the results of their survey of assessment participants and their own knowledge, the team prepared discussion notes for a workshop it convened in Washington in April 2004. Workshop invitees included assessment participants, potential users of assessments, and domain or policy experts not involved in the assessment. See M. Granger Morgan et al., “Learning from the U.S. National Assessment of Climate Change Impacts,” Environ. Sci. Technol. 39 (2005), 9023–9032.
Ibid., 9031.
Ronald D. Brunner, “Policy and Global Change Research: A Modest Proposal,” Climatic Change 32 (February 1996), 121–147, sec. 2.
Morgan et al., “Learning from the U.S. National Assessment of Climate Change Impacts,” 9028.
Rayner and Malone, “Ten Suggestions for Policymakers,” 126.
Cash and Moser, “Linking Global and Local Scales: Designing Dynamic Assessment and Management Processes,” 118.
See, respectively, Harold D. Lasswell, “Technique of Decision Seminars,” Midwest J. Political Sci. IV (August 1960), 213–236, and Ronald D. Brunner, Christine H. Colburn, Christina M. Cromley, Roberta A. Klein, and Elizabeth A. Olson, Finding Common Ground: Governance and Natural Resources in the American West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002).
For advice on communicating with mass publics on climate change mitigation see Moser and Dilling, “Making Climate Hot,” which is based on a similar concept of communication. More generally, see Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Other Die (New York, NY: Random House, 2007).
Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 114–115.
Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 111.
Ibid., 114–115.
Ibid., xi.
Herbert A. Simon, Reason in Human Affairs (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983), 22.
Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 81. However, p. 66 notes evidence that “information can be added in a second or two to locations (variable places) in images that are already present in an expert’s long-term memory. Such images are called retrieval structures or templates.” If so, the difference between a second or two and eight seconds rewards reinforcement of structures or templates in long-term memory and penalizes their expansion. Retrievals from long-term to short-term memory are measured in fractions of a second.
Simon, Reason in Human Affairs, 16. The Olympian model is also called “Subjective Expected Utility” or SEU. For a fuller description and critique, see 12–17.
Ibid., 20.
Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 25–27. Emphasis added.
Simon, Reason in Human Affairs, 23.
Ibid., 19–20.
Ibid., 19.
Ibid., 20–22.
Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 128.
Simon, Reason in Human Affairs, 78.
Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 30. Emphasis in original.
Ibid.
Ibid., 35.
Ibid., 147–148.
Ibid., 149.
Ibid..
Compare Lasswell, A Pre-View of Policy Sciences, 56: “By definition a problem is a perceived discrepancy between goals and an actual or anticipated state of affairs.”
Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 129.
Ibid., 122. In connection with computer programs that solve problems, Simon described these associations as “productions” that are reminiscent of “if-then” rules in the internal models of agents in Holland’s models of complex adaptive systems. “Each production is a process that consists of two parts—a set of tests or conditions and a set of actions. The actions contained in a production are executed whenever the conditions of that production are satisfied” (102). Emphasis in original.
Ibid., 123.
Ibid., 193–194.
Ibid., 8.
Ibid., 148.
Ibid., 196. Simon elaborated the point on p. 105: “Suppose a problem-solving system is able to solve a particular problem but does it inefficiently after a great deal of search. The path to a solution finally discovered, stripped of all extraneous branching in the search, could serve as a worked-out example” to inform subsequent searches.
Ibid., 124.
Simon, Reason in Human Affairs, 106.
Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 43–44. Compare Harold D. Lasswell, Psychopathology and Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1930 and 1977), 185–186: “Political acts are joint acts; they depend upon emotional bonds. … People who are emotionally bound together are not yet involved in a political movement. Politics begins when they achieve a symbolic definition of themselves in relation to demands upon the world.”
Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 144.
Martin Landau, “Redundancy, Rationality, and the Problem of Duplication and Overlap,” Public Administration Review (July/August 1969), 346–358; all quotations is this paragraph except the last are from pp. 355–356.
Martin Landau and Russell Stout, Jr., “To Manage Is Not to Control: Or the Folly of Type II Errors,” Public Administration Review (March/April 1979), 148–156, at 155.
D. T. Campbell, “Reforms as Experiments,” in F. Caro, Ed., Readings in Evaluation Research (New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1969), Ch. 18, 233–261, at 234. An earlier version was published in Amer. Psych. 24 (April 1969), 409–429. A related critique of scientific management, Martin Landau, “On the Concept of a Self-Correcting Organization,” Public Administration Review (November/December 1973), 533–542, argued that organizations aspiring to scientific management are not scientific enough; they do not provide adequately for error correction, or feedback.
Campbell, “Reforms as Experiments,” 234–235.
Ibid., 236.
Ibid., 233.
Ibid., 255.
Lasswell, Psychopathology and Politics, 188.
Lasswell, A Pre-View of Policy Sciences, 62–63. Emphasis in original.
Rayner and Malone, “Ten Suggestions,” 127.
Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York, NY: Random House, 1971), 105. Emphasis in original. Alinsky’s politics are almost exclusively class based, but his rules are springboards for insight into promotional politics generally. His rules were used, e.g., to train community organizers for Barack Obama’s election campaign beginning in 2007.
Ibid.
Ibid., 106.
Ibid., 81. Alinsky also added to what we have found in the climate-related literature. For example, pp. 91–92: “Another maxim in effective communication is that people have to make their own decisions.” A community organizer “will not ever seem to tell the community what to do; instead, he will use loaded questions” in the spirit of Socratic method. For example, “His response to questions about what he [the organizer] thinks becomes a non-directive counterquestion, ‘What do you think?’ His job becomes one of weaning the group away from any dependency upon him. Then his job is done.”
On the amount of power, consider Harold D. Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan, Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950), 77. “The weight of power is the degree of participation in the making of decisions; its scope consists of the values whose shaping and enjoyment are controlled; and the domain of power consists of the persons over whom power is exercised. All three enter into the notion of ‘amount’ of power.”
Rayner and Malone, “Ten Suggestions,” 132.
Steve Rayner and Elizabeth L. Malone, “Why Study Human Choice and Climate Change,” in Steve Rayner and Elizabeth L. Malone, Eds., Human Choice & Climate Change, Volume 4: What Have We Learned? (Columbus, OHhio: Battelle Press, 1998), 1–31, at 30.
Rayner and Malone, “Ten Suggestions,” 132. The chapter mentioned is Timothy O’Riordan et al., “Institutional Frameworks for Political Action,” which observes, p. 427, “The FCCC provides an important symbolic framework expressive of worldwide concern about climate and about the persistent issues of global development that are inextricably bound up with it. However, the real business of responding to climate concerns may well be through smaller, often less formal, agreements among states, states and firms, and NGOs and communities.”
Rayner and Malone, “Ten Suggestions,” 120.
William C. Clark, “Environmental Globalization,” in Joseph S. Nye Jr. and John D. Donahue, Eds., Governance in a Globalizing World (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2000), Ch. 4, 86–108, at 101.
John D. Donahue, Eds., Governance in a Globalizing World (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2000), Ibid., 104. Compare Ian Burton, Livia Bizikova, Thea Dickinson, and Yvonne Howard, “Integrating Adaptation into Policy: Upscaling Evidence from Local to Global,” Climate Policy 7 (2007), 371–376, at 373: “Much of the current thinking is still mired in the false structures of the Convention dating from 1992. Extending the life of the Kyoto Protocol is still considered the first priority.”
Thomas Dietz, Elinor Ostrom, and Paul C. Stern, “The Struggle to Govern the Commons,” Science 302 (12 December 2003), 1907–1912, at 1907. They refer to Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (13 December 1968), 1243–1248.
Dietz, Ostrom, and Stern, “The Struggle to Govern the Commons,” 1908.
Ibid., 1910.
Ibid., 1910. The two sentences preceding this one affirmed both field testing (experimentation) and the first part of the linear model (emphasis added): “Sustained research coupled to an explicit view of national and international policies can yield the scientific knowledge necessary to design appropriate adaptive institutions. Sound science is necessary for commons governance, but not sufficient.”
Thomas J. Wilbanks, “Scale and Sustainability,” Climate Policy 7 (2007), 278–287, at 282, including the points quoted below. The more theoretical parts of this article generally assume a climate change mitigation context. Section 6, 284–285, considers “Climate Change Adaptation as an Example.”
Ibid., 282.
Ibid., 284. Consider also David. W. Cash, W. Neil Adger, Fikret Berkes, Po Garden, Louis Lebel, Per Olsson, Lowell Pritchard, and Oran Young, “Scale and Cross-Scale Dynamics: Governance and Information in a Multilevel World, Ecology and Society 11 (2006), 8–18, on three responses to existing problems of scale: institutional interplay across levels and scales, comanagement, and boundary or bridging organizations.
Wilbanks, “Scale and Sustainability,” 281. We believe the point is even more important for adaptation. Wilbanks, at 281, also envisions procedurally rational decision making: “If the results are not sufficient to address imbalances and associated impacts, the process iterates further.”
Herman A. Karl, Lawrence E. Susskind, and Katherine H. Wallace, “A Dialogue, Not a Diatribe: Effective Integration of Science and Policy through Joint Fact Finding,” Environment 49 (January/February 2007), 20–34, at 33.
Madeleine Heyward, “Equity and International Climate Change Negotiations: A Matter of Perspective,” Climate Policy 7 (2007), 518–534, at 518.
Burton et al., “Integrating Adaptation into Policy: Upscaling Evidence from Local to Global,” 375.
Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 183–184.
Ibid., 186.
Ibid., 198.
Clinton as quoted, inter alia, in two reviews of literature on scaling up: Jeffrey Bradach, “Going to Scale: The Challenge of Replicating Social Programs,” Stanford Innovation Review (Spring 2003), 19–25, at 19; and Arntraud Hartmann and Johannes F. Linn (2008), Scaling Up: A Framework and Lessons for Development Effectiveness from Literature and Practice, Working Paper 5 (Washington, D.C.: Wolfensohn Center for Development, Brookings Institution, October 2008).
Bradach, “Going to Scale,” 19. Emphasis in original.
Ibid., 23.
Hartmann and Linn, Scaling Up, 36.
Everett M. Rogers, “Centralized and Decentralized Diffusion Systems,” in his Diffusion of Innovations, 4th ed. (New York, NY: Free Press, 1995), 364–369, at 364.
Ibid., 363–364.
Etienne C. Wenger and William M. Snyder, “Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier,” Harvard Business School (January-February 2000), 139–145, at 139, 142. See also Etienne C. Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Recall Simon on the significance of such group identifications and commitments.
Wenger and Snyder, “Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier,” 141.
Snyder, “Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier,” Ibid., 142.
Snyder, “Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier,” Ibid., 143.
Snyder, “Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier,” Ibid., 140.
Snyder, “Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier,” Ibid., 145.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, “America’s Edge: Power in the Networked Century,” Foreign Affairs (January/February 2009), 94–113, at, respectively, 94, 99–100, 112, and 98.
Landau, “Redundancy, Rationality, and the Problem of Duplication and Overlap,” 356.
For example, on the Los Angeles Green Building Ordinance enacted in 2008, see Ashley Lowe, Josh Foster, and Steve Winkelman, Ask the Climate Question: Adapting to Climate Change Impacts in Urban Regions (Washington, D.C.: Center for Clean Air Policy, June 2009), 17. Similarly, on the multiple functions of widespread urban forestry initiatives see ibid., 12–13.
Landau, “Redundancy, Rationality, and the Problem of Duplication and Overlap,” 356.
Ibid., 348.
Ibid., 352.
Ibid., 351.
Ibid., 354.
Robert A. Dahl, The New American Political (Dis)order (Berkeley, CA: Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California, 1994), 5; see also pp. 1–2. For more recent diagnoses and proposed reforms by former Senators, see David Boren, A Letter to America (Norman, OK.: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), and Ernest F. Holling and Kirk Victor, Making Government Work (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2008).
Landau, “Redundancy, Rationality, and the Problem of Duplication and Overlap,” 352.
Ibid., 356, anticipated that “large-scale organizations function as selforganizing systems and tend to develop their own parallel circuits: not the least of which is the transformation of such ‘residual’ parts as ‘informal groups’ into constructive redundancies.”
Thomas L. Friedman, “Flush with Energy,” New York Times (10 August 2008).
This should be distinguished from the derivation of predictions or other conclusions about the particular case from general propositions. For critiques of derivation that apply here, see “A Note on Derivations,” in Lasswell and McDougal, Jurisprudence for a Free Society, 759–786; “Methodology of Morals,” in Kaplan, American Ethics and Public Policy, 90–101; and earlier in the text of this chapter, Simon’s critique of the Olympian or SEU model of rationality, and Kuhn’s observations on the function of Newton’s second law in problem solving.
Lasswell, Lerner, and Pool, “Political Symbols,” Ch. 1, 1–25, at 4. Emphasis in original. Of course these writers are not responsible for our selection and use of these propositions. On the nature and functions of political myth, see same. Compare Brunner, “A Paradigm for Practice,” 144: “A paradigm is a myth specialized to explaining and justifying scientific practices and claims of scientific knowledge, just as an ideology is a myth specialized to explaining and justifying political practices and demands.”
Lasswell and Kaplan, Power and Society, 61–62, e.g. What might be dismissed as unnecessary jargon is better understood as functional terms defined in relation to other terms in a comprehensive framework designed for contextual inquiry. In any case, translations across different frames of reference are sometimes necessary and always possible.
Lasswell, Lerner, and Pool, “Political Symbols,” 4. Emphasis in original.
On the need for empirical inquiry, consider the response of a lobbyist on Capitol Hill when asked “what sort of understanding of Washington is essential” for his work. “You got to understand what motivates the politician. Dummies, even in this town, think that politicians just want to be reelected.” Then he spelled out his understanding of a member of Congress. Charles Walker, as quoted in Elizabeth Drew, “A Reporter at Large: Charlie,” The New Yorker (9 January 1978), 32f.
See Mary Robinson, “Climate Change Is an Issue of Human Rights,” The Independent (London) (10 December 2008). See also the International Council on Human Rights Policy, Climate Change and Human Rights: A Rough Guide (Geneva, 2008).
Here we apply a proposition from Lasswell and Kaplan, Power and Society, 113: “Propaganda in accord with predispositions strengthens them; propaganda counter to predispositions weakens them only if supported by factors other than propaganda.”
Lasswell, Lerner, and Pool, “Political Symbols,” 5. Emphasis in original.
Ibid., 5, 6. Emphasis in original.
Karl et al., “A Dialogue, Not a Diatribe,” 24.
Compare Lasswell, Lerner, and Poole, “Political Symbols,” 10. Emphasis in original. “Any general symbol may be elaborated in support of any specific proposition; any general symbol may be applied or nonapplied in practice…. During short periods of time for specific groups, the linking of general with specific symbols and of symbols with overt actions may be stable.”
McDougal, Lasswell, and Reisman, International Law Essays, 201. The authors continue, “The core test of constitutive and public order decision at any level of interaction is its immediate and prospective contribution to the realization of human dignity in a world commonwealth, sufficiently strong to protect the common interest and sufficiently flexible to permit the widest range of diversity to flourish.”
Ibid., 209.
Ibid., 211.
Robert A. Dahl, After the Revolution? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 59.
Ibid., 93. The Chinese Box is a useful simile suggesting a hierarchy of communities up to the most inclusive global community. However, the implication that each smaller box is wholly contained within a larger one is misleading. On the problems caused by eliminating overlaps, see Christopher Alexander, “A City Is Not A Tree,” Architectural Forum 122 (April and May 1965), 58-62 and 58–61
Ibid., 102.
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© 2010 Ronald D. Brunner and Amanda H. Lynch
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Brunner, R.D., Lynch, A.H. (2010). Opening the Regime. In: Adaptive Governance and Climate Change. American Meteorological Society, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-935704-01-0_4
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