Climate change collaboration among natural resource management agencies: lessons learned from two US regions

Abstract

It has been argued that regional collaboration can facilitate adaptation to climate change impacts through integrated planning and management. In an attempt to understand the underlying institutional factors that either support or contest this assumption, this paper explores the institutional factors influencing adaptation to climate change at the regional scale, where multiple public land and natural resource management jurisdictions are involved. Insights from two mid-western US case studies reveal that several challenges to collaboration persist and prevent fully integrative multi-jurisdictional adaptation planning at a regional scale. We propose that some of these challenges, such as lack of adequate time, funding and communication channels, be reframed as opportunities to build interdependence, identify issue-linkages and collaboratively explore the nature and extent of organisational trade-offs with respect to regional climate change adaptation efforts. Such a reframing can better facilitate multi-jurisdictional adaptation planning and management of shared biophysical resources generally while simultaneously enhancing organisational capacity to mitigate negative effects and take advantage of potentially favourable future conditions in an era characterised by rapid climate change.

Keywords:

• climate change
• adaptation
• collaboration
• transboundary
• natural resources
• management
• policy
• planning
• adaptive capacity
• mainstreaming

Acknowledgments

Special thanks are extended to all workshop participants who took the time to complete the questionnaire. This project was funded by Project RM CESU-102 (Identifying Multi-jurisdictional Adaptation Strategies for Responding to Climate Change on Federal Lands) and the U.S. Geological Survey (Grant and Cooperative Agreement #G10AC00684). The authors thank the Editor and three anonymous referees for their constructive comments that helped them to improve the manuscript.

The views expressed in this manuscript are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the US National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management or the US Forest Service

Note

Notes

1. Adaptive capacity has been variously defined and measured with little consensus as to best practices for assessment. Because this study builds on research that focuses specifically on adaptive capacity within complex social-ecological systems, the definition of adaptive capacity put forth by Walker et al. (2002, 3) was utilised to guide the case study approach detailed here: “the aspect of resilience that reflects learning, flexibility to experiment and adopt novel solutions, and development of a generalized response to broad classes of challenges.”