Complex adaptive governance systems: a framework to understand institutions, organizations, and people in socio-ecological systems

Governance is the reason for and solution to complex problems in socio-ecological systems (SESs). Governance refers to the institutions, organizations, and people involved in and affected by socio-ecological practices (SEPs), such as research, planning, design, construction, restoration, conservation, and management. The complexity of SESs requires the ability to understand and identify how the social world produces differential opportunities, constraints, and resources across multiple levels and scales of governance systems and as a consequence undesirable SEP outcomes for social equity, human well-being, and environmental integrity. This paper presents a complex adaptive governance systems framework (CAGS-F) designed to provide guidance, organization, and basic conceptualizations of social scientific concepts and terms for diagnostic, descriptive, and prescriptive inquiry into SEPs for the purpose of improving justice and sustainability. CAGS-F is unique for synthesizing the panarchy heuristic’s focus on socio-ecological interdependence, cross-scalar, multi-causal, non-linear complexity, and change with compatible social scientific theories of multi-level institutions, organizations, and human practices. The framework works from a critical realist orientation to reveal how power and privilege embedded in institutions, organizations, and human practices produce inequitable and/or undesirable SEP outcomes. The structure of the framework employs analytic dualism to provide a way to identify where, at what level and scale, who is included and/or adversely affected, and at which point in discrete adaptive cycles across institutional, organizational, and human practices opportunities, barriers, and leverage points exist so as to optimize design, planning, programming, and implementation of SEPs or evaluate unintended and unforeseen, less than successful, inequitable, and/or undesirable outcomes.