The Need for Adaptive Policies

The Challenge Facing Policy-Makers

Today's policy-maker has a tough job. Crafting public policies to help guide the daily actions of individuals, communities and businesses to ensure our economic, social and environmental well-being, is challenging under the best of circumstances. But the reality is that our world is more complex than ever—highly interconnected, owing to advances in communication and transportation; and highly dynamic, owing to the scale of impact of our collective actions. We know, for example, that the climate is changing, but not precisely how. We know that energy prices are highly unpredictable, and that international trade rules are in a state of flux. Advancing human well-being through policy, therefore, is inherently complex and dynamic. Whether policies seek to address economic conditions such as household income levels; social issues such as infant mortality rates; or environmental matters such as availability of clean water, today's policy- and decision-makers face significant uncertainty.

Policies that cannot perform effectively under dynamic and uncertain conditions run the risk of not achieving their intended purpose, and becoming a hindrance to the ability of individuals, communities and businesses to cope with—and adapt to—change. Far from serving the public good, these policies may actually get in the way. Experience demonstrates that policies crafted to operate within a certain range of conditions are often faced with unexpected challenges outside of that range. The result is that many policies have unintended impacts and do not accomplish their goals. Therefore, policy-makers need ways to craft policies that can adapt to a range of conditions previously not imagined and can perform even under complex, dynamic and uncertain conditions.

This book provides practical guidance for making adaptive policies—policies that can anticipate and respond to an array of conditions that lie ahead, and can navigate towards successful outcomes when surprised by the unforeseen.

[Page 2]In preparing this book we first undertook a comprehensive review of academic and professional insights on how to intervene effectively in complex adaptive systems as experienced by a range of sectors including natural resources management, healthcare, transportation engineering, information technology and international development. To study more closely the adaptive features of public policies, we examined and researched case examples from agriculture and water resources management within a context of weather uncertainty and all of the socio-economic and ecological issues enveloped in the global climate change issue. From hundreds of interviews with farmers and water resource managers in Canada and India we identified policies that have helped people and communities adapt to historic weather-related shocks and stresses. We did so based on the belief that such policies would be fruitful ground for researching specific adaptive policy-making mechanisms. And this indeed turned out to be the case. From over a dozen policy examples that we studied in Canada and India, we unearthed many specific and practical features that policy-makers have employed to make policies adaptive. We draw from these examples throughout the book (and summarize them at the back) to illuminate seven things we observed that policy-makers should know to create better policies in today's complex, dynamic and uncertain world. We tested our ideas at numerous workshops and international meetings and prepared this book as a guide for adaptive policy-making relevant for socio-ecological settings and the pursuit of sustainable development.

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