Beyond Panaceas in Land Tenure Systems in Ghana: Insights from Resilience and Adaptive Governance of Social-Ecological Systems

The Roles of Adaptive Water Governance in Enhancing the Transition towards Ecosystem-Based Adaptation

“…While the manuscript has explored the utility of the attributes of adaptive governance in meeting these requirements, it is worth noting that the adaptive governance concept itself is not without its critics. Some have highlighted the challenges in the emergence of adaptive governance, including path dependencies from old institutions and cultural traditions, as well as the role of vested interests [19,23,106], the challenges of coordination and allocation of responsibilities across scales, capacity constraints, potential inefficiencies in its institutional arrangements [52,98,156], and the potential for outcomes that may be undesirable, including the neglect of power relations and social inequities [20,118,151]. Given the inherently political and wicked nature of transformation processes [95,157,158], adaptive governance may have limited transformational ability where some of these challenges are not identified and addressed [38].…”

“…Adaptive governance was initially proposed as an approach to ecosystem-based management [30], but it has also been applied to specific resource management arenas, such as energy policy [101], protected areas management [102,103], forest policy [104,105], and land tenure systems [106]. In the field of water governance, adaptive governance is increasingly considered as an appropriate response to the failures of the commandand-control paradigm in addressing complexity and integrating the human dimensions into the management process [20,36,107,108].…”