Handling uncertainty through adaptiveness in planning approaches: comparing adaptive delta management and the water diplomacy framework

Abstract

Planners and water managers seek to be adaptive to handle uncertainty through the use of planning approaches. In this paper, we study what type of adaptiveness is proposed and how this may be operationalized in planning approaches to adequately handle different uncertainties. We took a comparative case study approach to study two planning approaches: the water diplomacy framework (WDF) and adaptive delta management (ADM). We found that the approaches differ in their conceptualization of uncertainty and show that different types of adaptiveness are used in the approaches. While WDF builds on collaborative adaptive management as a set of ongoing adjustments and continuous learning to handle uncertainty, ADM deliberately attempts to anticipate future adaptations through a set of tools which allows for seizing opportunities and avoiding lock-in and lock-out mechanisms. We conclude that neither of the approaches is fully able to account for different uncertainties. Both approaches may benefit from specific insights in what uncertainty and adaptiveness entail for the development of water management plans. ARTICLE HISTORY

The understanding and role of uncertainty and risk in climate change adaptation: local and central authorities in Norway

“…climate change, Zandvoort et al (2017) argue that planning approaches have to take into account ontic, epistemic, and ambiguous uncertainties to achieve coherency, but by making adaptiveness subject to knowledge claims and consensus it could impede on solutions contingent upon uncertainty of an ontic type. Our findings on uncertainty at the municipal level resemble some of the points made by Zandvoort et al (2017): successfully taking actions mean coherency in addressing different types of uncertainties, but it is necessary to consider the interaction of municipal and state levels, as well as local, regional, and national scales. For instance, the state level (national and regional) is providing knowledge and, hence guidelines and regulations, while the municipal level generally are accounting for contextual facts and ontic uncertainty.…”

“…A better strategy may be to facilitate and foster a multitude of approaches, or at least approaches that introduce some disruptive forces to the dominant approach. Such a strategy may align with approaches favoured by both Skinner et al (2014) and Zandvoort et al (2017) of combining different types of uncertainty (and risks). This would also introduce approaches like Swyngedouw's (1999) two opposite cycles of socio-nature or Moore's (2015) double internality of society in nature and nature in society as part of an environmental world history.…”

The Uncertainty Contagion: Revealing the Interrelated, Cascading Uncertainties of Managed Retreat

“…Revealing the complexity of uncertainty underscores its many dimensions, from a basic lack of information to what can even be knowable, the variety of means by which these could or should be mitigated, and deepening understanding about the intricate interrelationships between academic disciplines and their suitability towards revealing and understanding different dimensions of uncertainty. These insights also underscore how different approaches to conceptualizing uncertainty can lead to very contrasting methods, tools, and demands for practice [31].…”

“…These reports also help to highlight different dimensions of scientific uncertainty, such as technical, methodological, epistemic and aleatory sources of uncertainty. For instance, epistemic uncertainty is the imperfection of knowledge (also termed completeness, subjective, or systematic uncertainty), and aleatory uncertainty represents the inherent randomness of human and natural systems that cannot be reduced (also referred to as variability, stochastic, random or ontic uncertainty) [27,[29][30][31]. Unlike aleatory uncertainty, epistemic uncertainty can be quantified and mitigated, but even then new information can reveal new uncertainties [27].…”

Durability of environment-recruitment relationships in aquatic ecosystems: insights from long-term monitoring in a highly modified estuary and implications for management

“…Our findings suggest that when environment-recruitment relationships underpin decision-making they should be re-evaluated on a regular basis as part of a broader adaptive management approach to ensure that they remain robust in the face of new data and continue to provide an accurate representation of a continually evolving ecosystem. Such an adaptive approach to evaluating environment-recruitment relationships is aligned with broader calls for increasing the implementation of more proactive adaptive management in Bay Delta ecosystems to address accelerating environmental change (Delta Independent Science Board 2015, 2016; Zandvoort et al 2017).…”