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Adaptive management is an approach for stewardship of social–ecological systems in circumstances with high uncertainty and high controllability. Although they are largely overlooked in adaptive management (and social–ecological system management), it is important to account for spatial and temporal scales to mediate within- and cross-scale effects of management actions, because cross-scale interactions increase uncertainty and can lead to undesirable consequences. The iterative nature of an adaptive approach can be expanded to multiple scales to accommodate different stakeholder priorities and multiple ecosystem attributes. In this Forum, we introduce multiscale adaptive management of social–ecological systems, which merges adaptive management with panarchy (a multiscale model of social–ecological systems) and demonstrate the importance of this approach with case studies from the Great Plains of North America and the Platte River Basin, in the United States. Adaptive management combined with a focus on the panarchy model of social–ecological systems can help to improve the management of social–ecological systems.

 

Over the past several decades, environmental governance has made substantial progress in addressing environmental change, but emerging environmental problems require new innovations in law, policy, and governance. While expansive legal reform is unlikely to occur soon, there is untapped potential in existing laws to address environmental change, both by leveraging adaptive and transformative capacities within the law itself to enhance social-ecological resilience and by using those laws to allow social-ecological systems to adapt and transform. Legal and policy research to date has largely overlooked this potential, even though it offers a more expedient approach to addressing environmental change than waiting for full-scale environmental law reform. We highlight examples from the United States and the European Union of untapped capacity in existing laws for fostering resilience in social-ecological systems. We show that governments and other governance agents can make substantial advances in addressing environmental change in the short term—without major legal reform—by exploiting those untapped capacities, and we offer principles and strategies to guide such initiatives.