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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Canada’S Regional Adaptation Collaboratives And Adaptation Platform: The Importance Of Scaling Up And Scaling Down Climate Change Governance Experiments, Adam Wellstead, Michael Howlett, Sreeja Nair, Jeremy Rayner Dec 2016

Canada’S Regional Adaptation Collaboratives And Adaptation Platform: The Importance Of Scaling Up And Scaling Down Climate Change Governance Experiments, Adam Wellstead, Michael Howlett, Sreeja Nair, Jeremy Rayner

Department of Social Sciences Publications

Policy experiments have often been touted as valuable mechanisms for ensuring sustainability transitions and climate change adaptation. However problems exist both in the definition of ‘experiments’, and in their design and realization. While valuable, most experiments examined in the literature to date have been small-scale micro-level deployments or evaluations of policy tools in which the most problematic element revolves around their “scaling-up” or diffusion. The literature on the subject has generally neglected the problems and issues related to another class of experiments in which macro or meso-level initiatives are ‘scaled-down’ to the micro-level. This paper examines a recent effort of …


“Push” Dynamics In Policy Experimentation: Downscaling Climate Change Adaptation Programs In Canada, Adam Wellstead, Michael Howlett, Sreeja Nair, Jeremy Rayner Dec 2016

“Push” Dynamics In Policy Experimentation: Downscaling Climate Change Adaptation Programs In Canada, Adam Wellstead, Michael Howlett, Sreeja Nair, Jeremy Rayner

Department of Social Sciences Publications

Policy experiments have often been touted as valuable mechanisms for ensuring sustainability transitions and climate change adaptation. However problems exist both in the definition of ‘experiments’, and in their design and realization. While valuable, most experiments examined in the literature to date have been small-scale micro-level deployments or evaluations of policy tools in which the most problematic element revolves around their “scaling-up” or diffusion. The literature on the subject has generally neglected the problems and issues related to another class of experiments in which macro or meso-level initiatives are ‘scaled-down’ to the micro-level. This paper examines a recent effort …


The Neglect Of Governance In Forest Sector Vulnerability Assessments: Structural-Functionalism And “Black Box” Problems In Climate Change Adaptation Planning, Adam Wellstead, Michael Howlett, Jeremy Rayner Jan 2013

The Neglect Of Governance In Forest Sector Vulnerability Assessments: Structural-Functionalism And “Black Box” Problems In Climate Change Adaptation Planning, Adam Wellstead, Michael Howlett, Jeremy Rayner

Department of Social Sciences Publications

Efforts to develop extensive forest-based climate change vulnerability assessments have informed proposed management and policy options intended to promote improved on-the-ground policy outcomes. These assessments are derived from a rich vulnerability literature and are helpful in modeling complex ecosystem interactions, yet their policy relevance and impact has been limited. We argue this is due to structural-functional logic underpinning these assessments in which governance is treated as a procedural “black box” and policy-making as an undifferentiated and unproblematic output of a political system responding to input changes and/or system prerequisites. Like an earlier generation of systems or cybernetic thinking about political …