Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

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

Adam Wellstead

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 …