Boundary judgments and their consequences for the governance of complex spatial-water issues. A comparison of the Dutch Haringvliet sluices and the American
Ingmar van Meerkerk, JurianEdlenbos, Mattijs van Maasakkers, Adriaan Slob
In this paper we will focus on the consequences of boundary judgments for the governance of complex social-ecological issues. Boundary judgments refer to the way in which experts, stakeholders and decision-makers understand and demarcate the relevant boundaries of and within socio-ecological systems. The issues at stake in these systems typically cross all kinds of organizational, social and ecological boundaries, such as different governmental layers, jurisdictions, geographical regions and functional domains. Therefore it is unlikely that a single optimal social or institutional (sub)system exists, which matches all the relevant issues at stake (Folke et al., 1998; Brown, 2003; Folke et al., 2007; Teisman et al., 2009). So in order to increase the resilience of social-ecological systems, especially in the context of global changes, interventions in the socio-ecological system have to be designed, approved, implemented and monitored within a legitimate and appropriate institutional framework.
In governance systems where people are trying to increase the resilience of complex social-ecological systems, they are often confronted with many different actors which make different boundary judgments regarding what belongs to the social-ecological system of concern and what does not (Churchman, 1970; Ulrich, 1983; Midgley et al., 1998; Flood, 1999). These boundary judgments affect the way in which governance processes around complex spatial-water issues evolve. We make a distinction between four types of boundary judgments:
1. Substantive boundary judgments, demarcating the content of the issue and therefore also the geographic scale of the system
2. Structural boundary judgments, which are strongly related with the question: who has the authority and the legitimacy to make decisions about the social-ecological system?
3. Procedural boundary judgments: regarding the participation and design of decision-making processes about the system. Which actors, in which way and at which time do they have to be involved?
4. Contextual boundary judgments, regarding ‘external’ dynamics: which external (e.g. political and ecological) developments are considered to be relevant during the policy process?
The relationship between these four types of boundary judgments and governance processes is studied by an international comparison of projects dealing with attempts to enhance the resilience of river basins through ecological restoration: the ecological restoration of the Haringvliet estuary, located in the south-west delta of the Netherlands and the restoration of the Atchafalaya Basin, located in south-central Louisiana in the USA. Both systems are characterized by a long history of thorough intervention in the composition of the ecosystem, muddying the boundary between natural and artificial, complex interactions between social groups which make very different boundary judgments regarding the social-ecological system at stake. In addition, both cases show how the different types of boundary judgments influence each other and in turn influence the adaptive capacity of the social-ecological system. The case studies show that inflexible boundary judgments regarding these four aspects easily could lead to inert governance processes, not capable of adapting to the internal and external dynamics of the social-ecological system. We argue that permeable boundary judgments are needed in order to realize ‘adaptive governance’ and formulate some prescriptions to realize this.