Editing IPCC:AR6/SRCCL/Chapter-7 (section)

=== 7.6.1 Institutions building adaptive and mitigative capacity ===

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Institutions are rules and norms held in common by social actors that guide, constrain, and shape human interaction. Institutions can be formal – such as laws, policies, and structured decision- making processes (Section 7.5.1.1) – or informal – such as norms, conventions, and decision-making following customary norms and habits (Section 7.5.1.2). Organisations – such as parliaments,

regulatory agencies, private firms, and community bodies – as well as people, develop and act in response to institutional frameworks and the incentives they frame. ‘Institutions can guide, constrain, and shape human interaction through direct control, through incentives, and through processes of socialization’ (IPCC 2014d, p. 1768). Nations with ‘well developed institutional systems are considered to have greater adaptive capacity’, and better institutional capacity to help deal with risks associated with future climate change (IPCC, 2001, p. 896). Institutions may also prevent the development of adaptive capacity when they are ‘sticky’ or characterised by strong path dependence (Mahoney 2000 <sup>[[#fn:r1177|1177]]</sup> ; North 1991 <sup>[[#fn:r1178|1178]]</sup> ) and prevent changes that are important to address climate change (Section 7.4.9).

Formal and informal governance structures are composed of these institutionalised rule systems that determine vulnerability as they influence power relations, risk perceptions and establish the context wherein risk reduction, adaptation and vulnerability are managed (Cardona 2012 <sup>[[#fn:r1179|1179]]</sup> ). Governance institutions determine the management of a community’s assets, the community members’ relationships with one another, and with natural resources (Hurlbert and Diaz 2013 <sup>[[#fn:r1180|1180]]</sup> ). Traditional or locally evolved institutions, backed by cultural norms, can contribute to resilience and adaptive capacity. Anderson et al. (2010) <sup>[[#fn:r1181|1181]]</sup> suggest that these are a particular feature of dry land societies that are highly prone to environmental risk and uncertainty. Concepts of resilience, and specifically the resilience of socio-ecological systems, have advanced analysis of adaptive institutions and adaptive governance in relation to climate change and land (Boyd and Folke 2011a <sup>[[#fn:r1182|1182]]</sup> ). In their characterisation, ‘resilience is the ability to reorganise following crisis, continuing to learn, evolving with the same identity and function, and also innovating and sowing the seeds for transformation. It is a central concept of adaptive governance’ (Boyd and Folke 2012 <sup>[[#fn:r1183|1183]]</sup> ). In the context of complex and multi-scale socio-ecological systems, important features of adaptive institutions that contribute to resilience include the characteristics of an adaptive governance system (Section 7.6.6).

There is ''high confidence'' that adaptive institutions have a strong learning dimension and include:

# Institutions advancing the capacity to learn through availability, access to, accumulation of, and interpretation of information (such as drought projections, costing of alternatives land, food, and water strategies). Government-supported networks, learning platforms, and facilitated interchange between actors with boundary and bridging organisations, creating the necessary self-organisation to prepare for the unknown. Through transparent, flexible networks, whole sets of complex problems of land, food and climate can be tackled to develop shared visions and critique land and food management systems assessing gaps and generating solutions.
# Institutions advancing learning by experimentation (in interpretation of information, new ways of governing, and treating policy as an ongoing experiment) through many interrelated decisions, but especially those that connect the social to the ecological and entail anticipatory planning by considering a longer-term time frame. Mechanisms to do so include ecological stewardship, and rituals and beliefs of indigenous societies that sustain ES.
# Institutions that decide on pathways to realise system change through cultural, inter and intra organisational collaboration, with a flexible regulatory framework allowing for new cognitive frames of ‘sustainable’ land management and ‘safe’ water supply that open alternative pathways (Karpouzoglou et al. 2016 <sup>[[#fn:r1184|1184]]</sup> ; Bettini et al. 2015 <sup>[[#fn:r1185|1185]]</sup> ; Boyd et al. 2015 <sup>[[#fn:r1186|1186]]</sup> ; Boyd and Folke 2011b <sup>[[#fn:r1187|1187]]</sup> , and 2012).

Shortcomings of resilience theory include limits in relation to its conceptualisation of social change (Cote and Nightingale 2012 <sup>[[#fn:r1188|1188]]</sup> ), its potential to be used as a normative concept, implying politically prescriptive policy solutions (Thorén and Olsson 2017 <sup>[[#fn:r1189|1189]]</sup> ; Weichselgartner and Kelman 2015 <sup>[[#fn:r1190|1190]]</sup> ; Milkoreit et al. 2015 <sup>[[#fn:r1191|1191]]</sup> ), its applicability to local needs and experiences (Forsyth 2018 <sup>[[#fn:r1192|1192]]</sup> ), and its potential to hinder evaluation of policy effectiveness (Newton 2016 <sup>[[#fn:r1193|1193]]</sup> ; Olsson et al. 2015b <sup>[[#fn:r1194|1194]]</sup> ). Regardless, concepts of adaptive institutions building adaptive capacity in complex socio-ecological systems governance have progressed (Karpouzoglou et al. 2016 <sup>[[#fn:r1195|1195]]</sup> ; Dwyer and Hodge 2016 <sup>[[#fn:r1196|1196]]</sup> ) in relation to adaptive governance (Koontz et al. 2015 <sup>[[#fn:r1197|1197]]</sup> ).

The study of institutions of governance, levels, modes, and scale of governance, in a multi-level and polycentric fashion is important because of the multi-scale nature of the challenges to resilience, dissemination of ideas, networking and learning.

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