Ecosystem Governance

Central to all forms of coastal management is the need to orchestrate the interactions among human activities and the ecosystem in which they occur. Management is the process by which human and material resources are harnessed to achieve a known goal within a known institutional structure.

Governance, by contrast, sets the stage in which management occurs by defining-or redefining-the fundamental objectives, policies, laws and institutions by which societal issues are addressed. CRC advances governance that links efforts at the scale of a neighborhood or a single estuary to governance at the large ecosystem scale that addresses entire watersheds and the adjoining large marine ecosystem.

In ecosystem-based governance, human society is viewed as one element of the planet's living systems. The governance of coastal ecosystems overlays an integrating approach upon the management of individual sectors that is directed at sustaining the potential for generating ecosystem goods and services.

Governance is by no means the purview of only government. In many settings, the role of government in the governance of a coastal ecosystem is small. Ecosystem governance focuses on coherent, self-defined and self-organizing units comprising interacting ecologic, economic and social components. It is marked by sustained learning.

Of particular concern is tracking changes underway in estuaries—one of the planet’s most biologically productive ecosystems and a major producer of goods and services. In estuaries, freshwater from the land and rainfall mixes with seawater in an embayment, river mouth or lagoon. As competition for freshwater intensifies, however, the quantity, quality and pulsing of freshwater flows to estuaries is radically altered.

Because both our knowledge of how ecosystems evolve is growing rapidly and we are also learning how to better manage human affairs, planning and decision-making must be learning-based and therefore adaptive. Governance of these ecosystems requires forecasting, responding and, where possible, influencing societal behavior within coastal and marine systems. A major challenge is refining the methods for documenting ecosystem change in a way that informs and supports sound governance. This requires systems thinking, focusing upon the interconnections among the parts and understanding the processes that govern living systems including human economies.