Actors and Adaptive Planning in Water Management

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Background

In the face of uncertainty and complexity, adaptive planning approaches help balance the need for short term action within long-term horizons, leaving room for flexibility and nurturing resilience. Adaptive planning requires more than a technical systems approach for preventing lock-in effects and for valuing flexibility. It also requires incorporating the actor dimension in long-term strategic planning. This actor dimension includes recognition and balancing of different priorities of societal actors, using participatory planning approaches, but also thinking of networked implementation arrangements and strategies that are aimed at institutions building and the creation of the societal conditions needed for adaptive capacity.

There is a growing recognition and attention for actors in adaptive planning. Still, the bulk of the recent wave of adaptive planning literature in the water sector uses (integrated) technical system perspectives, acknowledging actors and policy processes, but not focusing on the specific challenges and questions these bring. With this Research Topic, we hope to bring together research that helps to close this gap.

Contributions are sought that address research questions that help us to better understand and address the complexities associated with the multi-actor dimensions in adaptive planning in water management. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
• What are the limits of participation, how do these affect adaptive planning and what are available approaches to address, or cope with them? Participation is useful and needed, but also practically limited. Not all actors will be willing or able to participate. Also, there are limits to what participation can achieve. Participation does not necessarily translate into representation/voice or influence over decision-making processes.
• How to deal with power, politics, social dilemmas, and relationships among actors in adaptive planning? Decision-making rarely occurs along the lines of adaptive plans and optimal solutions, as politics, power, and relationships dictate how policies are formulated and decisions regarding adoption and implementation are made. As planning processes ideally balance the interests of different groups: How can adaptive planning processes balance power inequalities of stakeholders to achieve a higher degree of justice in water accessibility?
• What is the contribution that methods inspired by for instance game theory, network analysis and actor and strategy models can make? Can such methods support adaptive planning with key trade-offs and critical assumptions of relevance to different actors, to incorporate those more systematically in adaptive plans and monitoring arrangements?
• How do actors exert agency in selecting indicators for monitoring adaptive plans? Monitoring and evaluation is essential for adaptive planning. Monitoring information is distributed over different actors and different actors are involved in the implementation of adaptive plans. And how to ensure that distributed local learning experiences feedback into higher-level adaptation decisions?
• Adaptive planning requires fitting institutional and governance arrangements. What are those, how are they different from existing arrangements, and how can they be realized in the existing planning landscapes?

Interested authors are invited to submit short abstracts of their proposed contributions to assess potential fit with the focus of the issue. Full paper submissions will be peer-reviewed following the regular review procedure for the journal.

Keywords: Adaptive Planning, Participation, Policy Process, Uncertainty, Sustainability

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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