At a conference several years ago I heard Will Steffen give a keynote address on the Anthropocene.  This was a term I had not heard before and that twenty-minute talk changed me!  Suddenly four decades of working on coastlines in the US, in Latin America, in Southeast Asia, in Europe, in Africa, came together like a 500 piece puzzle.  The bigger picture in all its detail snapped into focus.  The years spent piecing together scattered information on trends, the shifts in the condition of the people of a place, how they relate to their resources and environment, the sorting of issues raised by urgent needs for both development and conservation, for mediation, for restructuring institutions, for public education all fitted into a single unifying narrative.  I understood what I had been seeing and what I had been trying to do with a new and wonderful clarity.

In October of this year I spent three weeks in Galicia, the green and mountainous province of northwestern Spain where Celtic traditions are strong and thousands of hikers as modern day pilgrims pour into Santiago de Campostela, the end point of the famouscamino.  I gave a short course for the Campus do Mar on the fundamentals of coastal governance.  Another objective of the visit was to explore how the contents of the short course might be applied to Galicia.

Practicing ecosystem governance is difficult.  It’s easy to lose your way.  As in medicine, broadly applicable principles and good practices will take you some distance, but in places where the problems are both multiple and significant, a thorough diagnosis followed by the skillful execution of a plan of action over the long term are necessary.  Rarely is the practice a “paint by the numbers” rote process.  For example, if overfishing is an issue, we can confidently say that fishing pressure should be reduced. Good, this most probably is correct.  But how?  What mixture of actions will be effective in reducing fishing pressure: greater involvement of the fishers in shaping the rules?  Targeted enforcement?  Education of the judges that mete out punishments to those who break the rules?  These are some of the many options.  Since we are engaged in ecosystem governance, choosing which approach to take will have to be made while simultaneously acting on other goals -  perhaps to reduce poverty, conserve biodiversity, create new sources of livelihood or integrate a wind farm in a focal area already crowded with human activities.  Traditional sector-by-sector management can and should be applied to address the individual goals for a focal area.  The additional layer of ecosystem governance will address the interactions and interdependencies among these various sectors and will work to integrate their more narrowly focused actions into a coherent whole.

Recently, in this space, Stephen introduced us to the concept of the Anthropocene – the emerging geologic epoch that is replacing the Holocene, the epoch that we all learned about in school as the “current one.”  While the Holocene is defined as the period following the end of the last ice age starting about 11,700 years ago, the Anthropocene is characterized as the time on our planet when the cumulative actions of our species, not astronomical cycles, volcanism, plate tectonics or the like, are the dominant driver of Earth’s systems: its climate, bio-geochemical cycles and material flows. 

This installment addresses the first of the simplifying frameworks - the Management Cycle.  The cycle was developed by the Coastal Resources Center (CRC) as the conceptual framework for what evolved into the Center’s four-week international training courses on the “theory and practice of coastal management.”  After fifteen years of engagement in US-style coastal zone management and four years working in Latin America and Southeast Asia we felt ready to share what we were learning.  We had many ideas, sackfuls of experience, but no unifying conceptual framework.  Many elements of the US CZM program were relevant but certainly not the model to be replicated anywhere.  This was in 1989, four years before the UN Rio “Earth Summit” Conference gave currency to the term Integrated Coastal Management in 1993.

This post addresses the Orders of Outcomes, the second of the simplifying frameworks put forward in blog #4. 

As the 1990s drew to a close I became increasingly concerned that the swelling number of coastal and marine management projects and programs - particularly in the developing world - were having little lasting impact.  Few could make the transition from studies, plans and proposed policies to sustained implementation of a plan of action.  It was the familiar problem of the transition from Phases 1 -3 of the Management Cycle to Phase 4.  Many initiatives were doing a fine job of completing the actions identified by the initial planning stages of the management cycle but they were not creating the conditions within their focal area that implementing a plan of action requires.  Could I put forward another simplifying heuristic that would define the sequence of outcomes of ecosystem governance to complement the processes described by the management cycle? 

Many years ago, when I was deeply immersed in leading a particularly difficult attempt to establish a national coastal management program in Thailand, a colleague observed “Steve, one of things that is unusual about you is that you care more about the process of what we are doing than the outcomes.”  I agreed that this was the case.  To me how we defined and prioritized the issues a coastal management program would address; how we outsiders and our Thai partners would select the places in which we would initially engage; how we designed the process of engagement in those places; how we interacted with our senior policy committee – these were my key concerns.  What we might realistically achieve in a five year period, be it to reduce the proliferation of development “mistakes” so obvious along many stretches of Thailand’s coastline, reduce bomb fishing, or stem the flows of pollutants into estuaries, would all be shaped by how we conveyed our purpose and engaged with our allies and our detractors.  If the purposes of our program were misinterpreted, or if the process of engagement and trust-building misfired, we would accomplish very little in our five year window - no matter how lavish the funding and how strong the support in the high level governmental agency to which our project had been assigned.  Our ability to build interest, credibility and win the trust of our partners would determine whether we would together be able to make tangible progress on such complex issues.  This would determine the ultimate impacts and significance of our program.  Yes, without a doubt, communicating and expressing our intentions and engaging in a coastal management process were my top concerns at this initial stage of our program.  

Blog #1 declared that ecosystem governance is, above all, a social and political challenge and process that shapes how groups of people and institutions relate to, and modify, each other’s behavior and the environments of which they are part. I came to this conclusion long ago when my colleague Lynne Hale and I prepared a paper for the first US national conference on coastal zone management (CZM) held in California in the late 1970s. Lynne and I compared the five-year experience of drafting Rhode Island’s CZM program, and winning its approval by the federal Office of CZM, to a political campaign. And indeed to us this was the best metaphor. For a difficult ten months the Rhode Island program had been the test case for determining whether the federal CZM approval standards would be weak - as desired by the American Petroleum Institute - or a rigorous expression of the environmental movement as argued by the Natural Resources Defense Council. At the next scale down, convincing skeptical state and federal agencies that another regulatory program would indeed make a difference brought other challenges. Findings our way through this thicket of often conflicting local and national interests felt very much like a protracted political campaign. Our candidate, however, was not a political figure, but a fresh approach to a set of complex and varied problems such as guiding residential development on shorefronts periodically impacted by hurricanes, protecting remaining wetlands, reviving the moribund industrial waterfront and positioning our fishing industry to take advantage of the newly expanded 200 mile territorial limit. For all these and other topics we based our CZM policies and regulations on a historical perspective that considers how each issue had evolved before setting forth what the Rhode Island CZM program would work to achieve in the future. This approach worked well in public workshops and helped catalyze the support of the Providence Journal, the state’s influential newspaper.

I am in Switzerland, awaiting open heart surgery on my three month old grandson.  He and his father are Swiss and I am getting a taste of what that means.  Switzerland has the highest per capita GDP and last month a referendum that would have provided every Swiss citizen with a minimum income of 4000 francs per month (about US $4600) lost by a small margin. Why is Switzerland so wealthy, so seemingly insulated from the turmoil swirling about those of us that carry other passports?  The answer, of course, lies in its traditions of governance and that fact that this mountainous region has in the past been militarily defensible.  The first three cantons came together as a confederation in 1291.  As independent-minded mountaineer communities they recognized that the benefits flowing from the trade routes through their mountain passes were highest when they cooperated with each other.  When their main export became mercenary soldiers, they ruthlessly enforced the Swiss brand - mercenaries that could not be bought once a contract had been signed.  One result is that the now largely ornamental Vatican Guards are still Swiss.  The Confederation, with its standing army composed of every able bodied man, managed to stay out of both World War I and II.  Switzerland is not a member of the European Union and only joined the United Nations in 2002.

This blog has laid out some of the stepping stones that I believe can help us collectively get from where we are to where we need to be in the practice of the ecosystem approach (aka ecosystem governance and ecosystem-based management). Our collective progress towards more equitable and sustainable governance of the primary human habitat - coastal lands and coastal waters - is more halting, fragmented, inefficient and ineffective than it should be. This entry gets at why I believe this to be case. This is a big topic and one that I have been pondering for many years. I am going to limit this discussion to three points: (1) the scant recognition of the knowledge, skills and attitudes that the practice of ecosystem governance requires, (2) the lack of awareness of challenges of achieving an understanding of the “ecology of governance in a given place” and (3) the consequences of disconnected short term projects as the principle mechanism by which investments in coastal and marine governance are made in the countries where they are most needed.