Understanding Feasibility in Climate Change Adaptation Planning : Structural-Functionalism and the Neglect of Governance in Complex Adaptive Systems Inspired Forest Sector Vulnerability Assessments

Studies using a complex adaptive systems (CAS) framework to understand resource and environmental issues such as climate change adaptation in forest policy development often propose policy options intended to promote improved on-the-ground policy outcomes. Like many CAS-inspired works in other sector and areas, such studies are helpful in modelling complex eco-system interactions, yet their policy relevance and impact has been limited. This paper argues this is due to the structural-functional logic underlying CAS models in which government is treated as a procedural ‘black-box’ and policy-making as an undifferentiated and unproblematic output of a political system responding to input changes and/or system prerequisites. Like an earlier generation of systems or cybernetic thinking about political processes the exclusive focus of CAS models on macro system-level variables and relationships fails to account for the multi-level or ‘polycentric’ nature of governance and the possibility of policy processes resulting in the non-performance of critical tasks. This paper outlines this weakness in CAS thinking and proposes several avenues based on contemporary policy and governance theory to help overcome it in the forest sector and elsewhere