Understanding Complexity in Freshwater Management: Practitioners’ Perspectives in The Netherlands

Ecosystems have been stabilized by human interventions to optimize delivery of certain ecosystem services, while at the same time awareness has grown that these systems are inherently dynamic rather than steady state. Applied research fields have emerged that try to increase adaptive capacity in these ecosystems, using concepts deriving from the theory of complex adaptive systems. How are these concepts of complexity interpreted and applied by practitioners? This study applies a mixed-methods approach to analyze the case of freshwater management in The Netherlands, where a management paradigm... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Guido Rutten
Steve Cinderby
Jennie Barron
Dokumenttyp: Artikel
Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
Reihe/Periodikum: Water, Vol 12, Iss 2, p 593 (2020)
Verlag/Hrsg.: MDPI AG
Schlagwörter: ecosystem management / complex adaptive systems / nature-based solutions / engineering / adaptive management / Hydraulic engineering / TC1-978 / Water supply for domestic and industrial purposes / TD201-500
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-26800888
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : https://doi.org/10.3390/w12020593

Ecosystems have been stabilized by human interventions to optimize delivery of certain ecosystem services, while at the same time awareness has grown that these systems are inherently dynamic rather than steady state. Applied research fields have emerged that try to increase adaptive capacity in these ecosystems, using concepts deriving from the theory of complex adaptive systems. How are these concepts of complexity interpreted and applied by practitioners? This study applies a mixed-methods approach to analyze the case of freshwater management in The Netherlands, where a management paradigm promoting nature-fixating interventions is recently being replaced with a new paradigm of nature-based solutions. We find that practitioners have widely varying interpretations of concepts and of how the ecosystems they work in have evolved over time when described with complex system attributes. This study allows for the emergence of key complexity-related considerations among practitioners that are not often discussed in literature: (i) the need for physical and institutional space for self-organization of nature; (ii) the importance of dependency and demand management; and (iii) trade-offs between robustness and flexibility. This study, furthermore, stresses the importance of using practitioners’ views to guide applied research and practice in this field.