Fit-for-purpose governance: A framework to make adaptive governance operational

Natural disasters, extreme weather events, economic crises, political change and long term change, such as climate change and demographic change, are in many places forcing a re-think about the way governments manage their environmental resource systems. Over the last decade, the concept of adaptive governance has rapidly gained prominence in the scientific community as a new alternative to the traditional predict-and-control regime. However, many policy makers and practitioners are struggling to apply adaptive governance in practice. Drawing on an extensive, critical literature review of adaptive governance, network management and institutional analysis, we argue that the constraints to the uptake of adaptive governance relate to a large extent to the inability of practitioners and policy makers to cope with complexity and various uncertainties: (i) ambiguous purposes and objectives of what should be achieved with governance; (ii) unclear contextual conditions in which governance takes place; and, (iii) uncertainty around the effectiveness of different governance strategies. To address such practical challenges, this paper introduces a “fit-for-purpose” framework consisting of three key ingredients for developing a diagnostic approach for making adaptive governance operational. We introduce the concept of fit-for-purpose governance to be used as an indication of the effectiveness of governance structures and processes and define it as a measure of the adequacy of the functional purposes that governance structures and processes have to fulfil at a certain point in time. In other words, are existing and proposed governance structures and processes fit for their purpose? While adaptive governance focuses on responding to (potential) change, fit-for-purpose governance is specifically considering the (future) functions that the social and physical components of a particular system, such as an urban water system, have to fulfil. As such, the fit-for-purpose governance framework provides an alternative starting point for developing the much sought-after guidance for policy and decision makers to evaluate the effectiveness of established governance arrangements and to predict the likelihood of success of institutional reform.