2 results
8 - Public–private partnerships in the provision of environmental governance: a case of disaster management
- from Part II - Adapting and governing public institutions for uncertainty and complexity
- Edited by Emily Boyd, University of Reading, Carl Folke, Beijer International Institute of Ecological Economics, Stockholm
-
- Book:
- Adapting Institutions
- Published online:
- 05 November 2011
- Print publication:
- 27 October 2011, pp 171-190
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction
Disaster planning is an activity most often performed by the state, through which disaster risk reduction is provided as a public good. State institutions manage this role with varying degrees of success. State provision of disaster risk reduction occurs when there is financial and political commitment to risk reduction, effective institutional structures and the alignment of political interests with those of powerful stakeholder groups. This chapter analyses a novel approach to disaster risk reduction – the use of a public–private partnership – and shows how adaptive governance can work in practice. Specifically, the chapter analyses the role of public and private responsibility in the provision of disaster mitigation, early warning systems, disaster response and post-impact recovery. This is achieved through a review of the emergence and transformation of the Cayman Islands’ National Hurricane Committee (NHC). The NHC is a novel hybrid institution that emerged through spontaneous collective action by various members of Cayman Islands society, some of whom were civil servants. The NHC is now an official public–social–private partnership that uses relational contracting transactions, hierarchical management relationships and recurrent contractual transactions to prepare the Cayman Islands for storms and manage the islands’ recovery in a state of emergency. This chapter reveals that public–private partnerships can provide effective governance structures for weather-risk management, if they exhibit the features commonly associated with adaptive governance, that is, they are participatory and deliberative, they build trust, they are multi-layered, they link knowledge, action and hazard context, and they are accountable. However, such public–private partnerships need to be carefully crafted and delivered to ensure that the distribution of costs and benefits from their existence is not captured by a small group of powerful individuals.
The term public–private partnership (PPP) describes a range of initiatives that bring together the public and private sectors for long-term partnerships of mutual benefit. PPPs have been described as ‘an institutionalised form of cooperation of public and private actors who, on the basis of their own indigenous objectives, work together towards a joint target, in which both parties accept investment risks on the basis of a predetermined distribution of revenues and costs’ (Nijkamp et al. 2002).
13 - Hidden costs and disparate uncertainties: trade-offs in approaches to climate policy
- Edited by W. Neil Adger, University of East Anglia, Irene Lorenzoni, University of East Anglia, Karen L. O'Brien, Universitetet i Oslo
-
- Book:
- Adapting to Climate Change
- Published online:
- 31 August 2009
- Print publication:
- 25 June 2009, pp 212-226
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction
As policy-makers struggle to define the policy agenda to address the challenge of climate change, three distinct influential approaches to climate policy are emerging in the climate change literature: implementing climate change adaptation; reducing social vulnerability; and managing ecosystem resilience. Each of these approaches has been developed in specific policy contexts associated respectively with natural hazard mitigation, poverty and social welfare investment, and natural resource management. In these contexts each approach has met with varying levels of past success. The fact that climate change is characterized by a high probability of surprise events; significant scientific uncertainty; and a need for long-term planning horizons only makes policy development more difficult.
In this chapter we argue that each of the three approaches involves implicit trade-offs in both the process of policy formation and in policy outcomes. These trade-offs are rarely considered in the evaluation of policy options, yet may have important implications for social welfare and sustainability. Through the analysis of case studies of adaptation to climate variability and change, we illustrate how the different ways of approaching the process of adjusting to future change can inadvertently lead to, for example, the privileging of efficiency over equitable distribution of resources (for example, risk-based adaptation approach), equity at the expense of cost (for example, social vulnerability approach), or intergenerational equity over political legitimacy (resilience approach).
In the next section, we first create caricatures of the three approaches to climate policy: risk-based adaptation, vulnerability and resilience.