eLearning

ADAPTIVE INSTITUTIONS
Economic valuation methods, based as they are on
the concept of self-organizing markets, borrow
strongly frompluralist ideas about decisionmaking—
that the public interest is found in a competition
among economic interests, where each individual
valuation is accorded equal weight. Energy evalua-
tion methods borrow most strongly from the idea
that the public interest is unitary and discoverable
by experts. Adaptive approaches admit that the
public interest emerges through social interactions,
the interrogation of nature, and political discourse.
It could be said that the public interest, because it is
‘‘public,’’ does not exist prior to these interactions.
The mythology that derives from methodological
individualism is that the relevant preferences over
environmental goods and services are more or less
static and predetermined and can be revealed at the
individual level. Reflection suggests that individuals
hold preferences on several scales—Sagoff (1981)
has called these consumer preferences versus citizen
preferences. Individuals may provide different val-
ues for an environmental commodity in the context
of the core family, a scientist, or a representative of
the government.
Institutions, operating at appropriate scales, pro-
vide the framework—the norms and rules—for the
generation of preferences. Preferences and values
(even entitlements) are not fixed. They evolve as
part of a social process, part deliberative, part histori-
cal (Sunstein 1988). People not only have prefer-
ences over states of nature but over the processes
that lead from state to state. We believe adaptive
and flexible institutions that reassess valuation in
the context of resilience in coupled social–ecological–
economic systems are critical for sustainable use of
ecosystemservices. By nurturing institutional learn-
ing, we discover how to interpret and respond to
ecological, social, and political dynamics. From a
sustainable use perspective, the challenge is to
develop flexible and adaptable institutions in tune
with ecosystem dynamics and ecosystem services
(Folke and others 1998).
Trying to fit the process of institutional learning
into a cost–benefit framework reduces the complex-
ity of preference formation and social interactions to
merely a commodity-calculus. The commodification
of nature, and of political space, are found not to be
as inevitable as previously thought by economists,
evidenced by work on common property and com-
munal management regimes (Berkes and Folke
1998; Ostrom 1990). That is, community institu-
tions that are organized around notions of the
collective good, and that resist the parcelization and