Governing complexity: A comparative assessment of four governance models with applications to climate change mitigation and adaptation

Responses to ongoing global climate change include economy-wide mitigation efforts and large-scale societal adaptation that demand novel approaches to governance. An array of innovative governance models has been proposed since the late 1900s and early 2000s as scholars observed inadequacies of government-centric and formal legal approaches to natural resource management, complexity and uncertainty, failures of neoliberal economic reforms, and cross-scale institutional arrangements. Four such models have come to dominate the solution-oriented discourse on climate change governance: adaptive governance, transition governance, transformation governance, and anticipatory governance. We compare these models in terms of their origin and applicability to deal with the complexities of climate change. Our particular interest lies in how the four governance models propose to manage complexity and how they envision the role of governments as actors and law as an instrument in steering societal responses to climate change. Our analysis shows that while transition and transformation governance are often portrayed as more readily applicable to climate change mitigation, and adaptive and anticipatory governance to climate change adaptation, this sharp dichotomy does not hold water on closer scrutiny. Rather, all four governance models are applicable to different aspects of climate change mitigation and adaptation. Concerning complexity, all four governance models take some variation of social-ecological-technological complexity as their starting point. Finally on the role of government and law, adaptive governance, transition governance and one branch of transformation governance favour a facilitative role of governments, while another branch of transformation governance calls for a more involved and directive role for governments with heavy legal instrumentation and legal systemic change to match. Anticipatory governance plays more of a supporting role for implementing the other models and can range from facilitative to directive in that respect. With these observations, we hope to clarify the current global discussion over the perspectives offered by the four governance models in governing complexity in the context of climate change and beyond.