Law, Restoration and Ontologies for a More Ecologically Complex World!

Restoration efforts can target very different outcomes. Simply put, restoration is a process, and diverse values and ontological dispositions can shape the why, what and how questions about what people do. Restorative inputs focused on adaptively adding complexity into an ecosystem commits to values that go beyond rehabilitating and just removing threats and harms that are disturbing an ecosystem. Restoring within a landscape to enhance its ecological complexity is a useful goal for adaptive governance, and one which will also enable discussions about how humans and legal and governance institutions can change and respond to managing the environment. Using two scenarios we briefly explore how governance approaches to restoration need ontological dispositions focused on ecological complexity. In particular, we argue in this article that a focus on inputs into ecological complexity creates not only opportunities for overall net gain, but also, and more critically, that it requires legal and governance changes that establish parameters for how the vision will be realised. We explore and briefly discuss four of these institutional challenges to chart further research trajectories for how restorative inputs into ecological complexity can be achieved.