هزینه های معاملات، اقدام جمعی و سازگاری در مدیریت سیستم های زیست محیطی-اجتماعی مجتمع

With the escalating uncertainties and surprises faced in responding to environmental and natural resource challenges has come growing recognition of the need to manage such issues as social–ecological systems and value the capacities that enable adaptation to these changes. Adaptations in environmental management often involve complex, including wicked, problems of collective action. Institutions introduced to reduce the transaction costs of solving these problems do not come for free. A cost effectiveness framework designed to provide a comprehensive and logical structure for economic evaluation of path dependent institutional choices in this context, and a procedure for boundedly rational empirical application of the framework, are proposed and illustrated in this article — including for the choice between water buy-back and infrastructure upgrade programmes for accumulating the ‘environmental water’ needed to sustain the ecosystems of Australia's Murray–Darling Basin. Also outlined is a research strategy designed to help identify the heuristics needed for application of this procedure.

Humans have adapted to actual and anticipated changes in our living conditions since our emergence as a species, and the concept of adaptation has long been central to the subject matter of economics. The mainstream economic focus in this area, associated with conventional neoclassical economics, has been on individuals adapting to changes in demand or supply conditions of the markets where they transact with one another in pursuing their self interest. The focus has thus been on adaptation via transactions over private goods. It has been assumed that markets operate mechanistically and thus the consequences of changed conditions for adaptation decisions, or of adaptation decisions themselves, can be accounted for comprehensively using standard decision theory. The attention paid by policy makers and scholars to understanding human adaptation has escalated over recent decades alongside recognition of the rapidly multiplying and intensifying adaptation challenges to be faced from changes in the behaviour of climate, freshwater and other natural systems. Indeed, some leading scientists have concluded that the Earth has already experienced a transition from the Holocene epoch of around the last 10,000 years, during which human cultures developed within relatively stable natural environments, to a new epoch, the Anthropocene, where ‘the impacts of human activities are so pervasive and profound that they could inadvertently alter the Earth System in ways that may prove irreversible and inhospitable to humans’ (Biermann et al., 2010 p. 202).

Many contemporary adaptation challenges faced in environmental management involve complex problems of collective action. Appropriate institutions, or working rules, can foster a structural setting within which the trust and reciprocity required to solve these problems is created and maintained. However, defining these problems, and identifying, establishing and operating the institutions needed to solve them, involve costs (most directly, but not exclusively, transaction costs) which need to be weighed against the benefits of solving them. Given the complexities and uncertainties associated with many adaptation challenges faced in contemporary environmental management, it is necessary also to account for the impacts of current institutional options on the costs of institutional changes that eventuate as problems come periodically to be redefined.