Barriers and bridges to the integration of socialecological resilience and law

www.frontiersinecology.org © The Ecological Society of America E and lawyers deal with uncertainty in very different ways. Ecologists and environmental scientists approach uncertainty as an opportunity to do research, while lawyers (including judges) often view uncertainty as a barrier to enforceability and action. This tension at the intersection of law and science is particularly troublesome for environmental management. As a collaboration of ecologists and legal scholars, we suggest that adaptive governance can bridge this gap. Adaptive governance is becoming more popular in the ecological and social science fields because it incorporates many well-established principles, such as the structured, hypothesis-driven process of adaptive management (Allen et al. 2011), into a broader model that addresses scale and social dimensions in environmental issues (Folke et al. 2005; Chaffin et al. 2014). However, the current discussion lacks an essential element: law. In much of the previous literature on adaptive governance, law is treated as an inconsequential aspect of the conditions necessary for achieving adaptive governance and essential legal questions, such as enforceability, are often ignored (Garmestani et al. 2013). The goal of this paper is to explicitly contribute the voice of law to adaptive governance scholarship by first exploring the tensions between ecology and US environmental law and then offering proposals to overcome several current legal obstacles to adaptive governance. Because law is inherently restricted to jurisdictional boundaries, our analysis is limited to US law, although many of the constraints of the US legal system are also relevant in other jurisdictions (see Green et al. 2013).