TUNING THE POLICY CLOCK TO SCALES OUTSIDE OF THE POLICY BOX: POLICY SCOPING FOR ADAPTIVE MITIGATION ACROSS SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL, TECHNICAL, AND GEOLOGICAL SCALES

Climate change and other processes of environmental transformation require that communities across the globe adapt to new ecological and geophysical constraints. Promoting socio-ecological resilience and equitably in such circumstances will require policy scoping approaches that allow community leaders and decision makers to slide across temporal scales. Policy processes that are successful in mitigating socio-technical drivers of environmental change will likely have to identify and address the socio-historical origins of these drivers, as well as the geographic, temporal, and relational contexts of their function and impact. Similarly, a policy process oriented toward promotion of resilience in socio-ecological systems must contend with the historical points of vulnerability in such relational configurations, while also facilitating adaptation to climatological, hydrological, and geological projections that vary widely in temporal range, as well as suggest differing points of vulnerability and pathways to resilience for a given socio-ecological system. This challenge indicates that appropriate policy process models need to be adaptive, polycentric, and temporally “telescopic” if problems such as path dependence, policy inertia, and climate justice are to be avoided in the near future.