Towards Just Resilience: representing and including new constituencies in adaptive governance and law

Resilience has become a key concept in the era of global environmental change in both academic and policy circles. Social scientists have singled out adaptive governance as the most appropriate regulatory strategy to build resilience. Although adaptive governance scholars are proponents of participatory decision-making, they have not explored in depth the democratic potential of adaptive governance. Questions of who should be represented and why have not been fully addressed from a normative viewpoint. Building on political theories of justice and green political thinking, this article explores more in depth the issue of procedural justice and representation in adaptive governance. In doing so the article makes a first attempt at developing the theoretical foundations for ‘just resilience’.