Designing policies in a world of uncertainty, change and surprise

In the first phase of the four-year research project entitled Designing policies in a world of uncer- tainty, change, and surprise: adaptive policy-making for agriculture and water resources in the face of climate change, review of a very young literature on adaptive policy-making and its connections to adaptive management and complex adaptive systems theory is given. [...] The rigidity of the policy resulted in the slow deterioration of the rail x IISD–TERI–IDRC Adaptive Policies Project transportation system as contexts changed over the course of the 20th century. [...] Curiously, the increases in crop diversification and im- provements in the livelihoods of farmers anticipated in the wake of the policy’s termination have not materialized, and today, the Canadian Prairies are suffering some of the worst ecological and economic conditions since the dust-bowl years of the 1930s. [...] Adaptation priorities in the face of future climate variability and change, and the specific policies required to help facilitate these adaptations, are the focus of a significant and growing body of pragmatic research around the world. [...] Initial conceptual framework and literature review for understanding adaptive policies 15 We saw from the policy instrument examples that in the case of the Income Tax Act of Canada, and for most income tax systems in fact, tax brackets exist to allow the level of tax collected to be fairly distributed according the level of one’s own income.