8. Resilience and Law in the Platte River Basin Social-Ecological System: Past, Present, and Future

A characteristic of the Anthropocene is an acceleration in the rate of change of many global environmental resources, including loss of biodiversity and increased freshwater use. However, societal response to accelerated environmental change often does little to prevent the undesirable and sudden social-ecological system changes that occur in response to relatively incremental resource depletion. Resilience theory provides a framework for evaluating the interactions among social-ecological systems and the policies meant to guide them toward desirable outcomes. This chapter examines the resilience of the Platte River Basin system through time, assessing linkages among environmental change and governmental institutions, policies, and geophysical realities of the region during three distinct social-ecological regimes: pre-European settlement, heavy modification of the river and adjacent land, and the Platte River Recovery Implementation Program (PRRIP). Policy guided by resilience theory accommodates the potential for rapid, nonlinear change characteristic of complex systems such as the Platte River Basin. With increasingly extreme floods and droughts predicted for the Great Plains in coming decades as climate change progresses, a resilience approach to policy and decision-making will contribute to desirable outcomes for people and nature in the next iteration of the Platte River Basin.