Trickster Law: Promoting Resilience and Adaptive Governance by Allowing Other Perspectives on Natural Resources Management

Abstract

The Anthropocene requires a new approach to natural resources law and policy, an approach that this short article terms "trickster law." Trickster law incorporates insights from resilience theory, adaptive governance scholarship, and cultural/anthropological studies of trickster tales to create a legal approach to natural resource management that is precautionary, engaged in proactive planning, based in principled flexibility, and pluralistic. This article focuses on the "pluralism" component, presenting three examples of how law modified to be more inclusive and respect different value systems has generated new approaches to natural resources management that better promote social-ecological resilience to climate change and other anthropogenic stressors.

Keywords: trickster, adaptive governance, resilience, values, water law, Clean Water Act, fisheries, Maori