Polycentric Governance (Holling Reading)

Polycentric governance is the institutional realization of adaptive management at scale. Rather than concentrating authority in a single hierarchical body, polycentric systems distribute governance across multiple overlapping institutions operating at different scales — local management bodies, regional coordination mechanisms, national regulatory agencies, international frameworks — connected through information flows and coordinating mechanisms. The architecture matches the multi-scale character of the systems being governed and provides the redundancy, diversity, and cross-scale learning that adaptive capacity requires. AI governance needs polycentric arrangements analogous to those that have emerged around the Great Barrier Reef, the Ostrom common-pool resource literature, and other successful multi-scale governance cases.