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Adaptive Management
Citation:
Allen, C. AND A. Garmestani. Adaptive Management. Chapter 1, Craig R. Allen, Ahjond Garmestani (ed.), Adaptive Management of Social-Ecological Systems. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, Netherlands, , 01-10, (2015).
Impact/Purpose:
Changes in natural resource management through time have been driven by changes in scientific understanding, as well as by a wide range of changes in society and politics. The usual goal of management is to ensure that one or more properties of a system of interest are maintained through time. This is often interpreted as a need for managers to seek either to maintain system stability or to maintain particular system components and relationships while allowing or encouraging the system to change. In considering the dynamics of management and system change, an understanding of resilience is particularly relevant.
Description:
Adaptive management is an approach to natural resource management that emphasizes learning through management where knowledge is incomplete, and when, despite inherent uncertainty, managers and policymakers must act. Unlike a traditional trial and error approach, adaptive management has explicit structure, including a careful elucidation of goals, identification of alternative management objectives and hypotheses of causation, and procedures for the collection of data followed by evaluation and reiteration. The process is iterative, and serves to reduce uncertainty, build knowledge and improve management over time in a goal-oriented and structured process.
