You are here:
The Role of Bridging Organizations in Enhancing Ecosystem Services and Facilitating Adaptive Management of Social-Ecological Systems
Citation:
Green, O., L. Schultz, M. Nekoro, AND A. Garmestani. The Role of Bridging Organizations in Enhancing Ecosystem Services and Facilitating Adaptive Management of Social-Ecological Systems. Chapter 7, Craig R. Allen & Ahjond Garmestani (ed.), Adaptive Management of Social-Ecological Systems. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, Netherlands, , 107-122, (2015).
Impact/Purpose:
To manage for resilience, the goal must be to generate improved understanding of the entire system of interest, rather than specific, detailed knowledge from parts of the system (Folke et al. 2005). In the Kristianstads Vattenrike example, social and ecological change at one scale triggered cross-scale effects, which resulted in a window of opportunity for the transition to adaptive governance (Olsson et al. 2006). With respect to the adaptive cycle, the critical variable is that change is the only constant. The trick is to embrace change and recognize that while change can be negative, change can be a catalyst for new opportunities.
Description:
Adaptive management is an approach for monitoring the response of ecological systems to different policies and practices and attempts to reduce the inherent uncertainty in ecological systems via system monitoring and iterative decision making and experimentation (Holling 1978). Monitoring is an essential aspect of adaptive management, as information from the system (e.g., monitoring data) feeds back into the management process in an iterative manner that allows managers to adapt to changing circumstances (Green and Garmestani 2012). Management actions are hypotheses to be put “at risk” in an adaptive management framework, and information that allows for learning is generated to improve management decisions (Green and Garmestani 2012).
