Adaptive Management

Characteristics of Adaptive Management

CHARACTERISTICS OFADAPTIVE management include: acknowledgement of uncertainty concerning the most appropriate policy for a management issue, thoughtful selection of the practices to be applied (assessment and design), careful implementation of a plan of action designed to reveal the critical missing knowledge, monitoring of key response indicators, analysis of the management outcomes in consideration of the original objectives, and incorporation of the results into future decisions.

While it was first developed for ecosystem management, principles of adaptive management have also been used in other fields. For example, the concept of learning organizations in business management, learning in the social sciences, and the scientific method all draw from principles of adaptive management. More recently, adaptive management has also been applied to conservation projects.

Adaptive management is an inductive approach, relying on comparative studies that blend ecological theories with observation, the design of planned interventions in nature, and the understanding of human response processes. Adaptive management treats management policies as experiments that probe the responses of ecosystems as human behaviors change. Adaptive management is bioregional in scope, collaborative in governance, and adaptive with respect to management perspective. As its use has become more widespread and diverse in meaning, it is also referred to as adaptive environmental assessment and management, or AEAM.

Adaptive management incorporates research into conservation action. The testing of assumptions, necessary in order to adapt and learn, involves a six-step iterative process: 1) problem assessment or outline purpose; 2) model design of the system in question, and a management plan; 3) implementation of the plan; 4) monitoring of activities that test assumptions; 5) evaluation of activities and analysis of collected data; and 6) using results to adjust or adapt the project and to learn from the experience, then repeating the cycle to further improve management efforts. The key to successful adaptive management is to complete all six steps to understand which actions work or do not work, and why.

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