Adaptive management

From RAWorkbook

Adaptive management - is an approach captured in the phrase ‘learning by doing’. It is a learning-based approach to resource management that views policies as guesses or hypotheses, and actions as ways of testing those guesses. The main point of an adaptive assessment is to try to define what is known and what is not known about various management issues. It makes explicit the assumptions underlying management. Management actions can then be structured to test these assumptions (system understanding), while solving management issues. In doing so, adaptive assessment attempts to fill the gap between knowledge and action.

To begin setting up an adaptive management program it is useful to summarize the alternate regimes within the focal system. And it helps to think about regimes that occur in the ecological domain, economic domain, political domain, and social domain.

It will likely be necessary to test the form and positions of identified thresholds for at least some of the regime shifts listed, and experiments of this kind involve costs, sometimes in the form of foregone profits where reduced levels of use are one of the treatments. This will be especially important in tests to determine if the system is in an undesired regime, and what it will take to restore it to a desired one. The allocation of costs is part of the intervention plan.