Adaptive Management: From More Talk to Real Action

The challenges currently facing resource managers are large-scale and complex, and demand new approaches to balance development and conservation goals. One approach that shows considerable promise for addressing these challenges is adaptive management, which by now is broadly seen as a natural, intuitive, and potentially effective way to address decision-making in the face of uncertainties. Yet the concept of adaptive management continues to evolve, and its record of success remains limited. In this article, we present an operational framework for adaptive decision-making, and describe the challenges and opportunities in applying it to real-world problems. We discuss the key elements required for adaptive decision-making, and their integration into an iterative process that highlights and distinguishes technical and social learning. We illustrate the elements and processes of the framework with some successful on-the-ground examples of natural resource management. Finally, we address some of the difficulties in applying learning-based management, and finish with a discussion of future directions and strategic challenges.

• Publication year

  2013

• Venue

  Environmental Management

• Publication date

  2013-11-23

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1007/s00267-013-0205-7PMID 24271618PMCID 4544568
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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