ABSTRACT
Adaptive management — implementing policies as experiments — is a methodological innovation in resource management. This chapter considers the difficulties of realizing the promise of adaptive management in natural resource management and biodiversity conservation. The essence of managing adaptively is having an explicit vision or model of the ecosystem one is trying to guide. Adaptive management is an unorthodox approach for people who think of management in terms of command. The high-water mark, so far, in adaptive management practice appears to be a careful series of management experiments conducted in groundfish fisheries by Keith Sainsbury of the Australian CSIRO in Tasmania. Adaptive management and learning also play a strategic role in the emergent question of conservation at the ecosystem scale. Practitioners of adaptive management are moving the method toward the pragmatics of trial-and-error learning, while seeking to preserve the rigor of scientific logic.
