ABSTRACT
Modernist approaches to environmental management have been comprehensively critiqued in recent decades across multiple disciplines. Pretensions to complete (expert) knowledge and control have become widely regarded as ‘pathologies’ (Holling and Meffe 1996) or ‘fallacies’ (Stirling 2014). Environmental management scholars have sought alternative ways to structure knowledge–action relationships that are more cognisant of the complex, dynamic and, to some extent, unknowable relations between humans, non-humans, and landscapes (e.g. Berkes et al. 2003). Adaptive management, primarily developed within resilience science, has become one such increasingly influential alternative, embraced in Australian and Scandinavian environmental management, policy and planning (Allen and Garmestani 2015). Adaptive management is based on the idea that, in the context of unpredictable change, knowledge will be incomplete and provisional and management experience should be used to produce scientific knowledge and to shape subsequent management actions (Holling 1978; Walters 1986). Consequently, adaptive management attempts to enhance learning from experience by framing management plans as scientific hypotheses and management actions as experiments in processes of learning-by-doing. However, while adaptive management is intuitively attractive as a way of bridging science and practice in order to ‘allow management action to continue’ in complex and uncertain situations, it has proven difficult to connect adaptive management decisions to desired outcomes in the landscape, and a gap has emerged between theory and practice (Allen and Garmestani 2015, p. 3).
