Towards an Adaptive Management That Recognises Science and People

Complexity, uncertainty and human behaviour increasingly affect the success of environmental management, especially when managing at large scales. Over the past thirty years, recognition of the need for new approaches to managing these has consolidated. As a solution, adaptive management is becoming increasingly popular. However, adaptive management is increasingly being classified as either adaptive ‘experimental’ management or adaptive ‘collaborative’ management. Whilst each form recognises different perspectives of environmental problems, practitioners are unaware of the differences and tend to adopt one or the other. The lack of integration of the two components when retro-fitting adaptive management to programmes has (arguably) lead to a lack of realisation of the promise of adaptive management. This paper begins by outlining core components of adaptive management that relate to science and social perspectives, and to the processes that link them together, providing a more holistic picture of the approach. It then draws upon these to build an evaluation tool that enables practitioners to assess the relative strengths and weakness of their programmes. This tool can then be tailored to their particular context, and used as a record of both changing circumstance and programme improvement. We thus demonstrate, using examples from the New Zealand natural resource management setting, a new form of information transfer that allows us to learn about integrating different perspectives on adaptive management in their various contexts.