Pathology and failure in the design and implementation of adaptive management.

TL;DR: This work outlines nine pathologies and challenges that can lead to failure in adaptive management programs and focuses on general sources of failures in adaptivemanagement, so that others can avoid these pitfalls in the future.

About: This article is published in Journal of Environmental Management.The article was published on 2011-05-01 and is currently open access. It has received 278 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Adaptive management & Natural resource management.

Summary

1. Introduction

• Additionally, natural resource decision making is conducted within the constraints of broader social and political systems, which often confine or constrain the ability to manage adaptively (or to manage at all, in some cases).
• Those competing hypotheses are then put at risk by applying management experimentally.
• If habitat improvement by reducing herbaceous vegetation produces a positive response, there is still uncertainty in how to best achieve the manipulation of herbaceous vegetation while promoting a positive response in tern populations.

2.1. Lack of stakeholder engagement

• A lack of engagement of stakeholders early in the adaptive management process can lead to stakeholders rejecting results that vary from their expectations.
• A challenge in adaptive management is the recognition by key agency personnel that they will have to become engaged in activities that are outside their own agency mandate, and that they may have to agree to involvement from parties who are affected by their management decisions but have no legal authority.
• The Glen Canyon Adaptive Management Program is an example of such a FACA committee.
• The reluctance to experiment can also be manifest as a need for control (Allan and Curtis, 2005) from a range of stakeholders including agencies.
• One such example is the cost of experimental water releases from the Glen Canyon, but the situation is very similar in the Missouri and Platte Rivers.

2.3. Surprises are suppressed

• Surprises are expected in complex socialeecological systems, perhaps especially when the authors attempt to anticipate them.
• Surprise may come in the form of natural disaster (drought, hurricane), or as a departure from anticipated human behaviors, or from other sources.
• In the Platte River, the historic structuring process was flooding.
• Thus, simply restoring the former structuring process will not restore structure, and woody vegetation has to be removed before flooding can have an impact on habitat.
• By the year 2000, an invasive wetland plant, the common reed (Phragmites australis), had become established along the Platte River, further entrenching the hysteresis caused by vegetative stabilization of sandbars.

2.4. Prescriptions are followed

• Adaptive management is prescriptive only in process, though formally identifying objectives and alternative actions giving support for one alternative or another is critical.
• If management is seeking to optimize learning, then it is not possible to anticipate every bifurcation possible following individual experiments.
• But the unanticipated can be less startling than surprises, asmore andmore is learned about the system under management, new information informs new management.
• After all, it can take years of process to reach management agreements.
• That knowledge should be embraced, and adaptive management plans should be revisited, dropped, and rewritten as a matter of course.

2.5. Action procrastination: learning and discussion remain the only ingredients

• Process should not trump action, and the implementation of what has been learned.
• Management is central in adaptive management, but can be halted by calls for ‘more science’, which often represents a stalling tactic.
• Many complex and difficult environmental challenges have been left unaddressed for years by hiding behind the need for more science.
• Such obstruction is often political in nature.

2.6. Learning is not used to modify policy and management

• This runs counter to the basic tenets of adaptive management, whereby management can proceed despite uncertainty as long as management actions are designed to reduce that uncertainty over time.
• This pathology is similar to the one described above, but here what is learned is critical and important, but is shelved because the management actions identified and necessary are too politically, economically, or logistically difficult.
• Salmon management in the Pacific Northwest is once again an example, where the management objective is to conserve distinct stocks of salmons, and viable populations of those stocks.
• Removal of dams would clearly benefit salmon stocks, and indeed, for salmon runs blocked by dams, other actions which may further aid salmon stocks may be trivial by comparison.

2.7. Avoiding hard truths: decision makers are risk averse

• It is possible to conduct small management experiments into perpetuity while never tackling the critical but controversial underlying management challenges.
• Here, the necessary management is not known with surety, but it is likely that it is logistically and politically difficult and expensive; or, the outcome is anticipated to be economically or politically expensive.
• To avoid hard truths small-scale management experiments are conducted, which may improve management and the state of the resource, around the edges.
• The California condor (Gymnogyps californianus), when the wild population was reduced to a handful of individuals, was not a good candidate for adaptive management.
• For one, critical experiments were too risky (such as attempting to establish a second population); additionally, critically endangered species are unlikely to yield enough data in terms of sample size to actually assess the success of management experiments.

2.8. The process lacks leadership and direction

• Stakeholders should not be decisionmakers, and no stakeholder group should have more influence than others.
• Strong, but beneficent, leadership is critical, as is the ability to facilitate; facilitator and leader can be separate roles.
• Too often a very vocal or influential individual, or stakeholder group, hijacks the process.
• This can lead to a process to address a specific agenda other than learning how to best manage.
• The adept leader of an adaptive management effort should recognize the personalities involved and make the best of all of them (Holling and Chambers, 1973), and should recognize both blatant and hidden agendas.

2.9. Focus on planning, not action

• Large adaptive management programs can become stuck in a planning loop.
• This can be due to a desire for perfection and success, the mistaken belief that the adaptive management plan is a panacea rather than a process andmust be perfect, or because the funding or sponsoring agency wishes to keep the process in an endless planning loop.
• Either is a serious pathology that must be recognized and rectified.
• In some large adaptive management programs, programmatic compartmentalization within bureaucracies may mean that there is plenty of funding available to establish the process, or for monitoring, but not for experiments.

3. Summary

• The conceptual underpinnings for adaptive management are quite simple; there will always be inherent uncertainty in the dynamics and behavior of complex ecologic systems.
• This integrative learning is described in phases of assessment, policy as hypotheses, management actions as tests, and evaluation.
• For one, the process can be hijacked by those with specific agendas.
• On the obvious front, making stakeholders cry by badgering them during the process (witnessed by one of the authors) is a telltale sign of process gone awry.
• The adaptive management approach can bridge gaps in understanding and create new and novel approaches.

4. Conclusions

• Adaptive management is perhaps too often seen as the only way forward for wicked socialeecological problems, such as presented by the management of stressed and over-appropriated watersheds that transcend multiple jurisdictions (e.g., the Everglades, the Colorado River, the Missouri River).
• These are not the ideal situations for the application of adaptive management, because replication is not possible and experiments are highly constrained by entrenched management, engineering, economic and social systems.
• In such situation, adaptivemanagement can be seen as the action of last resort, and used to maintain the status quo.

Figures

Fig. 1. Adaptive management and scenarios are complementary approaches to understanding complex systems. Adaptive management functions best when both uncertainty and controllability are high, which means the potential for learning is high, and the system can be manipulated (adapted from Peterson et al., 2003).

Fig. 2. Adaptive management is appropriate where the level of risk is relatively low, where it is “safe” to conduct experiments.

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions in "Pathology and failure in the design and implementation of adaptive management" ?

Adaptive management is a form of structured decision making, and structured decision-making and adaptive management are often used synonymously in natural resource management this paper. 

Q2. What are the future works in "Pathology and failure in the design and implementation of adaptive management" ?

Often, this action procrastination leads to missed opportunities and more intractable problems in the near future. 

Q3. What is the key to success and failure of adaptive management?

Social networks that arecentered on epistemic communities and extend to stakeholder and policy groups are developed in adaptive assessments and are critical to successes and failures of implementation and management (Gunderson, 1999). 

Q4. What are the main reasons for adaptive management failures?

Programmatic failures have been a result of a lack of ecological resilience, inability to control experimentation at appropriate scales, and the lack of flexibility, trust and openness in the human management system (Gunderson and Light, 2006). 

Q5. What is the common explanation for the decline of terns?

Itmay be thatwoodyorherbaceous vegetation is encroaching on tern habitat, it may be that some change in habitat conditions increased populations of nest predators, or that foraging habitat has declined, resulting in reduced survival of young. 

Q6. What are the nine pathologies that can lead to failure in adaptive management?

A lack of engagement of stakeholders early in the adaptive management process can lead to stakeholders rejecting results that vary from their expectations. 

Q7. What is the meaning of adaptive management?

Since its initial introduction and description, adaptive management has been hailed as a solution to endless trial and error approaches to complex natural resource management challenges. 

Q8. What is the cost of experimental water releases from the Glen Canyon dam?

Although water releases from the Glen Canyon dam are required under the Colorado Compact, water can be released through the turbines that generate electrical energy or water can be released through by-pass tubes. 

Q9. What was the initial response to the invasion by common reed?

One of the initial responses discussed by the Platte River Program Governance Committee was to treat invasion by common reed as external, and attempt to eradicate it and then continue with the planned adaptive management. 

Q10. What is the definition of adaptive management?

Many large river adaptive management programs fall into this category, and may focus on manipulations to improve habitat rather than restoring processes e usually flooding and hydrological variation. 

Q11. What is the way to deal with surprises?

When surprises intervene in adaptive managementprograms, they should be embraced as opportunities to learn rather than as externalities. 

Q12. What can be the primary source of the need for control?

This need for control can be from governance committees, from agencies with the primary responsibility for management, or from other sources (Holling and Meffe, 1996).