Synonyms

Adaptive resource management

Definition

Adaptive management is a decision-making process centered upon learning from the outcomes of management actions. Information from monitoring and research is systematically incorporated into future decisions to improve the effectiveness of management.

Description

Adaptive management (AM) is recommended when resource management decisions must be made despite significant uncertainty. AM programs collect information about a system while implementing management actions and apply that information to reduce uncertainty and improve future decisions. AM frameworks typically include monitoring, research, and conceptual and numerical modeling to collect and organize knowledge about a system and incorporate it into future decisions (Williams et al., 2009).

Structured decision making is recommended for the development and ongoing operation of AM programs. Structured decision making is a process in which problems, objectives, management alternatives, and key uncertainties are systematically identified (Gregory et al., 2012). The process includes projecting the consequences of alternative actions into the future to determine the range of likely outcomes and trade-offs while identifying acceptable levels of risk. As resource management has political, social, and economic considerations, formal engagement with stakeholders in the structured decision making process and the development and implementation of an AM program increases the chances that the program will succeed.

AM approaches can be categorized as active or passive. Practitioners of active approaches seek to optimize learning through management experiments, assigning higher value to management actions that will provide the most useful information. Passive approaches use information gained through monitoring of actions and outcomes; however, they generally do not choose actions based on their potential for increasing knowledge. While passive approaches gather information more slowly, they may be beneficial in cases where experimentation is impractical or impossible. Both approaches follow a cyclical pattern of action and assessment. Such a cycle might consist of (1) a planning phase to develop conceptual models, objectives, and management alternatives; (2) a design phase to choose and develop specific actions; (3) an action implementation and monitoring phase; (4) an assessment phase, in which new information is combined with existing information to evaluate the outcomes of actions relative to the objectives; and (5) an adjustment phase to make changes to actions as necessary to improve outcomes. Assessment and adjustment may apply to the current action, returning the cycle to the design phase. Less frequently, managers may use the assessment and adjustment phases to evaluate the AM program itself and revisit the planning phase.

Cross-references