FIGURE 1. The Position of This Guide Relative to Existing Works on Adaptive Management
For conservation to succeed, it must be a well-organized and highly efficient endeavor. We have found, however, that despite enormous investments of time and money over the past few decades, the conservation community has met with only limited success in achieving its goals. Clearly, changes must be made to the way we carry out conservation activities to ensure that we are getting the highest return on our investments.
On the front lines of conservation, in projects around the world, practitioners need to know the most cost-effective path to success. They often ask: How do we identify and define operational goals that will help us measure our success? What actions can we take to efficiently achieve our goals? How can we measure the extent to which our actions contributed to positive change? How can we more effectively integrate learning into what we do and how our organizations function? These are some of the questions that motivated us to explore the use of adaptive management as a tool to achieve conservation success.
Although the concept of adaptive management has been used in natural resource management since the early 1970s, it has remained fairly technical and primarily within the command of professional scientists. For this reason, its full integration into the practice of conservation has remained elusive.
We wrote this guide in order to distill the essence of adaptive management to develop guidance for practitioners to help them more efficiently define and achieve their conservation goals. To complete the study, we reviewed publications and materials from many related fields, and we visited various conservation projects that have attempted to practice adaptive management.
The results of our review and field visits are presented as a framework for adaptive management that we believe provides the necessary foundation for practitioners to be able to realize the full potential of this valuable tool. As you design, manage, and monitor your own conservation projects in the future, we hope you find this guide to be a useful resource.
Perhaps you are a member of a project team that is responsible for managing a biosphere reserve or national park. Maybe you work for a non-governmental conservation organization that is doing community-based conservation in an area rich in natural resources. Perhaps you are a research scientist or graduate student trying to figure out the best way to conserve an ecosystem in a particular area. Or maybe you work for a government agency responsible for managing natural resources in a certain state or country.
These roles are typical of conservation practitioners — people who work on projects that are designed to achieve goals related to biodiversity conservation and the sustainable management of natural resources. If you are like most other conservation practitioners, your work requires a wide range of skills including managing staff, dealing with boards, funders, and bosses, communicating with stakeholders, and understanding the biology and culture of the places in which you work. But perhaps more importantly, your job requires understanding and managing information in ways that maximize your conservation results.
Like many other conservation practitioners, you have probably asked the following questions as you have managed your project:
How can we best understand the conditions at the site where we are working?
What goals should we be trying to accomplish?
What actions should we take to efficiently achieve our goals?
How do we measure success and the extent to which our actions contributed to change?
What can we do to work more effectively in the future?
How can we capture what we have learned so that we don’t make the same mistakes again?
How can we share our findings with other practitioners?
If you have ever asked yourself questions like these, then you have begun the process of adaptive management.
The field of biodiversity conservation is at an important point in its evolution. Over the past few decades, we have discovered why conservation is important for the future of our planet. We have identified many of the species and ecosystems that are at greatest risk of going extinct. And we have begun to develop tools and techniques that can help counter the growing threats to biodiversity.
At the same time, as the field matures, the conservation community is also facing a number of new and more difficult challenges. Perhaps foremost amongst these is the recognition that despite decades of hard work, hundreds of projects, thousands of trained professionals, and millions of dollars, we have not yet substantially slowed the destruction of forests, grasslands, and aquatic ecosystems. It is clear that business as usual is not a viable option and that newer, more powerful approaches must be tried.
Conservation practitioners are facing increasing pressure from donors, governments, local stakeholders, and society as a whole to demonstrate clear and tangible results. To this end, they are trying to develop workable monitoring and evaluation systems. Conservation practitioners are also challenged by limited financial and human resources to become more effective in using different tools and techniques in their work. As a result, they have begun examining what works, what doesn’t, and why. And finally, conservation practitioners are being asked to capture what they have learned and pass it on to other practitioners so that we can avoid making the same mistakes over and over again and can begin generating new knowledge. They have thus begun to try to create learning projects and learning organizations.
Monitoring and evaluation, testing what works and what doesn’t, and creating learning organizations are all components of an approach called adaptive management. Adaptive management is fundamentally a way of incorporating reflection into action to enhance the practice of conservation and learning.
The term "adaptive management" has been used primarily in academic circles since the 1970s, but until recently, has had little relevance for conservation practitioners. In recent times, the term has become a confusing buzzword that means many things to many people — as one person told us, "Adaptive management is merely an excuse to change your mind." We believe that this perceived lack of relevance and confusion occur largely because adaptive management has not been clearly defined or explained in operational terms. Our interest in writing this guide has grown out of a desire to help bring some conceptual clarity to the concept of adaptive management and to determine ways in which it can be harnessed and used more effectively by conservation practitioners. To achieve these aims, we began with seven objectives:
1. Clearly define what adaptive management is — and what it isn’t.
2. Describe the conditions that warrant using an adaptive management approach.
3. Review the conceptual roots of adaptive management and demonstrate how they are relevant to conservation projects.
4. Learn how some field projects are currently doing certain aspects of adaptive management.
5. Outline the steps involved in doing adaptive management in conservation projects
6. Determine principles for doing effective adaptive management in conservation projects.
7. Suggest future directions to further refine our understanding of adaptive management and its application to conservation projects.
Adaptive management is rooted in many different disciplines, but has not yet been widely used in conservation projects. To address many of the conceptual issues in our objectives, we had to rely heavily on research, analysis, and publications from other fields. Furthermore, to address many of the practical and applied issues in our objectives, we had to locate conservation projects that were practicing some aspects of adaptive management. We also drew on our own experiences in applying adaptive management to projects and portfolios. As shown in Figure 1, this guide synthesizes ideas from a literature review of other fields that have used similar theoretical concepts, experiences from conservation projects that have applied at least some of these concepts, and processes from two other publications that we have written. Our research for this guide was divided into three main activities:
Reviewing the literature. We canvassed a broad spectrum of fields that have either used adaptive management, or have developed parallel concepts. These fields include science and philosophy, social science, business management, professional practice, and ecosystem management. After reading broadly in each field, we selected one or two sources that we believed best summarized the field. These sources are described in the following section. From this literature review, we developed a draft framework that includes a definition of adaptive management, the conditions that warrant an adaptive management approach, and the steps and principles involved in doing effective adaptive management of conservation projects.
Conducting site visits and key informant interviews. Using this draft framework, we developed a topic guide that we could use to interview key informants in conservation projects from around the world. After a careful search, we selected three projects that we believed clearly demonstrated some of the characteristics of adaptive management that we identified during the literature review. These projects, which are described the following section, include the ADMADE Project in Zambia, the Crater Mountain Project in Papua New Guinea, and the British Columbia Forest Service’s Adaptive Management Initiative in Canada. We visited these sites in 1999 and 2000 and interviewed key informants using our topic guide. Most conversations were tape recorded so that we could use transcripts for our analysis.
Developing "how-to" guidebooks. While we were doing the literature review and site-based research, we also developed two "how-to" guidebooks designed to help conservation practitioners apply adaptive management principles to their work. Measures of Success is about using adaptive management at a project level.1 It forms the basis for the steps discussed in the third section of this guide. Greater Than the Sum of Their Parts is about using adaptive management across multiple projects in a portfolio.2 It forms the basis for the steps discussed in the last section of this guide.
Based on the results of these three activities, we developed the final framework described in this guide.
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FIGURE 1. The Position of This Guide Relative to Existing Works on Adaptive Management |
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As you read through this publication, please keep in mind the following main points:
Our work is descriptive and synthetic. To come up with the principles we include in this publication, we did not use a random sample of projects or a systematic experimental design. Instead, we were much more opportunistic and used the insights and experience of other fields and examples of conservation projects that exhibit some characteristics of adaptive management. We wrote this publication in an attempt to capture and synthesize relevant state-of-the-art thinking on and application of adaptive management.
This is not a "how-to" guide. This publication does not explain in detail the process for doing adaptive management. As you read this publication, we hope you will think about your own experiences and how you might apply the steps and principles we present. If you are interested in learning more about adaptive management as an idea, you can then go on to read the original sources that we used as well as the other sources listed in the references section. If you are interested in trying an adaptive management approach with your project, we recommend taking a look at Measures of Success, which describes in greater detail the steps involved in designing, managing, and monitoring conservation projects. If you are interested in trying an adaptive management approach with a portfolio of projects, we suggest consulting Greater Than the Sum of Their Parts, which describes similar steps at a program level.
This is an intermediate step. We did not write this guide to be the last word on adaptive management and its application to conservation projects. Instead, we expressly set out to provide an intermediate step that clarifies the current state of knowledge as to what adaptive management is and how conservation practitioners might better apply it to their work. We hope that this guide serves as a catalyst that will lead to an improved understanding over time of how to use adaptive management to more efficiently reach conservation goals and build learning organizations.
Overview of This SectionIn this section, we first define adaptive management. We then outline some of the conditions that warrant taking an adaptive management approach in conservation projects. |
Adaptive management is a relatively new concept — one that has only recently begun to gain popularity in the mainstream conservation community. But what is it? Some people may ask, "Isn’t adaptive management simply good management? Doesn’t it merely involve trying something and then if it doesn’t work, using your common sense to adapt and try something else?" We believe that adaptive management is good management, but that not all good management is adaptive management. We also believe that adaptive management requires common sense, but that it is not a license to just try whatever you want. Instead, adaptive management requires an explicitly experimental — or "scientific" — approach to managing conservation projects as outlined in the following definition:
Adaptive management incorporates research into conservation action. Specifically, it is the integration of design, management, and monitoring to systematically test assumptions in order to adapt and learn.
This definition can be expanded as follows:
a) Testing assumptions is about systematically trying different actions to achieve a desired outcome. It is not, however, a random trial-and-error process. Instead, it involves first thinking about the situation at your project site, developing a specific set of assumptions about what is occurring and what actions you might be able to use to affect these events. You then implement these actions and monitor the actual results to see how they compare to the ones predicted by your assumptions. The key here is to develop an understanding of not only which actions work and which do not, but also why.
b) Adaptation is about taking action to improve your project based on the results of your monitoring. If your project’s actions did not achieve the expected results, it is because either your assumptions were wrong, your actions were poorly executed, the conditions at the project site have changed, your monitoring was faulty — or some combination of these problems. Adaptation involves changing your assumptions and your interventions to respond to the new information obtained through monitoring efforts.
c) Learning is about systematically documenting the process that your team has gone through and the results you have achieved. This documentation will help your team avoid making the same mistakes in the future. Furthermore, it will enable other people in the broader conservation community to benefit from your experiences. Other practitioners are eager to learn from your successes and failures so that they can design and manage better projects and avoid some of the hazards and perils you may have encountered. By sharing the information that you have learned from your project, you will help conservation efforts around the world.
Our definition of adaptive management includes a framework of specific conditions that warrant an adaptive management approach, steps for the process of adaptive management, and principles for the practice of adaptive management. This framework, which is described in the remainder of this guide, is summarized in the box on the next page.
Summary of the Framework for Adaptive
Management
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Adaptive management is driven by the serious challenges that all conservation practitioners face. It has been developed to help conservation project managers make sense of seemingly confusing and chaotic situations that they face on a daily basis, and to provide a framework to learn systematically from their successes and failures as well as those of others. In this section we describe some of the most prevalent conditions encountered by many project managers as they attempt to achieve their goals and objectives — conditions that necessitate an adaptive management approach to conservation project management.
Condition 1: Conservation Projects Take Place in Complex Systems.
Conservation practitioners need to deal with a wide range of factors and circumstances as they implement and manage field projects. At any given site, there are dozens if not hundreds of factors that influence the status of biodiversity and its conservation. There are geophysical factors like climate, weather, winds and currents, and soils. There are ecological factors like regeneration rates and predator-prey interactions. There are social factors like culture, demographic and family structures, and religion. There are political factors like the type of government and the willingness of national governments to address local problems. There are economic factors like cash needs, employment opportunities, exchange rates, and markets. There are institutional factors like the strength of leadership in project organizations and the ability of project team members to work together. And there are random factors like diseases, economic crashes, or earthquakes and volcanoes that can completely destroy projects. It is not an exaggeration to say that conservation projects take place in perhaps some of the most complex systems that humans have ever dealt with.
Condition 2: The World Is a Constantly and Unpredictably Changing Place.
This complex world in which conservation projects take place is also constantly changing. It is generally fairly easy for humans to adapt to predictable change in the natural world like the rising and setting of the sun, the cycles of the tides, and the seasonality of snows or monsoon rains. Other sorts of natural change, like Pleistocene glaciation and deglaciation, though less predictable, occur over time scales longer than the attention span of humans. Whereas these changes may have affected our evolution, they do not exist in our conscious minds. Change, of course, affects— not only the natural world, but the human one as well. Changes in life expectancies, market expectations, political systems, and human hopes all can impact conservation projects, which historically, have been ill equipped to adapt to a changing world. Furthermore, not all change is linear and predictable. Volcanoes, El Niño, plant epidemics like the Irish potato famine fungus, and alternate stable states in ecological systems all represent the types of change that prove difficult for humans to control or understand. Yet these types of change are pervasive in the natural world and even more common in the world of human affairs where economic crashes or political coups can almost overnight radically alter the landscape in which project teams must operate. The existence of change of any sort, let alone non-linear change, makes adaptability an essential element of conservation projects. Surprise does not always have to be an enemy; it can also be an ally if you know how to turn it into an opportunity to accomplish your goals.
Condition 3: Our "Competitors" Are Changing and Adapting.
The need to stay one step ahead of the competition is clearly evident in the world of conservation projects. Logging firms change and adopt new tactics. Poachers use new traps. Commercial land developers are forever finding ways of getting around zoning laws. Big business, like sugar producers or oil companies, manipulate public opinion by changing public image through the use of expensive advertising. It’s a battle. The conservation community — including conservation practitioners and managers — must adapt to compete. Unfortunately, with rare exceptions, conservation projects are most often managed by governmental agencies or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have far fewer financial and human capital resources than their competitors. As a result, project teams have to be "smarter" in order to succeed and get the most out of the resources that they have. Organizations, like human beings, can often survive by sticking to one strategy or by changing through a trial-and-error process. However, those organizations that are most strategic and can adapt the best and most efficiently have the greatest chance of thriving and getting and staying ahead of the competition.
Condition 4: Immediate Action Is Required.
Despite the constantly and usually unpredictably changing world and despite incomplete information, we must never stop conserving biodiversity and managing resources. This is because humans will never stop our seemingly inexorable consumption of the earth’s biosphere and geosphere. Fishers will not stop fishing, loggers will not stop logging, and human populations will not stop growing in size and resource consumption. Therefore, conservation projects helping park directors, resource managers, and community conservation groups cannot flag in their efforts. To stop is to surrender.
Condition 5: There Is No Such Thing as Complete Information.
The success of humans has, in large part, been possible due to our abilities to gather and interpret information. In early millennia it was information derived from animal tracks and smoke signals, whereas, we are now using satellite-based cameras and the Internet. In many parts of our lives, particularly personal ones, we are used to operating with less than complete information. Despite this, we typically expect assurance that conservation or development decisions will be based on complete information. Unfortunately, measuring and fully understanding biodiversity at a given site is a difficult, if not impossible, undertaking. Likewise, social, economic, and political information related to human populations living in or around the area of concern is rarely complete. As a result, complete knowledge, cannot be a necessary pre-condition to design and implement conservation policies or activities. Conservation practitioners do not have the luxury to wait until all the biological, ecological, and social characteristics of a given area are known and understood before they implement project activities. Most often, they must act using only existing information — and they must act quickly to counter some pressing threat. Incomplete knowledge of biological and social conditions should not be a barrier to action, but should be used as efficiently and wisely as possible to design effective interventions. Important gaps in knowledge must be identified and addressed early in the conservation project in order to make the best decisions throughout the life of the project.
Condition 6: We Can Learn and Improve.
Against the prospect of continuing change, human consumption, and habitat alteration is the proven fact that humans can and have improved their ways of living lightly on the earth. The challenge is to stimulate novelty, build in flexibility, adaptability and learning, and help conserve the remains of the biodiversity left in an already heavily influenced world. Success will ultimately only happen to the degree to which we can learn and use what we have learned to improve our conservation efforts.
Overview of This SectionAlthough the term "adaptive management" has only been around for the past couple of decades, the basic concepts inherent in this term have been expressed for centuries in various schools of human thought. Adaptive management approaches have been developed in many different contexts. In the first part of this section, we introduce a few of the approaches that we read about. Specific fields that we consulted include:
Elements of adaptive management have also been adopted by many conservation and natural resource management projects. In the second part of this section, we describe the projects in the three countries that we visited:
Each of these sources contributed to the framework for effective adaptive management presented in this guide. |
The Scientific Method
The most basic concepts behind all adaptive management approaches can be found in the traditions of science and philosophy. In the Western tradition, these advances are embodied in the development of the formal scientific method. The scientific method has its roots in the work of the ancient Greek philosophers such as Democritus, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle who developed the first formal elements of logic and reason. This work was then further refined through the work of subsequent philosophers like Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, and Kant, and scientists like Galileo, Newton, Pasteur, Darwin, and Einstein. To represent the "scientific method," we use some of the ideas outlined by Robert Pirsig in his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. We also briefly touch on a few concepts advocated by Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and the idea of "post-normal" science represented by the works of Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz.3
Conditions That Warrant Using the Scientific Method
According to Pirsig, at it’s most basic sensory level, the universe is "unintelligible, just a kaleidoscopic jumble of colors and patterns and noises and smells and pain and tastes without meaning."4 Pirsig is interested in how humans have used the scientific method to organize our collective understanding of these pure sensory data into a pyramid of knowledge about the universe. Pirsig describes the formal scientific method in comparison to informal ways of acquiring knowledge as "a huge bulldozer — slow, tedious, lumbering, laborious, but invincible...it takes twice as long, five times as long, maybe a dozen times as long as informal techniques, but you know in the end you’re going to get it."5 This formal process is needed because in scientific work "otherwise the problems get so complex that you get lost in them and confused and forget what you know and what you don’t know and have to give up."6
A Brief Description of the Scientific Method
Pirsig describes how at its core, the scientific method involves weaving together two kinds of logic. Inductive inference involves starting with observations of the natural world and then arriving at general conclusions based on these observations. Induction is thus reasoning from particular experience to general truths. Deductive inference involves starting with general knowledge and predicting specific results. Deduction is thus reasoning from general truths to particular experience. The scientific method involves combining long strings of mixed inductive and deductive inferences.7
To be truly effective, the use of inductive and deductive reasoning has to be done very systematically so that as you add to the pyramid of knowledge, you avoid making any errors on lower levels that could cause the entire structure to come crashing down. The formal scientific method involves eight steps: 1) State the problem that you would like to change, 2) Develop a hypothesis as to the cause of the problem, 3) Design an experiment to test the hypothesis, 4) Predict what you think will happen when you undertake the experiment, 5) Implement the experiment following the protocol that you outlined, 6) Describe the results of the experiment focusing only on what you have observed and not make any unwarranted inferences, 7) Analyze and draw conclusions from the results of the experiment without concluding more than you have proved, and 8) Publish the results of your experiment so that other people can learn from your findings and will not have to "reinvent the wheel."8
Kuhn looks at the larger scale of how science operates in general. He defines the collection of knowledge and models in any given field as a paradigm. Kuhn argues that the development of paradigms is not a gradual process, but occurs in a series of waves in which the greatest advances take place during crisis periods when existing theory and the normal modes of scientific inquiry break down. Funtowicz and Ravetz extend this concept, arguing that when dealing with large complex problems like environmental issues, the traditional scientific method cannot be used successfully in the face of high stakes, a high degree of uncertainty, and conflicting values held by different stakeholders. Instead, they advocate using science in a way in which it is "no longer imagined as delivering truth" and instead, decision-making becomes a mutual learning process among different stakeholders.9
Social Learning
Practitioners in a number of different fields began to take the scientific method and apply it to problems that they were facing, seeking to turn knowledge into action. One of the earliest of these efforts was in the social sciences where practitioners were concerned with the question of how groups make decisions. This work began to become known as social learning. Social learning can in part be traced from John Dewey’s philosophy of pragmatism — a theory of getting things done.10 For Dewey, learning comes from the interplay between practice and planning and then back to practice:
The plans which are formed...as guides of reconstructive action, are not dogmas. They are hypotheses to be worked out in practice, and to be rejected, corrected, and expanded as they fail or succeed in giving our present experience the guidance it requires.11
Dewey’s influence was seen in the work of a wide range of people ranging from the planner Lewis Mumford, the economist Edgar J. Dunn, and even the revolutionary Mao Tse-tung whose essay "On Practice" echoes the same thoughts: "Practice, knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge. This form repeats itself in endless cycles, and with each cycle, the content of practice and knowledge rises to a higher level."12 To represent this work, we look at the field of "social learning" as described by Chris Argyris and Donald Schön in their book Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective.
Conditions That Warrant Social Learning
Argyris and Schön base their work in the need to help organizations function better. According to Argyris and Schön, an organization is a collection of people whose members devise rules for making decisions in the name of the collectivity.13 The problem is to try to get the organization to capture knowledge generated so that it does not repeat mistakes. As Argyris and Schön put it:
Organizational learning is not the same thing as individual learning, even when the individuals who learn are members of the organization. There are too many cases in which organizations know less than their members. There are even cases in which the organization cannot seem to learn what every member knows.14
A Brief Description of Social Learning
Every organization has what Argyris and Schön call a "theory-of-action" that guides what activities the organization chooses to pursue. Unfortunately, an organization’s stated theory may often differ from its actual "theory-in-use." As a result, as Argyris and Schön state:
Organizational learning occurs when members of the organization act as learning agents for the organization, responding to changes in the internal and external environments of the organization by detecting and correcting errors in organizational theory-in-use, and embedding the results of their inquiry in private images and shared maps of organization...In both cases, organizational learning consists of restructuring organizational theories of action.15
Although these ideas are developed in the context of specific organizations, Argyris and Schön made it clear that the same principles apply to society as a whole.
The Learning Organization
Different schools of thought for managing businesses and organizations have probably been around for as long as there have been businesses — it’s not that hard to imagine merchants in ancient Babylon or China talking to one another in their stalls about the latest strategy for maximizing profit flow and avoiding taxes. In the past few decades, however, a number of schools of thought on business and organizational management have developed that have begun to converge on similar ideas. Examples of these different schools include strategic planning,16 management by objectives/results,17 total quality management,18 and structured flexibility.19 To represent this approach, we focused on the concept of the "learning organization" that is presented in Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization.
Conditions That Warrant Learning Organizations
For Senge, the key condition is that managers are working with systems. A system is a series of interconnected factors that affect one another. Because managers are working with systems, they cannot merely focus on part of the system, but instead need to use systems thinking. As Senge writes: "Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static snapshots."20 For Senge, "Today, this systems thinking is important because we are being overwhelmed by complexity. Perhaps for the first time in history, humankind has the capacity to create far more information than we can absorb...and to accelerate change far faster than anyone’s ability to keep pace."21 Furthermore, this complexity is not in the sheer numbers of variables in the system — the detail complexity of the system — but also in the ways in which these variables interact with one another — the dynamic complexity of the system.22 The complexity of these systems means that those corporations that can deal with it best will be the most likely to survive.
A Brief Description of Learning Organizations
Senge’s approach to developing a learning organization involves mastering five different disciplines. For Senge, the key discipline is systems thinking. One of the main tenants of system thinking is that all systems have an inherent structure that can dictate outcomes and behaviors. In most systems, these factors are not linearly related, but instead linked in webs or loops with different factors interacting with each other in different ways. As a result, many well-intentioned efforts to solve problems by focusing on only part of the system can have unintended results. At the same time, however, small, well-focused actions can sometimes produce significant, enduring improvements, if they’re in the right place. Senge refers to this principle as "leverage." Senge’s other disciplines include developing mental models of the system in question, building shared visions of the future that you seek to create, enhancing team learning, and promoting personal mastery that involves a commitment to lifelong learning.23
Reflection-in-Action
Another offshoot of the social learning and organizational development work is related to the work done by professionals — practitioners of fields like medicine, law, architecture, and planning. These professions have a scientific underpinning of technical rationality that can be traced back to the work of the French philosopher August Comte in the early 1800s. The expansion of technical rationality into all fields continued throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, peaking in World War II with the development of the field of operations research, which used scientific approaches to track submarines and build nuclear weapons. These successes led to a growing sense that all problems could be dealt with through the rigorous application of the scientific method. In the 1960s, however, as researchers began to apply technical rationality with little or no success to social and political problems, doubts began to creep in about the validity of the approach. A growing movement developed to look at how to best help professionals deal with the difficult problems that they are facing. To represent this movement, we use the ideas outlined by Donald Schön in his book The Reflective Practitioner, which describes the process he terms "reflection-in-action."
Conditions That Warrant Reflection-in-Action
Schön starts by looking at the types of problems that professionals work with. He finds that the hallmark of these problems is that they are complex, uncertain, unstable, unique, and laden with value conflicts. Whereas traditional academics deal with relatively tidy and clean problems that can be solved through rigorous application of technical knowledge, practitioners are faced by these messy problems that are more relevant to the real world, but that resist traditional technical based approaches. As Schön states:
In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground where practitioners can make effective use of research-based theory and technique, and there is a swampy lowland where situations are confusing "messes" incapable of technical solution. The difficulty is that the problems of the high ground, however great their technical interest, are often relatively unimportant to clients or to the large society, while in the swamp are the problems of greatest human concern. Shall the practitioner stay on the high, hard ground where he can practice rigorously, as he understands rigor, but where he is constrained to deal with problems of relatively little social importance? Or shall he descend to the swamp where he can engage the most important and challenging problems if he is willing to forsake technical rigor?...There are those who choose the swampy lowlands. They deliberately involve themselves in messy, but crucially important problems and, when asked to describe their methods of inquiry, they speak of experience, trial and error, intuition, and muddling through.24
A Brief Description of Reflection-in-Action
Reflection-in-Action is a process that begins by "setting the problem" and "framing the context" in which the problem will be dealt with.25 Next, the practitioner sets up experiments that test his or her understanding of the situation. These experiments take place in the context of everyday practice. As Schön writes, the practitioner "becomes a researcher in the practice context...he does not keep means and ends separate, but...implementation is built into inquiry. Thus reflection-in-action can proceed, even in situations of uncertainty, or uniqueness.26 Schön pointed out that the practitioner’s experimentation is different from that of the traditional scientist:
The practice context is different from the research context in several important ways, all of which have to do with the relationship between changing things and understanding them. The practitioner has an interest in transforming the situation from what it is to something he likes better. He also has an interest in understanding the situation, but it is in the service of his interest in change.27
Adaptive Management of Ecosystems and Natural Resources
In North America, the first few hundred years after Columbus landed saw little or no management of natural resources, especially at ecosystem levels.28 The basic principle behind the "frontier mentality" was to harvest what you could as fast as technically and economically possible and then, when the returns began to diminish, move on to new locations. In the late 1800s, however, the obvious shortsightedness of this approach started to become apparent with the close of the frontier. A number of visionary thinkers such as John Muir, Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt began to realize that it would become important to manage these resources. This realization led to the development of federal, state, and local government agencies and non-government organizations, all of which were concerned with managing natural resources. During much of the following century, the natural resource management that these agencies and organizations promoted was primarily reactive and focused on discrete elements of the overall system. Under this "command and control" approach, a manager was trained to focus on a specific target variable.
In the early 1970s, policy makers and resource managers became dissatisfied with the traditional procedures and principles of resource management and sought some realistic alternatives. In response, a group of scientists led by C.S. Holling and Carl Walters began to argue for a new approach to these problems that might address some of these concerns. These ideas were developed in the context of resources drawn from large ecosystems like salmon along the Northwest Coast of North America, timber in the Canadian forests, and fresh water in the Florida Everglades. The approach was first termed "adaptive environmental assessment and management" and was then later shortened to "adaptive management." To represent this work, we use the ideas outlined by Kai Lee in his book Compass and Gyroscope: Integrating Science and Politics for the Environment and C.S. Holling in his introduction to the book Barriers and Bridges to the Renewal of Ecosystems and Institutions.
Conditions That Warrant an Adaptive Management Approach
Holling and his co-workers outline a number of conditions of ecosystems that warrant taking an adaptive management approach as opposed to the traditional command and control approach: 1) ecosystems are complex, but everything is not strongly connected to everything else, 2) ecosystems are non-uniform over space and time, 3) the unexpected can be expected, and 4) eliminating change does not lead to environmental quality.29 In addition to these conditions about the nature of ecosystems, there are also conditions about the limited ability of a researcher or manager to understand the ecosystem that favor an adaptive management approach. As Lee states: 1) data are sparse because it is difficult to observe the state of the ecological system and the human economy interacting with it, 2) theory is limited and does not permit deductive logic to extrapolate very far from experience, and 3) surprise is unexceptional so that predictions are often wrong, expectations unfulfilled, and warnings hollow.30
A Brief Description of Adaptive Management of Ecosystems
An adaptive management approach deals with the uncertainty inherent in managing natural ecosystems by treating policies as experiments. As Lee puts it:
Adaptive management is an approach to natural resource policy that embodies a simple imperative: polices are experiments; learn from them...Adaptive management takes uncertainty seriously, treating human interventions in natural ecosystems as experimental probes. Its practitioners take special care with information. First, they are explicit about what they expect, so that they can design methods and apparatus to make measurements. Second, they collect and analyze information so that expectations can be compared with actuality. Finally, they transform comparison into learning — they correct errors, improve their imperfect understanding, and change action and plans. Linking science and human purpose, adaptive management serves as a compass for us to use in searching for a sustainable future.31
Community-Based Wildlife Management in Zambia
During our field visit to Zambia we focused primarily on the Administration Management Design (ADMADE) project. We interviewed Gilson Kaweche, then Director of National Parks and Wildlife Service at its headquarters in Lusaka. While at ADMADE’s headquarters of operations at the Nyamaluma Training Institute in Lupande, we interviewed Dale Lewis, Technical Advisor, and many of the staff who manage ADMADE (For more information on ADMADE, go to www.ADMADE.org.).
During our visit to Zambia, we also spoke to representatives of the Kafue Anti-Poaching (KANTIPO) project based in Kafue National Park, and the South Luangwa Area Management Unit (SLAMU) project based outside of the South Luangwa National Park. We interviewed Stephan Forster, General Manager of KANTIPO, and Brian Child, Technical Advisor to SLAMU Project Manager.
Conditions That Warrant an Adaptive Management Approach
Zambia is a country rich in wildlife. But in recent times, wildlife numbers have declined precipitously as rural populations have grown, hunting has intensified, and encroachment into national parks has increased. Because of a lack of financing and infrastructure, the Government of Zambia has been hard-pressed to control the internal and external threats to its wildlife. In response to these threats, the Government of Zambia has developed a decentralized approach to natural resource management in which control over wildlife in designated Game Management Areas is given primarily to local communities. In this way, subsistence hunting is monitored, poaching by outside forces is tightly controlled, and many of the benefits of commercial safari hunting flow directly to the communities.
Growing out of a workshop that occurred in Lupande in 1983, the Zambian National Parks and Wildlife Service established the ADMADE program. ADMADE is Zambia's official community-based natural resource management initiative and is responsible for working in 36 Game Management Areas throughout the country. ADMADE works with communities through Community Resource Boards, which are elected by community members. Working with the Government and private sector investors — such as tour and commercial safari operators — the Community Resource Boards are empowered to make most of the natural resource management decisions in their local area.
ADMADE works to find ways in which communities can manage their wildlife resources sustainably. Many of the projects supported by ADMADE are designed to promote community development as a way of offsetting threats to biodiversity. The major source of revenue for many ADMADE communities is commercial safari hunting — safari clients often pay as much as $1300 to $1500 per day for the privilege of hunting in the Game Management Areas of Zambia.
At the Nyamaluma Training Institute, ADMADE trains village scouts, unit leaders, bookkeepers, enumerators, and data analysts. It also conducts seminars and workshops for village chiefs, the Community Resource Board members, and other community leaders. It also monitors all aspects of ADMADE operations including results of scouting patrols, training, community development, and commercial safaris.
KANTIPO, the second organization we visited, is managed by a board of directors and steered by an association of stakeholders including tour and safari operators, lodge owners, National Parks and Wildlife Service, and local communities. KANTIPO primarily supports the activities of anti-poaching units in Kafue and also works with local communities to find incentives to counteract hunting activities.
SLAMU, the third group we visited, works in the Luangwa area, controlling the South Luangwa National Park and the Upper and Lower Lupande Game Management Areas. Like ADMADE, SLAMU is a community-based natural resource management project.
Elements of Adaptive Management in These Projects
According to Dale Lewis, "ADMADE is a continually evolving program that actively applies the principles of adaptive management to identify, test, and refine methodologies that support community-based natural resource management."32 ADMADE monitors wildlife throughout the project area primarily through village scouts. These scouts accompany safari operators to collect hunting data and ensure that they follow the rules. Data collected through these efforts are used to ensure that proper fees are paid to the Government of Zambia and local communities. They are also used to continually adjust hunting quotas. The scouts also conduct regular patrols and collect data on poaching, illegal fish camps, and encroachment into the national parks. ADMADE has been careful to understand the local conditions that drive overhunting in the GMAs. It has invested considerably in data collection and analysis, and according to Dale Lewis, "From such analysis, additional questions can be asked as to how best adapt ADMADE to these variables in achieving biodiversity conservation, supporting community development needs, and promoting private sector profits."33
The other two projects we visited also demonstrate characteristics of adaptive management approaches. KANTIPO utilizes a very systematic approach to determining threats, identifying strategic issues to address, developing objectives, planning activities, and monitoring results. The foundation of all of this work is a project "cause-effect" model in which project managers analyze the core problems affecting the Kafue National Park. The SLAMU project staff have made considerable investments in problem analysis, goal setting, and data collection and analysis.
Natural Resources Management in British Columbia, Canada
Of the three projects we visited for this study, the British Columbia (BC) Forest Service initiative is the one that is most explicitly doing adaptive management. We first learned about the BC Forest Service’s adaptive management work while on the Internet looking for information on adaptive management. Staff of the BC Forest Service have been prolific in developing tools to make the previously highly technical and somewhat academic concepts of adaptive management much more accessible to practitioners in the field (For more information, go to www.for.gov.bc.ca/hfp/amhome/amhome.htm. One result of their efforts is An Introductory Guide to Adaptive Management for Project Leaders and Participants (available at http://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hfp/amhome/introgd/toc.htm). This guide provides an introduction to the concept of adaptive management as it is being implemented by the BC Forest Service, and is an excellent resource for project managers anywhere in the world. During our visit to BC, we spoke with Brian Nyberg and Brenda Taylor in the Victoria offices. We also visited the Kispiox Forest District headquarters in Hazelton where we spoke with Norm Bilodeau, Doug Steventon, Dave Maloney, and other staff.
Conditions That Warrant an Adaptive Management Approach
The BC Forest Service of the Ministry of Forests is responsible for managing the timber, range and recreation resources of British Columbia’s unreserved public (Crown) forest land, which covers two-thirds of the province (about 59 million hectares).34 About one-quarter of this land is managed for commercial timber harvesting, while the other three-quarters are managed for non-commercial timber values, including recreation and cultural heritage. Each year, about one per cent of provincial forest land designated for timber production is harvested.
Within the BC Forest Service, the Forest Practices Branch is responsible for managing the preparation, update, assessment, and refinement of all aspects of provincial forestry policy and standards. Branch staff members provide expert advice and technical support to a broad array of clients, particularly operations field staff. They also assess the effectiveness of forest planning and forest practices standards and propose legislation, policies and procedures to help achieve the ministry's goals and objectives.
Elements of Adaptive Management in This Initiative
One of the key initiatives of the Forest Practices Branch is adaptive management. This initiative includes several components, including the production of educational materials, training programs, advice and support for various project teams, and development of a set demonstration projects where adaptive management is being applied to local issues. In particular, managers in the BC Forest Service use adaptive management as a way of efficiently managing BC’s timber resources. According to the BC Web site:
Forest ecosystems are complex and dynamic. As a result, our understanding of ecosystems and our ability to predict how they will respond to management actions is limited. Together with changing social values, these knowledge gaps lead to uncertainty over how best to manage British Columbia’s forests. Despite these uncertainties, forest managers must make decisions and implement plans. Adaptive management is a way for forest managers to proceed responsibly in the face of such uncertainty.35
One of the most important features of the BC Forest Service’s work is that it focuses on local resource managers as the agents of adaptive management. While it acknowledges that scientists are needed to carry our specific research that may be required to answer specific questions, the BC Forest Service seeks to help project managers use sound scientific and management principles to improve decision making. Examples of specific questions that the project managers have considered include: What are the effects of different types of logging road crossings on a stream’s ability to provide fish habitat? Or what are the effects of different levels of timber harvesting on the breeding success of key bird species?
Community-Based Natural Resources Management in Papua New Guinea
The focus of our visit to Papua New Guinea (PNG) was the Research and Conservation Foundation (RCF) based in Goroka in Eastern Highlands Province. We have been working with RCF for the last few years through their involvement in the Biodiversity Conservation Network (For more information, go to www.BCNet.org). We interviewed John Ericho, RCF’s General Manager, and Robert Bino, Manager of the Crater Mountain Project.
Conditions That Warrant an Adaptive Management Approach
Papua New Guinea is renown for its spectacular biodiversity. From the interior highlands to the coastal plains and coral reefs, PNG is home to birds of paradise, tree kangaroos, and marine invertebrates. Papua New Guinea is also blessed with an extraordinary cultural diversity. Most human populations in the highland live in relative isolation and population pressure on natural resources is relatively low.
RCF grew out of efforts to conserve the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area, which covers over 2,600 square kilometers. The site spans a wide range of elevations (150-2,100 meters). Primary forest blankets the lower elevations, while alpine scrub and grasslands occur higher up. Crater Mountain is home to over two hundred bird species, of which 49 are endemic to the region, and 84 mammal species, of which 15 are endemic. Crater Mountain is also home to under a thousand people who are divided into 21 traditional clans across two distinct linguistic groups. Although the area currently has a low population density, a number of threats loom including industrial logging, mining, and oil drilling. These threats are compelling because the companies that would like to access the natural resources of the Wildlife Management Area are offering the local residents who own these resources, relatively large amounts of money compared to their current incomes.
To address the threats to biodiversity, the Crater Mountain project team was formed by RCF working with the Wildlife Conservation Society. The team works in partnership with numerous national and international NGOs, the government of Papua New Guinea, and the local landowners. The project has established several locally owned and operated research and ecotourism and handicraft production enterprises. The tourism enterprises provide lodging and guide services for visiting scientists and for tourists interested in experiencing the natural and cultural wonders of the Crater Mountain area. The project has been working to develop a management plan that provides for both biodiversity conservation and enterprise sustainability.
RCF also executes community development initiatives as incentives for conservation for the local people of the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area. Though these initiatives are not directly linked to conservation, significant community development initiatives are being identified and implemented according to the wishes and aspirations of the landholders. RCF envisions that helping the landowners to meet their needs will assist in establishing concrete landholder commitment to RCF’s conservation work. As part of this strategy, the RCF Conservation Education Program is designed to raise public awareness in the Crater Mountain Area as a way to develop the knowledge and capacity of local landowners so that they can independently manage the Crater Mountain project in the future.
Elements of Adaptive Management in This Initiative
RCF is a relatively young conservation organization that has evolved considerably since its inception. In 1994, RCF began taking a much more systematic and strategic approach to project planning and management as part of the Biodiversity Conservation Network. Project staff developed a conceptual model of their project and detailed management and monitoring plans so that they could learn about the effects of their interventions. Since that time, RCF has been implementing these plans and has collected a good deal of data about various elements of the project. RCF has on a number of occasions formally revisited and revised their model and plans and is constantly working to develop their organizational learning capabilities.
Overview of This SectionAdaptive management incorporates research into conservation action. At its core, adaptive management involves the integration of design, management, and monitoring to systematically test assumptions in order to adapt and learn. In a conservation project context, adaptive management is about systematically trying different actions to achieve a desired outcome. It is not, however, a random trial-and-error process. Instead, it involves several specific steps described below and in the adaptive management cycle diagram in Figure 2:
In this section, we go through the various steps in this cycle. For each step, we first define what it means in the context of conservation projects. We then turn to our theoretical and practical sources to illustrate why this step is important. As we will see later, a key premise of this cycle is that adaptive management must be carried out by the same people who are responsible for project design and implementation. In other words, adaptive management must be done by your project team. It cannot be left solely to either outside experts that are not involved in project management or to a special research team that is solely charged with looking impassively at the potential project outcomes while the rest of the team sits around waiting for their results. You and your colleagues are the researchers — you are responsible for testing your own assumptions. Trained scientists can help you answer some questions about the effectiveness of your interventions, but the questions you ask and the answers you get must be relevant to your ability to ultimately adapt and learn. It is up to you to make adaptive management a natural part of the project process.
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The starting point for adaptive management involves clearly defining what it is you are trying to achieve with your project. If you don’t know where you want to go, chances are you won’t get there. Once you are clear about what the purpose of your project is, you can then determine how you are going to get there — what intermediate steps along the way you must take. Establishing a clear purpose enables you to develop a benchmark for measuring success. Establishing a common purpose enables you to develop effective collaboration among the different members of your project team.
As outlined in Measures of Success, to establish a purpose or vision for your project, you need to first determine, broadly speaking, what the mission of your project or organization is.36 Are you primarily interested in forest conservation? In developing the economic welfare of the local community? In improving the health standards in the region? To be effective, you and the members of your project team must agree on a common mission. Furthermore, you must also negotiate a common vision with the other groups that you will be working with. As shown in Figure 3, it’s okay if you and the other groups working together have different missions, as long as you can agree on a common vision for the project.
Once you have established your broad mission, you then need to determine the target condition for your project. A target condition is the specific state of the world that you want to focus on. For a conservation project, this target condition might be, for example, "the forest in a certain area" or it might be "the marine resources used by residents of a village." Next, you transform your target condition into a clear operational goal for your project. To do so, you need to think about what changes to this target condition you would like to either see happen or prevent. In the examples above, these changes might be "to conserve the forest" or to "promote sustainable use of the marine resources." Finally, you need to make sure that your project partners have a similar goal.
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FIGURE 3. Groups With Different Missions Can Implement a Joint Project |
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Source: Adapted from Margoluis & Salafsky 1998. |
Create a Benchmark for Measuring Success.
Establishing a clear vision gives your project meaning by defining a clear destination that you are trying to reach. Establishing a clear goal provides your project with a marker that you can use to measure your success in reaching this vision. Ultimately, effective adaptive management requires knowing both where you are today, but also where you want to be tomorrow. As you work toward your goal, you can gauge the extent to which you are achieving it and can then adjust your actions to optimize your realization of this goal. Without a goal, you have no standard against which you can compare progress and no device for measuring progress. Without a clearly defined goal, anyone managing a project can claim success at any time by merely saying at the end that whatever was achieved was the desired outcome. By being clear about your goal at the beginning of a project you are placing a stake in the sand, making your intentions clear, and defining in advance what constitutes success. You are providing yourself the means to measure your own progress.
The theoretical sources that we reviewed emphasize the need to be clear about what you want to achieve. Pirsig states that the first step in the scientific process is to "state what condition you would like to change or affect."37 Similarly, Schön states that problem solving starts with "problem setting, the process by which we define the decision to be made, the ends to be achieved, the means which may be chosen."38 And Senge states that developing a successful learning organization depends on integrating two visions: 1) An idealistic vision of the future that clarifies what is important to us and helps us know what we really want to achieve, and 2) An honest and accurate vision of current reality that tells us where we really are relative to what we want to achieve.39
Many of the project teams that we spoke with also agreed that establishing clear goals is important to provide a framework for measuring success. Dale Lewis of the ZAMBIA ADMADE PROJECT described how ADMADE is very good at measuring the effects of its program. "For us, data collection is very much focused on the dependent variable such as species diversity and population numbers of key species." In a similar fashion, Stephan Forster of the ZAMBIA KANTIPO PROJECT described how they use the numbers of key animals as the measure of their success. In this case, since it can be hard to count animals directly, they can "monitor behavior of animals as a proxy for animal ‘health.’"
Promote Informed Collaboration.
Establishing a clear goal also helps ensure that the different members of your project team understand and agree on a common end. This step is particularly important to projects that have multiple partners and that seek to address both conservation and development issues. If one group is primarily interested in conservation and the other is primarily interested in development, then unless this difference is clearly understood at the start, it will likely lead to conflict later on. These conflicts will lead to decreased efficiency in project implementation and a higher likelihood that nothing lasting will be achieved. However, groups that have different missions can work together — as long as they are clear about what their specific goal is in working together and how they might compliment one another in the context of the project.
The theoretical sources we reviewed agree that clarity about what you want to achieve is also essential to team cohesion. If all team members know what it is they are working towards, then there is a higher likelihood that they will all work together. As Senge writes regarding his discipline of Shared Vision, "One is hard pressed to think of any organization that has sustained some measure of greatness in the absence of goals, values, and missions that become deeply shared throughout the organization."40
In our discussions with the project teams, we learned that adaptive management is not a tool for deciding what the broad goal of your project should be. Instead, it can only be effectively used once you and your partners have determined what your goal should be. As Brian Nyberg of the BC FORESTRY INITIATIVE said:
It is vital that before you begin, everyone understands what is on the table and what is not. Before you can start working on an adaptive management design for a project on a given piece of land, you must decide what the values are to which the land is going to be dedicated. Anyone who came to the meeting had to decide, for example, that forestry would be pursued on part of the land base. The decision to allocate the land to forestry had already been made and those who wished it could all be a park were not involved. You have to have limited the option space.
Brian went on to say, "You need to spend time before workshops making sure that the common purpose is agreed upon. Adaptive management is much more effective if you know what you’re trying to achieve." In a similar fashion, Dale Lewis of the ZAMBIA ADMADE PROJECT said, "It is very important for everyone to have a very good understanding of ‘why’ we do things and how we learn. We do this as a team, we discuss everything, to ensure we are all working for a common goal."
The project teams also discussed at great length the problems they faced because of conflicting goals among different stakeholders. Dale Lewis of the ZAMBIA ADMADE PROJECT described how many of the challenges that they encountered occurred because "if you were to ask everyone what ADMADE is about, not everyone has the same understanding of the goals of ADMADE...at the institutional level, ADMADE is about conservation. At the community level, however, ADMADE is about development to meet the needs of local people." John Ericho and Robert Bino of the PNG PROJECT agreed, saying that although the project was set up to achieve conservation goals, the local community is more interested in development. As a result, there has been a great deal of confusion that has hindered the project. It even led to a situation where, as John said, "the villagers in Crater got together and some hot heads said ‘these guys have been here for five years and they haven’t done anything so let’s kick them out.’" To deal with this problem, they had to develop "Two sets of objectives — one set of objectives for conservation and one set for development. We need to work together because they have the forest and we want the forest. So we had to sit down with them and help provide the services that they want."
Once you have set your broad goal, the next step in adaptive management involves developing a shared understanding of the conditions at the site where you are working. Most conservation projects take place in incredibly complex situations. Project managers have to understand the complicated ecosystems that they are working in. If this were not enough, they also have to understand the cultural, social, economic, and political systems that influence the behavior of the many stakeholders at the project site. And all of these different ecological and human factors interact with one another in dynamic and unpredictable ways.
Getting an understanding of the system is typically done through the development of a model. Models are simplified versions of reality. They are important for a number of reasons. They help you to organize information. They provide you with a framework for comparing alternative courses of action. They provide an intellectual paper trail that lets you see what the chain of logic was behind a given action. And finally, they provide a vehicle for members of your team to work out a shared view of what is being managed and how the management should be done.
There are many ways of representing key factors, conditions, and relationships that influence biodiversity conservation at a given project site. In our book Measures of Success, we outline one process for constructing a conceptual model of your project site. A conceptual model is a diagram of a set of relationships between certain factors that are believed to impact or lead to your target condition.41 A good conceptual model presents a picture of the situation at your project site, showing the assumed linkages between the various direct and indirect threats that affect your target condition. In abstract form, an initial conceptual model for a conservation and development project looks like:
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Collect Relevant Information and Compare Alternative Courses of Action.
A good model enables your team to lay out what you think is happening at the project site — it provides a place to collect your team’s current knowledge of the existing conditions. Your model should be based on all available information including secondary sources, government records, and most importantly, a thorough needs assessment conducted with the stakeholders at your project site. Once you have collected this information, the model can then help you determine appropriate interventions.
The theoretical sources that we reviewed all talk about the need to develop a formal model of the system that you are working in. For example, a key discipline of Senge’s involves using "mental models" that determine not only "how we make sense of the world, but how we take action."42 He even goes as far as to propose computer-based ‘microworlds’ that business managers can use as "settings for both crafting visions and experimenting with a broad range of strategies and policies for achieving those visions."43 Schön talks about how ‘problem solving’ begins with using models to do ‘problem setting,’ saying that:
In real-world practice, problems do not present themselves to the practitioner as givens. They must be constructed from the materials of problematic situations which are puzzling, troubling, and uncertain. In order to convert a problematic situation to a problem, a practitioner must do a certain kind of work. He must make sense of an uncertain situation that initially makes no sense.44
Lee states that models help to organize information, saying "the usual experience with ecosystem data is that there is not enough to define the biology with any confidence, but far too much for a single human mind to assimilate. Models are indispensable simply to do routine bookkeeping on large quantities of data."45 Lee also states that once a model has been constructed, it can be used by a manager to compare the potential impact of different policies by testing simulated "what-if" scenarios to test the structure of assumptions built into the model.46 And finally, Argyris and Schön start their discussion of learning organizations by asserting that "all deliberate action has a cognitive basis that reflects the norms, strategies, and assumptions or models of the world" of the individual or group undertaking the action. This basis is the group or individual’s theory of action. They go on to use mathematical language to describe how this theory functions saying that this theory of action is basically a guide for the problem: "In situation S, if you want to achieve consequence C, under assumptions a...n, then take action A."47
The practitioners that we spoke with described finding extensive information about their project site and using models to help them sort it out. For example, Stephan Forster of the ZAMBIA KANTIPO PROJECT described how when his project started, they invested in reviewing the secondary data and literature available on Kafue to learn about the area and ended up with a great deal of information. They then started using a problem tree methodology to sort out the information that had been collected. Likewise, Norm Bilodeau of the BC FORESTRY INITIATIVE said:
It is important to recognize that a model is only a representation of reality and as such is only useful as a guide. All models are to some degree wrong, otherwise they would not be models. However, models when created and used in a realistic fashion, actually act like an "organizer." They gather complex and wide ranging information and process so that it is more tangible. More specifically they allow us to consider the interrelationships that are impossible for us to fully grasp at a discrete moment of time.
Likewise, Brian Nyberg of the BC FORESTRY INITIATIVE described why it was critical to use a model to develop a management plan for 40,000 hectares of forest, saying that, "The need for a model becomes much greater to simply explore all the complications associated with that large an area over a long time frame. Nobody can wrap their mind around it, so we are trying to spend much more time on the modeling aspects of the ecosystem management."
Create a Framework for Learning.
A good model also enables your team to predict the positive and negative impacts of your activities. These predictions will provide the foundation for learning later on. Once your activities are implemented, you can then go back to your model and see if your assumptions were correct. You can thus use your model as a foundation for learning as you move through the project cycle.
All of the theoretical sources that we reviewed highlight the importance of using a model to make predictions that can be checked over time. For example, Pirsig states that a key step in the scientific method is to use your understanding of the system to predict what will happen once you undertake an experiment.48 Lee states that a model provides "an intellectual paper trail" that provides "a way of understanding the chain of reasoning that leads from data base to output." He goes on to say that constructing a model is "crucial if learning is to be possible: without an understanding of how one’s model of reality works, it is impossible to go back and improve that understanding when reality fails to agree with prediction."49
Some of the practitioners that we spoke with had developed explicit models of their projects. These projects found their models to be very helpful in creating a record of their own thinking. For example, John Ericho of the PNG PROJECT said, "I think for me and Robert, it has been very helpful to go through this process of writing a conceptual model and then coming back and having a look at it as the project goes on." Brian Nyberg of the BC FORESTRY INITIATIVE also mentioned that models are important to help new personnel understand what is occurring and to create a "legacy of knowledge." He said:
If we’re talking about some sort of experimental program that requires tending over a period of decades or more, you can count on there being many changes of the personnel involved in the program. So how do you make sure each successive manager is able to understand what has gone on beforehand? A simple model makes it easy for someone to pick it up and say, "This is what they were thinking."
The operative word here seems to be "simple." Several of the practitioners that we spoke with described that if models were too complex, they became useless or even counter-productive. For example, Brian Nyberg of the BC FORESTRY INITIATIVE said that on occasions, he became very frustrated with complex computer models. He described being involved in creating an elaborate simulation model that looked at the relationship between deer and elk and their habitats in coastal forests. He said, "It looked very neat and tidy," on the screen, but "these simulation programs never worked in the real world. We poured in all this money and time and effort, and people stayed up all night and my conclusion at the end was that it told us essentially what we already knew before we started. The model gave very precise and unreliable predictions based on very imprecise knowledge of the modeled system." He goes on to conclude that the key for us is to "simplify the mathematically focused adaptive management stuff that’s in the literature — you have to ensure that whatever is produced gets used."
Synthesize Different Perspectives.
Another important reason for creating a model of your site is that it enables people to make their different perspectives explicit and to then work out a shared understanding. People often seem to believe that other people see the world in more or less the same way that they do. If you ask a diverse group of stakeholders to develop a model of a given site, they will often act offended and claim that it will be easy to do. Many hours later, however, they are still there at the table, arguing about what causes what and what factors are most important.
The theoretical sources that we reviewed support the importance of using a model to create a common understanding of the situation in the system where you are working. As Lee says:
The process of building a model is a way of working out a shared view of what is being managed and how the managing should be done. Often that process is conducted by a diverse group of people drawn from different organizations, some of them organizations with conflicting interests...when this happens, model building becomes a way of negotiating.50
In a similar fashion, Senge proposes using models to "make your reasoning explicit and encourage others to explore your views...and provide different views." He goes on to say:
Our mental models determine not only how we make sense of the world, but how we take action...Why are mental models so powerful in affecting what we do? In part, because they affect what we see. Two people with different mental models can observe the same event and describe it differently, because they’ve looked at different details. When you and I walk into a crowded party, we both take in the same basic sensory data, but we pick out different faces. As psychologists say, we observe selectively. This is no less true for supposedly "objective" observers such as scientists than for people in general. As Albert Einstein once wrote: "Our theories determine what we measure."51
And in a similar fashion, Argyris and Schön state:
When the task is large and complex, most members are unable to use face-to-face contact in order to compare and adjust their several images of organizational theory-in-use. They require external references. There must be public representations of organizational theory-in-use to which individuals can refer. This is the function of organizational maps. These are the shared descriptions of organization which individuals jointly construct and use to guide their own inquiry. They include, for example, diagrams of work flow, compensation charts, statements of procedure, even the schematic drawings of office space...they describe actual patterns of activity, and they are guides to future action.52
Many of the practitioners that we spoke with agreed that models were useful for bringing different perspectives together. Brian Nyberg of the BC FORESTRY INITIATIVE said that, "Many of the people who come to our meetings already have a common model of how they think things work. The more heterogeneous the group, the more important the jointly-developed model." He went on to say that the nature of the model is not important, but that, "What is important is that people have a common understanding of their assumptions, be it a model or boxes and arrows, or literally pictures. It is crucial to have a model that everyone understands." Other practitioners that we interviewed had not necessarily developed explicit models of their project. But these practitioners agreed that they had at least implicit models. For example, Dale Lewis of the ZAMBIA ADMADE PROJECT said, "there is a shared model that is implicit in every key person’s mind — a kind of internal conceptual model." Furthermore, in talking about the problem of getting new project staff to understand the vision, Lewis said, "Boy it would be great to have something like that."
After you have developed a model of your site, the next step in adaptive management involves figuring out what actions you are going to take. If you were starting your project with this step, trying to figure out what actions to take would undoubtedly be an overwhelming process. In any given system, there are generally hundreds if not thousands of different things you can do. Despite the wealth of options, you only have limited staff, limited money, and limited time. You can’t do everything. Furthermore, you will probably be unsure what a given action will produce. So how do you decide what to do? In some of the worst cases, practitioners seem to just try different actions more or less blindly, hoping that they will work. At the other extreme, some practitioners seem to have settled on a small subset of actions — like environmental education, sustainable agriculture, or strict protection — that they believe will necessarily lead to conservation in all situations. Not surprisingly, the results of these interventions are usually mixed at best.
However, if you’ve developed a conceptual model of your project site that shows your target condition and the threats to it and other factors that affect it, then you are in a much better position to figure out what steps to take. The key here is to develop a project management plan that outlines the factors that you want to affect and the specific actions that you will undertake to change them. Instead of focusing on the actions that you will ultimately take, first think about the specific results that you want to achieve and then base your selection of activities on how best to achieve them. By doing so, you can maximize your potential to leverage change on the system with the resource you have. You can also set up experiments that will help you learn which actions work and which do not. And finally, you can make more informed decisions as to how to balance the risks of action and inaction.
Developing a management plan starts by ranking the various threats that you have identified in your model and deciding which are causing the biggest problems and which are most easily addressed. Once you have selected which threats you think you might want to address, you then use your model to determine which factors linked to those threats you might be able to change to thus change the threat. After selecting a factor that you think you can affect, the next step is to develop a specific objective for that factor. As outlined in Measures of Success, objectives are specific statements detailing the desired accomplishments or outcomes of a project in relation to specific factors.53 Once you have developed the specific objectives that you want to accomplish, the next step is to develop the activities that will enable you to accomplish this objective. Activities are specific actions undertaken by project staff to reach each of the project’s objectives.54 The key to the management plan is that each objective is targeted at a specific factor in the model that is linked to the target condition. If the theory is correct, completing all of the activities will enable the project to meet its objectives and ultimately change the target condition. In simplified form, a final conceptual model that includes activities and objectives looks like:
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Maximize Leverage.
Using your model to select your actions can help your team to figure out which threats you need to address. It also enables you to figure out how to most effectively use your resources to counter these threats. Ideally, it will let you determine how you think that you can get the most impact on the system for the least effort. Perhaps even more importantly, you can also use your conceptual model to decide what actions you are not going to take. For example, if your model shows that using a certain tool is not going to impact the key threat factor or is not going to have sufficient impact, then you don’t want to be wasting your project’s money and time using that tool.
The theoretical sources that we reviewed underscore that too often managers seem to make decisions in an unsystematic fashion. As Senge writes:
Many American managers are too busy running to "think on their feet." "Even when there is ample time for reflection and the facility for retrieving all manner of relevant information...most managers do not reflect carefully on their actions. Typically managers...adopt a strategy, then as soon as the strategy starts to run into problems, they switch to another strategy, then to another and another...managers may run through three to six different strategies, without once examining why a strategy seems to be failing or articulating specifically what they hope to accomplish through a change in strategy. Apparently, the "ready, fire, aim" atmosphere of American corporations has been fully assimilated and internalized by those who live in that atmosphere.55
To counter this problem, the sources we reviewed emphasized the need to select actions based on your model. For example, Argyris and Schön discuss how one of the most important parts of the planning process is to figure out what you are going to do, saying that all groups need three maps:
The first is a map of where the organization is; the second is a map of where it wishes to go; the third is a map of how to get from here to there. Without the third map, knowing where you are may be interesting, but not helpful for change; knowing where you would like to go becomes an exercise in abstractions; and knowing only both can lead to frustration and a sense of helplessness.56
Most of the sources also discuss how it is important to select these actions in a systematic fashion to maximize your impact on the system. Senge emphasizes that small, well-focused actions can sometimes produce significant, enduring improvements, if they’re in the right place. Senge refers to this principle as "leverage" and states that "tackling a difficult problem is often a matter of seeing where the high leverage lies, a change which — with a minimum of effort — would lead to lasting, significant improvement. He goes on to describe how the most effective way to change a system is to "change the behavior of the system...[by] identifying and changing the limiting factor."57 Likewise, Holling and his colleagues realized that although ecosystems are complex, everything is not strongly connected to everything else. Instead, ecosystems are non-uniform over space and time.58 As a result, actions changing one part of the system can have dramatic effects on another part of the system. The key is to understand the system well enough so that you know where these high leverage points exist.
Robert Bino of the PNG PROJECT team echoes this concept when he said, "Our conceptual model assists project managers and planners to consider all factors affecting and influencing the project instantaneously and holistically. An important advantage is that an intervention activity that impacts a variety of factors instead of one can be identified and capitalized on. This benefits the project by reducing the costs of project activities and maximizing the scope and intensity of the leverage."
For the most part, however, the project teams that we spoke with put a fair amount of thought into deciding what actions to take, but had not necessarily been completely systematic in this process. For example, Brenda Taylor of the BC FORESTRY INITIATIVE described how members of their agency went about trying to solve a problem caused by destructive parties that were being held at campsites that they were managing. She said that the team certainly considered various options and responses ranging from hiring on-site supervisors to having police conduct spot-checks to physically "hardening" the site against potential damage. But as she said, "I don’t think we went about it in a systematic way looking at the linkages, but I think we did think about them." She goes on to describe how they used cost and potential effectiveness as their primary criteria for selecting actions.
Treat Your Actions as Experiments.
Although ideally you will be looking for high leverage actions, in most cases it may not be completely clear what the best activity to take might be. This problem typically occurs when your understanding of the situation is not complete or uncertain. In these cases, you will want to at least try one action and make predictions as to what the results will be. If it works, great. If not, however, then you can learn from the results and try something else in the future. You might even want to try implementing two or more different actions to be able to compare them more systematically. Taking action while confronting uncertainty is what adaptive management is all about.
This difficulty in finding the high-leverage actions is perhaps best summed up by Senge who says, "the only problem is that high-leverage changes are usually highly nonobvious to most participants in the system."59 Because of this uncertainty, it becomes necessary to experiment through one’s actions. As Schön says, "in the most generic sense, to experiment is to act in order to see where the action leads to." Holling and his colleagues agree, stating that if a policy is viewed as a hypothesis, then the implementation of that policy becomes the mechanism by which the hypothesis is tested or evaluated. As Lee puts it, "adaptive management is highly advantageous when policy makers face uncertainty." He goes on to say:
Because human understanding of nature is imperfect, human interactions with nature should be experimental. Adaptive management applies the concepts of experimentation to the design and implementation of natural resource and environmental policies. An adaptive policy is one that is designed from the outset to test clearly formulated hypotheses about the behavior of an ecosystem being changed by human use...If the policy succeeds, the hypothesis is affirmed. But if the policy fails, an adaptive design still permits learning, so that future decisions can proceed from a better base of understanding.60
To deal with the problem posed by uncertainty, the theoretical sources that we consulted all emphasize the importance of experiments and discuss different types of experiments that can be undertaken. Holling and his colleagues describe two main types of experimentation.61
Passive experimentation does not involve experimental manipulation of the system being studied. Instead, passive experimentation works best in systems that have a high degree of variation. This variation creates "natural" controlled experiments enabling managers to test the validity of their assumptions without intervening themselves. For example, a patch of forest being harvested using state-of-the-art methods can be compared to a similar patch of forest that is not being harvested. A major advantage of the passive approach is that it tends to be simpler and cheaper to implement. A disadvantage, however, is that it ignores the uncertainty surrounding the policy and basically assumes that it is correct.
Active experimentation, on the other hand, embraces both uncertainty and deliberately experimental management policies. In pursuing an active experimentation approach, a manager will try multiple strategies to determine which one is most effective. For instance, the forest manager may try several different harvesting options in different sections of the forest. This deliberate experimentation is more expensive to implement. Furthermore, trying multiple policies necessarily means that sub-optimal ones are being tried which will impose a short-term cost in terms of resource output. The pay-off, however, comes in enhancing the long-term learning about the system. Holling and his colleagues emphasize that adaptive management fundamentally involves active experimentation.
There are many ways in which to do active experimentation. Schön identifies several types of experiments that the practitioner can undertake including:
Exploratory Experiments — When action is undertaken only to see what follows, without accompanying predictions or expectations.
Move-Testing Experiments — When action is taken in order to produce intended change.
Hypothesis Testing Experiments — When action is undertaken to discriminate among competing hypotheses.62
Schön states that reflection-in-action involves a combination of all of these types of experimentation, "When the practitioner reflects-in-action...his experimenting is at once exploratory, move testing, and hypothesis testing."63
The practitioners that we spoke with who were familiar with the theoretical background of adaptive management endorsed the idea of trying something and then learning whether or not it worked —exploratory and move-testing types of experiments. For example, Robert Bino of the PNG PROJECT described how they tried sending local community members on a tour of other areas that had been logged so they could see the effects. As he said, "We didn’t know what it would be like when we went the first time. The result was quite good. As a result, we decided to keep doing the tours to expose other villagers to the effects of logging." He also described how the project would pilot an activity in one village — for example putting women on the management committee board — and then wait and see if it worked before trying it in all of the villages.
The BC FORESTRY INITIATIVE team members also described a number of move-testing and hypothesis-testing experiments that they had undertaken. For example, Norm Bilodeau and his colleagues described how they were concerned about the effects of logging road bridges on the fish populations of the streams that the bridges were built over. One set of experiments revolved around the testing of "best management practices" to develop road and bridge designs. It involved monitoring sedimentation and water temperature upstream and downstream from bridges, effectively using the bridge crossing as a "point source" to assess the success of different bridge construction and management options. Another set of experiments involved cutting timber on different stands at different densities — removing 30% of the trees on some plots and 60% on others — to see what the effect was on wildlife using migratory bird nesting and brood success. This experiment generated some interesting results. For example, Norm Bilodeau and Doug Steventon of the BC FORESTRY INITIATIVE described how they found they could generate an increase of up to 185% in available timber supply by instituting a partial cutting regime on at least 50% of a working area because of the way the clearcutting is regulated by legislation. As Doug put it, "this kind of innovative management flie
