Collaborative Adaptive Management: Challenges and Opportunities

Collaborative adaptive management merges three essential features of twenty-first century conservation and resource management—science, collaboration, and a focus on results. These features intersect in conservation and resource management contexts characterized by: (1) high degrees of uncertainty; (2) complexity resulting from multiple variables and non-linear interactions; (3) interconnectedness—among issues, across landscapes, and between people and place; and (4) persistent, possibly dramatic, change. In this context, many resource management decisions present communication challenges, information challenges, coordination challenges, and action challenges. Collaboration and adaptive management, in part, are responses to these challenges. Many resource management questions are technical and complex. But policies and project decisions have distributional effects and often involve trade-offs. These effects raise issues about the respective roles of scientists, technical experts, and the public; underscore the relevance of adaptive decision frameworks, and heighten the importance of collaborate decision making. This essay examines collaborative adaptive management in this context from the perspective of a decisionmaker.