Regional Scale Adaptive Management: Lessons from the North East Salinity Strategy (NESS)

The regional scale has become increasingly important for natural resource management, with funding support focused on regional plans. It is also the scale at which adaptive management an approach to managing natural resources that actively seeks to learn from the implementation of policies and strategies could be expected to work best. This article explores passive and active adaptive management through review of a salinity management program in the north-east region of Victoria between 1997 and 2001. The North East Salinity Strategy (NESS) was a conventional, passively adaptive program, but active adaptive management could have been considered. We sought to understand the NESS program logic through document review, semi-structured interviews and a focus group, and in the process looked for signs of adaptive management.