6. Adaptive Management
6.1. WHAT IS ADAPTIVE MANAGEMENT?
The companion report to the present one (Lowry, 2002 ) provides a comprehensive description of the nature of adaptive management in the context of managing groundwater resources in New Zealand. Material is quoted from that report, in this section, as a means of describing the role of analytical methods that support management.
... adaptive management develops management polices as experiments that test the responses of ecosystems to changes in people's behaviour.
... shall be thought of as managing the people who interact with the ecosystem, not management of the ecosystem itself.
Adaptive management is a process of 'learning while doing'.
The emphasis is on cooperative management by stakeholders who need to understand the reasoning behind the possible range of outcomes. The role of models is seen as expressing the collective understanding of the participants about how the groundwater system operates, assessing the uncertainties, and predicting the effects of various management actions.
6.2. ANALYTICAL TOOLS FOR ADAPTIVE MANAGEMENT
The analytical tools that support adaptive management require at least the following characteristics:
- Conceptual plausibility to the stakeholders, which means that the physical basis and assumptions can be clearly presented
- Ability for implementation in a "real-time" mode consistent with the time scale of adaptive decision-making
- Suitable for use with the available data.
It is unlikely that any one analytical method would meet all these requirements in all situations, and therefore it is desirable that appropriate methods are, conceptually, upwardly compatible in terms of data availability and scales of time and space. In practical terms this means that method concepts can be presented to stakeholders as being consistent and appropriate views of physical reality.
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