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The Collaborative Adaptive Management Network:

Facilitating Better Management

through Peer Mentoring and Dialogue

 

Mission: The Collaborative Adaptive Management Network develops best practices for solving complex conservation problems by creating and supporting adaptive and collaborative learning opportunities for practitioners.

Mission and Goals

 

The Collaborative Adaptive Management Network(CAMNet) is a collaborative among practitioners engaged in resource management and ecosystem restoration.  CAMNet creates learning opportunities for scientists, managers, and citizens to explore innovative and practical ways to solve complex ecological and institutional problems through collaborative processes linking science, social values, and experiential knowledge.  

 

In an era of unprecedented ecological challenges, the Collaborative Adaptive Management Network (CAMNet) seeks to screen, distill, and disseminate the best practices of ecosystem approaches to science, management and policy decision making.  By fostering collaboration and learning among managers, scientists, citizens, and others, CAMNet establishes a focal point for vetting and spreading these best practices to those who are grappling with these difficult issues on a day-to-day basis.  CAMNet seeks to to transform the theory and practice of resource management by building internal and external capacity for effective implementation of adaptive ecosystem management, reforming resource management institutions.  The ultimate goal is to re-couple human systems with natural systems in ways that maintain or increase, rather than erode, resilience and sustainable options for the future.  The goals of CAMNet are to:

 

a)       Build capacity within ecosystems and institutions to improve performance, accountability, and management efficiencies through the application of advances in science and technology, regionally, nationally and internationally.  CAMNet offers an alternative to “going it alone,” which many resource managers and stakeholders face.

b)      Integrate understanding of human and natural systems into decision making to generate sustainable, resilient options for the future, through the use of Adaptive Environmental Assessment, comparative analysis, case studies and learning exercises, historical dynamics analysis, and integration of ideas, practices and concepts from other disciplinary fields.

c)       Foster ways to break through gridlock and create win-win steps forward on many land- and water-based problems. CAMNet employs a systematic approach to science integration to optimize learning, and to improve management through addressing uncertainties, generating new options, sharing information, and promoting collaborative decision-making on-the-ground.  CAMNet works to create options that satisfy all parties needs, and generate a foundation of trust and cooperation.

CAMNet is founded on the premise that substantive advances in theory and practice will occur most efficiently through interactive dialogue across disciplinary, organizational, institutional, and geographic boundaries. CAMNet promotes improved implementation of adaptive management through a peer mentoring network involving practicing professionals, scholars, citizens, and students (the next generation of scientists and managers).  CAMNet fosters open communication and exchange of information among scientists, citizens, and practitioners working independently on topics of common interest to nurture a sense of community, minimize isolation, and maximize cooperation so as to optimize learning and eliminate duplication of effort. 

 

The Need

 

After 30 years of modern environmental management, we have succeeded in layering a multiplicity of missions, functions, procedures, and regulations onto environmental management that often generate “more heat than light”.  Society has invested large sums of money in managing individual species and isolated functions like water quality, and mapping the biophysical face of whole regions, but the pieces often do not add up to successful outcomes.  Components of management (e.g., timber, water supply, fisheries) are largely investigated and managed in isolation from one another.  Conventional management has failed to produce the needed results. 

Adaptive management and collaboration have emerged in recent decades in practice and theory as sets of tools, methods and techniques that hold promise for dealing with the challenges of managing complex systems for resilience.   As strategies and methods for navigating out of the “wicked problems” that have developed as the result of the complexity of the issues, coupled with the weaknesses of conventional approaches to resource management, both adaptive management and collaboration have been incorporated into the lexicon of international, federal and state environmental and resource management legislative language and policy.  Fundamentally, adaptive management and collaboration recognize that uncertainty and conflict are key ingredients that must be accounted for and utilized in designing ecological policies that work. 

While the theories and concepts of adaptive management and collaboration have become a part of the lexicon of modern resource management literature, legislation, and policy, experiments implementing adaptive management in large regional systems are still fairly young.  The practical lessons and experience derived by those most closely involved in such experiments are difficult to distill and communicate in the academic literature.  There is a clear need to leverage such experience by creating additional opportunities and alternatives are needed to share the growing body of experience and lessons emerging from regional experiments in adaptive management through a network of practitioners. The time has come for taking stock of what works, what does not work and what is needed to improve the combined aspects of natural resource and environmental management.  "The need for probing comparisons of adaptive management experiments underway in different regions of North America is one important conclusion of this report."[1]

Resource managers implementing novel, large-scale adaptive management programs are often operating on an n of 1 -- each system involves a unique configuration of ecological systems and processes, political and social cultures, knowledge bases, goals, and value orientations, leading to a complex management situation that neither they nor any one else has ever encountered.    There is a clear need to leverage such experience by creating additional opportunities and alternatives to share the growing body of experience and lessons emerging from regional experiments in adaptive management through a network of practitioners.  Practitioners involved in administering large-scale ecosystem programs often feel isolated under the weight of large uncertainties.  They may have few colleagues who understand what they are trying to do; they may also have few colleagues with whom they can freely discuss the challenges of their own particular setting. Ecosystem-based management seeks to integrate these across landscapes.  CAMNet is designed to bring these analytical approaches and tools to bear “on-the-ground”.  CAMNet realizes that ecological restoration, community viability and economic vitality go hand-in-hand, and pioneers ways to build flexibility and adaptability into ecosystem-based approaches. 

Core Competency

The strategies that will be advocated by CAMNet have developed a clear track record of successful interventions over the past 5 years.  CAMNet builds directly upon experience gained through the work of the Adaptive Management Practitioners’ Network (AMNet).  CAMNet will create opportunities for practitioners, leaders, and citizens with diverse backgrounds to reflect on a regular basis upon their experience in “safe” and open settings where learning is possible and encouraged.  Face-to-face meetings will be conducted for peer mentoring, troubleshooting, training and outreach based on analysis of real-world case experience. Tools, methods and techniques will be shared in person and through the Network website from some of the most challenging natural resource and environmental management successes.  CAMNet focuses on on overcoming barriers and thorny issues that tend to recur, sustaining collaborative adaptive management efforts over the long-term, and building a broad corps of the best resource management professionals who are pioneering new principles and practice. 

Regional ecosystems like the Everglades, Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, Upper Mississippi River, Colorado River, Pacific Northwest and Sacramento Bay Delta have provided unique and timely opportunities to view resource management from the inside out, offering a rich, complex tapestry of stories and ongoing experiments at multiple spatial scales.  CAMNet has assisted in developing new, tailored approaches, and then work through the real-time obstacles that emerge. 

The practitioners on the front lines of major natural resource management challenges are in the strategic, but often stressful, position of advocating, influencing and implementing change. Agencies and resource managers must work with challenges that no textbook could envision or adequately address. The need is not just to inject new ideas into challenging situations, but finding ways to overcome outmoded ways of doing business that stand in the way of progress.  CAMNet’s interventions offer current and future practitioners—managers, scholars, students, and engaged citizens—an unparalleled setting for informal, collegial inquiry and the opportunity to learn from each other. 

Definitions

The initial Taking Stock workshop in St. Paul, MN revealed that workshop participants (along with many others) hold a variety of definitions of adaptive management, ranging from informal learning-by-doing to elaborate and formal definitions incorporating collaboration, institutional change, and active experimentation (See summary of definitions provided by participants.)  There is widespread agreement that many of the commonly cited elements of adaptive management (e.g. acknowledging of uncertainty, linking science and management, treating management actions as experiments that can yield valuable learning about the system) are desperately needed.  At the same time, the concept is often criticized for being so broad as to be meaningless.  Vague and competing definitions have been used to repackage the status quo under a new label of “adaptive management”, but also to provide the flexibility needed to move forward in situations where conflict, ecosystem degradation, and management failure have led to gridlock.  In Jackson Hole, a working group convened in the attempt to develop  consensus on a working definition of adaptive management and a comprehensive list of its essential elements.   These definitions, and the questions they raised, are outlined in a separate document [DEFINITIONS AND ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS].

Products

·        Development and dissemination of practical useful tools, information and strategies that can help resource managers make the difficult decisions they face every day.

·        A cadre of resource management professionals with shared understanding of and experience implementing collaborative adaptive management

·        A group of networked experts who can be contacted for advice, services, resources, and strategic assistance.  In addition to the core CAMNet network, efforts have been and will be undertaken to establish strategic alliances and partnerships with other existing networks and associations.

·        Evaluation methods, including trade-off analysis, conceptual modeling for testing of hypotheses and assumptions and standards for peer review.

·        Risk management and conflict resolution tools for long-term management of conflict and uncertainty.

·        Use of small adaptive trials and ecological experiments among disputing parties to pave the way for improvements, not just in ecology, but in economy and society.

·        Publications, monographs, and reports summarizing “best practices”, lessons learned, theoretical advances, tools, strategies and policy recommendations.

 

“Though this may be madness, yet there is method in't."

 --Hamlet, II, ii (211)

 

"What's in a name.  That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

--Romeo and Juliet, II, ii(47-48)

 

 


[1] Wescoat, J. (1999) Downstream: Adaptive Management of the Glen Canyon Dam.  National Research Council.  Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.