Adaptive management
For example, the Yap people of Micronesia have been using adaptive management techniques to sustain high population densities in the face of resource scarcity for thousands of years (Falanruw 1984).
In using these techniques, the Yap people have altered their environment creating, for example, coastal mangrove depressions and seagrass meadows to support fishing and termite resistant wood (Stankey and Shinder 1997).
Kai Lee, notable Princeton physicist, expanded upon the approach in the late 1970s and early 1980s while pursuing a post-doctorate degree at UC Berkeley.
[31][32] This is also reflected in Department for International Development's Smart Rules that provide the operating framework for their programs including the use of evidence to inform their decisions.
[43][44][45] CLA, an adaptive management practice, is being employed by implementing partners[46][47] that receive funding from the federal government of the United States,[48][49][50] but it is primarily a framework for internal change efforts that aim at incorporating collaboration, learning, and adaptation within the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) including its missions located around the world.
[53] A part of integrating the CLA approach is providing tools and resources, such as the Learning Lab, to staff and partner organizations.
The flexibility and constant learning of an adaptive management approach is also a logical application for organizations seeking sustainability methodologies.
Businesses pursuing sustainability strategies would employ an adaptive management framework to ensure that the organization is prepared for the unexpected and geared for change.
By applying an adaptive management approach the business begins to function as an integrated system adjusting and learning from a multi-faceted network of influences not just environmental but also, economic and social (Dunphy, Griffths, & Benn, 2007).
An adaptive management approach to creating sustainable community policy and practice also emphasizes the connection and confluence of those elements.
Looking into the cultural mechanisms which contribute to a community value system often highlights the parallel to adaptive management practices, "with [an] emphasis on feedback learning, and its treatment of uncertainty and unpredictability" (Berkes, Colding, & Folke, 2000).
Often this is the result of indigenous knowledge and historical decisions of societies deeply rooted in ecological practices (Berkes, Colding, & Folke, 2000).
By applying an adaptive management approach to community development the resulting systems can develop built in sustainable practice as explained by the Environmental Advisory Council (2002), "active adaptive management views policy as a set of experiments designed to reveal processes that build or sustain resilience.
It requires, and facilitates, a social context with flexible and open institutions and multi-level governance systems that allow for learning and increase adaptive capacity without foreclosing future development options" (p. 1121).
This application was used in field research on tribal lands to first identify the environmental issue and impact of illegal trash dumping and then to discover a solution through iterative agent-based modeling using NetLogo on a theoretical "regional cooperative clean-energy economy".
See Bruss, 2012 - PhD dissertation: Human Environment Interactions and Collaborative Adaptive Capacity Building in a Resilience Framework, GDPE Colorado State University.
In an ever-changing world, adaptive management appeals to many practices seeking sustainable solutions by offering a framework for decision making that proposes to support a sustainable future which, "conserves and nurtures the diversity—of species, of human opportunity, of learning institutions and of economic options"(The Environmental Advisory Council, 2002, p. 1121).
[58] In Colorado, USA, a ten-year, ranch-scale (2590 ha) experiment began in 2012 at the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Central Plains Experimental range to evaluate the effectiveness and process of collaborative adaptive management [57] on rangelands.
Second, practitioners cannot assume that extensive monitoring data or large-scale efforts will automatically facilitate successful collaborative adaptive management.
