Heritage managers,
whether dealing with nature sites or built landscape, constantly
grapple, explicitly and implicitly, with uncertainty. One approach
is to confront the uncertainties by applying adaptive environmental
management as a central philosophy of planning and recording
conservation action plans.
Adaptive management
is promulgated as an integrated, multidisciplinary approach for
managing uncertainty in natural resource issues. The
management system is adaptive because it acknowledges that
environmental change is the norm due to human intervention and
shifts in geophysical processes and climate. Surprises are
inevitable, and new uncertainties will emerge all of which will
entail changing the management plan. Adaptability comes from
devising a system of planning and recording that will promote
active learning through assiduous monitoring of outcomes in
relation to measurable management objectives so that management has
the resilience to bounce back or bounce sideways.
Also, adaptive
management acknowledges that policies must satisfy social
objectives and must be continually modified and flexible for
adaptation to sociological surprises. Adaptive management therefore
views policy as a set of linked hypotheses; that is to say, most
policies are really questions masquerading as answers. Because
policies are questions, then management actions become treatments
in an experimental sense. Although some learning occurs regardless
of the management approach, adaptive management is structured as a
system to make that learning more efficient; it is
action-learning. A central proposition is that the successes
and failures of adaptive management are intertwined with system
properties of cultural ecology based on ‘flexibility’
and ‘resilience’. In a nutshell, if there is no
resilience in the management system, nor flexibility among
stakeholders in the coupled social system, then one simply cannot
manage sustainably.
The idea of a
national conservation management system (CMS) to protect the
condition of ecological features such as species, habitats and
landscapes arose in the UK Nature Conservancy and has been promoted
widely in Britain and Europe since the late 1980s. It has
been supported by all UK government conservation agencies, the
major NGOs and the Wildlife Trusts. These organisations came
together over three decades ago to form the CMS Consortium.
The consortium is a not-for-profit group set up to disseminate the
logic that planning should be a continuous, iterative and
developmental process. The CMS has always been developed, bottom
up, from the experience of site managers.
As a system of
adaptive management it is a dynamic approach to planning which is
based on the integration of scheduled projects seamlessly wthin the
plan. This enables actions to be easily modified to cope with
changes in factors that were not envisaged by the planners.
Therefore the CMS can be defined as a feature/
factor/project-based approach centred on monitoring
measurable objectives and then, if necessary, modifying actions as
new factors come into play. The cyclical adaptable management
process of the CMS outlined in Fig 1 allows managers to respond to
natural dynamic processes, accommodate the legitimate interests of
others, adapt to the ever-changing political and
socioeconomic climate and, in the long term, succeed, despite
uncertain and variable resources.
The strength and
flexibility of the CMS is managers 'learn to plan by
planning to learn'. Frequent management reviews based on
monitoring performance indicators are an integral and essential
component of the CMS. From this point of view the management
plan is operated as a cycle in which assumptions about the way to
reach an objective are open to question when performance indicators
demonstrate that the projects are not reaching the
objectives. Although linear plans can be written on
paper or spread sheets the logic of an adaptive management cycle
needs to be operated with a software relational database which has
hyperlinks from outcomes to inputs.
Moreover, a CMS
management plan is an ever-active software database and does not
lie as a printed document gathering dust on a
shelf.
