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

Abstract

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.

The NESS program logic was sound, and it achieved progress towards many of its goals. A more actively adaptive approach may have achieved more, but it would have been constrained by some social and institutional factors. We suggest that a culture of reflection was absent from the NESS. Reflection was inhibited by institutional arrangements such as reporting requirements and funding processes, and by social norms that separated implementation from research, and equated rationality of action with certainty of outcome.

We present a hypothetical NESS to highlight the differences between the current conventional approach and one based on active adaptive management. We suggest that any attempt to adopt active adaptive management will need substantial commitment and flexible thinking to overcome the identified barriers.