The Hybrid AMPE Approach: Towards More Effective Environmental Management

Abstract

In the Global North, attempts to manage environmental resources have resulted in uneven results for diverse ecosystems. Weak levels of participation are characteristic of these attempts, as well as a lack of accounting for the stochasticity of both human and environmental systems. To address this lacuna, adaptive management has integrated the concept of environmental stochasticity into the management of complex environmental systems. However, we contend that adaptive management does not ask critical questions that seek to ensure social and environmental equitability, calling into question the effectiveness of the approach in the long term. This article provides an alternative vision of adaptive management that incorporates theoretical approaches from political ecology. Adaptive management provides an applicable framework to sustain the critical questions that political ecology asks. Thus, this marriage of application and theory can result in a framework that recognizes system stochasticity and develops pathways to the equitable management of environmental resources.

Keywords:

• adaptive management
• environmental management
• interdisciplinary approaches
• political ecology

We thank Nathan Kettle, William Graf, Chad Smith, and Edward Carr, who provided helpful commentary on this article. Additionally, this article was much improved by the insightful and constructive comments provided by three reviewers.

Notes

In this article we tend to essentialize the concepts of “society'”and the “environment.” We do this in order to conceptualize phenomena that encompass human versus geophysical processes. However, we only do this for literary convenience, as we recognize that human and natural processes are inextricably linked, influencing and impacting a collective whole. By introducing the AMPE approach to environmental management, we seek to build on the idea that the world is made up of a complex interweaving of the traditionally parsed “human” and “environment” realms and the desire to draw these ontologically separated categories together (Goldman and Schurman 2000).