Embracing the Primacy of Experience: How a Practice Perspective can bring Accounts of Adaptive Management to Life

In complex, dynamic and uncertain environments, where the appropriate course of action is unclear, natural resource managers often wonder, “what should I do now?” Over the past thirty years, the answer from applied ecology and the complexity sciences has generally been, “adaptive management,” or in everyday terms “learning-by-doing.” Adaptive management, rooted in pragmatism, suggests that many problems can only be solved through experience and ‘doing,’ and therefore that management action should be structured as a process of scientific experimentation. These ideas have been widely embraced by ecologists, managers and policy-makers, but outcomes have been disappointing to advocates. There is a widespread perception that adaptive management is a great idea that rarely works in practice. In this paper we suggest, however, that while adaptive management is certainly challenging, diagnoses of failure have largely been made within implicitly linear models of the links between knowledge, practice and context, where experience is reduced to simply producing better representations of the target ecosystem. These linear models tend to run counter to contemporary pragmatist, practice-oriented philosophy, and neglect the complexity adaptive management is intended to address. In this paper, therefore, we draw attention to the tangible, embodied aspects of experience, and develop a model of the links between knowledge, practice and context more congruent with the everyday complexities of adaptive management. We apply three concepts from contemporary practice theory – ‘actionable understanding,’ ‘ongoing business’ and ‘the eternally unfolding present’ – to an in-depth case study of adaptive management in a remote Australian National Park. We illustrate the utility of a practice perspective by highlighting implications for a) assessments of success and failure in adaptive management, b) the roles of ecologists and managers, and c) the use of ecological information by managers. The key message of the paper is that embracing the inevitable complexity and ‘mess’ of experience may lead to more realistic accounts of adaptive management in action and creative new forms of practice.