Collaborative Adaptive Management: Separating the Kernel From the Chaff.

Despite being ideas in good currency; neither “collaboration” nor “adaptive management” is practiced with any consistency and almost never together. The intent of this presentation is to offer a perspective on collaborative adaptive management (CAM) grounded in the original works of Carl Walters, Ray Hilborn, Buzz Holling, Bill Clark (1970s) and more recent contributions by Kai Lee (1993) and Lance Gunderson (1995, 2002). Case studies involve Everglades Agricultural Area, Blufflands adjacent to Upper Mississippi River, Northwest Colorado land management, Kissimmee River Restoration, River communities and farmlands adjacent to the Missouri River, Galicia Region of Poland and Central Europe. Key issues to be discussed: 1) Collaboration is an unnatural act for most scientists, and having facilitators with no scientific background tend to make attempts at collaboration next to impossible (examples: MO River, NW CO); 2) Adaptive Management is alien to present social reality, but once understood, one of the founders of the Sage Brush Rebellion and barge captain remarked: “Why haven’t we been working this way all along?” (Kissimmee River, NW CO, MO River); 3) Creating a new social reality is the process of reconfiguring what scientific and social communities agree to define as “legitimate problems” and “credible solutions.” What does that mean for the roles that scientists and farmers have assumed in the past? (Blufflands, Galicia); 4) The goal of CAM is to create a preferred regime for managing working landscapes; It is imperative that the uncertainty and complexity of managing landscapes not impede development of solutions credible to all citizens.