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This Special Feature ofEcology and Societyseeks to communicate a practitioner’s perspective on the application of collaborative adaptive management (CAM) to contemporary natural resource management problems. One goal is to create an ongoing mechanism for dialogue that can connect practitioners, researchers, and policy makers. The core 15 papers are grouped into 3 categories that: (1) describe lessons learned through the practice of applying CAM principles to a specific project or generalizing principles from outcomes of a specific project; (2) summarize lessons learned from the author’s extensive CAM experiences; and (3) seek to be instructive of one or more CAM principles through a survey, evaluation, or comparison of multiple projects. Follow-up questions were submitted by authors to the online discussion section ofEcology and Societyto stimulate interactive communication among readers and authors about their papers and CAM in general.

Adaptive management has become increasingly common where natural resource managers face complex and uncertain conditions. The collaboration required among managers and others to do adaptive management, however, is not always easy to achieve. We describe efforts to work with villagers and government officials in Malinau, East Kalimantan Indonesia, where a weak, uncertain institutional setting and complex shifting political landscape made formal cooperation among these groups for forest management problematic. Through successive trials, the team learned instead to work with and enhance a “spontaneous order” of cooperation using four tactics: (1) continuous physical presence, (2) regular contact with the people who advised and were close to major decision makers, (3) maintenance of multiple programs to fit the needs of different interest groups, and (4) hyperflexibility in resource allocation and schedules.

1. Collaborative adaptive management (CAM) is regularly touted as the best way to handle natural resource management in the face of uncertainty, change and conflict. Successful applications of CAM have, however, been elusive in practice. 2. This article examines the Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Program (AMP) in the United States, and other CAM efforts, to illustrate why and how procedural shortcomings may lead to natural resource management failures and reflect on how they may be overcome. 3. Synthesis and applications. To increase the chance of success, CAM efforts should set clear overarching goals and concrete and measurable objectives, employ tools and incentives to facilitate participation and foster collaboration, implement well-defined joint fact-finding protocols to promote shared learning and manage scientific uncertainty, and commit to monitoring and adapting their management regimes over time. Even in complex and contentious resource management contexts, future CAM efforts that integrate these design elements are likely to lead to more effective natural resource management.

Collaborative adaptive management merges three essential features of twenty-first century conservation and resource management—science, collaboration, and a focus on results. These features intersect in conservation and resource management contexts characterized by: (1) high degrees of uncertainty; (2) complexity resulting from multiple variables and non-linear interactions; (3) interconnectedness—among issues, across landscapes, and between people and place; and (4) persistent, possibly dramatic, change. In this context, many resource management decisions present communication challenges, information challenges, coordination challenges, and action challenges. Collaboration and adaptive management, in part, are responses to these challenges. Many resource management questions are technical and complex. But policies and project decisions have distributional effects and often involve trade-offs. These effects raise issues about the respective roles of scientists, technical experts, and the public; underscore the relevance of adaptive decision frameworks, and heighten the importance of collaborate decision making. This essay examines collaborative adaptive management in this context from the perspective of a decisionmaker.

Ecosystem restoration is gaining momentum worldwide, but restoration projects frequently fall short of addressing the human dimension, notably through the involvement of local people. While social participation has been recognized to have a fundamental role in the success and sustainability of forest management projects, it is frequently not incorporated into restoration project planning. We gathered responses from a national assessment program regarding the status of terrestrial restoration projects in Mexico. We found that most of these projects were limited to the use of a local short-term work force in tree planting activities and were designed to alleviate short term local socioeconomic tensions, indicating that effective social participation is not well understood by managers.

The local community is an essential and key partner in managing protected areas, especially for national parks in Indonesia. Therefore, there is a need to establish adaptive collaborative management (ACM) between the park authorities and the local community. In 2000, several local leaders established a new organization to develop an ecotourism package called the Tangkahan Ecotourism Organization or Lembaga Pariwisata Tangkahan (LPT) and set up the Community Tour Operator to manage the ecotourism activities. Our study used a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis through focus group discussions (FGDs), interviews with related stakeholders and key informants, and carried out a literature review. It was found that ensuring local community could generate alternative income from ecotourism was an effective way to protect the park from any illegal activities. Additionally, the results about sustainability from the FGDs show that all three categories: Social Process, Adaptive Natural Resource Management, and Impact/Condition are interrelated, meaning that the collaboration and adaptive management in Tangkahan have resulted in high levels of humanistic well-being and the maintenance of ecological values, supporting collaboration processes and adaptive levels. Finally, our study can be used as a basis for a model of national parks focusing on ACM.

Collaborative adaptive management (CAM) has proved difficult to implement successfully. Insufficient attention to the problem definition process contributes to disappointing outcomes because that step sets the problem-solving approach and the attitudes of key partners. The exploratory problem assessment (EA) approach is a practical and cost-effective way for CAM project managers to learn enough about a problem situation quickly enough to identify critical partners and incorporate their input into problem definition and project planning. EA is a facilitated conceptual modeling approach built around two basic ideas: knowledge-focused facilitation can improve the problem definition process, and information design concepts can assist in building common understandings of complex situations. A facilitator with knowledge-brokering skills gathers and integrates information from people with diverse experiential and technical knowledge of the problem situation. The results are presented as information-rich and readily understandable diagrammatic conceptual models that can function as change theories for project planning. The EA approach and visual design strategy are described, with two illustrative cases showing how the approach can be applied in practice.

Land managers are often inadequately informed to make management decisions in contemporary watersheds, in which sources of impairment are simultaneously shifting due to the combined influences of land use change, rapid ongoing human population growth, and changing environmental conditions. There is, thus, a great need for effective collaborative adaptive management (CAM; or derivatives) efforts utilizing an accepted methodological approach that provides data needed to properly identify and address past, present, and future sources of impairment. The experimental watershed study design holds great promise for meeting such needs and facilitating an effective collaborative and adaptive management process. To advance understanding of natural and anthropogenic influences on sources of impairment, and to demonstrate the approach in a contemporary watershed, a nested-scale experimental watershed study design was implemented in a representative, contemporary, mixed-use watershed located in Midwestern USA. Results identify challenges associated with CAM, and how the experimental watershed approach can help to objectively elucidate causal factors, target critical source areas, and provide the science-based information needed to make informed management decisions. Results show urban/suburban development and agriculture are primary drivers of alterations to watershed hydrology, streamflow regimes, transport of multiple water quality constituents, and stream physical habitat. However, several natural processes and watershed characteristics, such as surficial geology and stream system evolution, are likely compounding observed water quality impairment and aquatic habitat degradation. Given the varied and complicated set of factors contributing to such issues in the study watershed and other contemporary watersheds, watershed restoration is likely subject to physical limitations and should be conceptualized in the context of achievable goals/objectives. Overall, results demonstrate the immense, globally transferrable value of the experimental watershed approach and coupled CAM process to address contemporary water resource management challenges.

Translating the attractive concept of collaborative adaptive management (CAM) into practice has proven very difficult. The papers included in this Special Feature explore why this is true and suggest how the challenges might be addressed. This summary highlights common themes, major challenges, and implications for research and practice. Many of the included papers emphasize the central importance of collaboration and stakeholder engagement as a response to complexity and uncertainty. Collectively, the papers make the case that a lack of knowledge about how to manage the human dynamics of comanagement poses a major challenge to implementing CAM. Human activities are the primary drivers of system change in most natural resource management systems, so attention to human dynamics is essential for developing useful change hypotheses and leading indicators that can provide useful and timely feedback for adaptive management. Institutions need to evolve to support adaptive and collaborative management processes. This will require thoughtful design of CAM processes, along with commitment of sufficient time and resources. Implementation challenges should be considered as a major focus for research rather than as simply barriers to progress. More effective ways of capturing practitioners’ experiential knowledge are required to improve the practice of CAM. This Special Feature suggests that the concept of a CAM practitioners’ journal has promise, but realization of that promise will require careful attention to the needs of and constraints on practitioners.

Adaptive management is a growing trend within environment and natural resource management efforts in the United States. While many proponents of adaptive management emphasize the need for collaborative, iterative governance processes to facilitate adaptive management, legal scholars note that current legal requirements and processes in the United States often make it difficult to provide the necessary institutional support and flexibility for successful adaptive management implementation. Our research explores this potential disconnect between adaptive management theory and practice by interviewing practitioners in the field. We conducted a survey of individuals associated with the Collaborative Adaptive Management Network (CAMNet), a nongovernmental organization that promotes adaptive management and facilitates in its implementation. The survey was sent via email to the 144 participants who attended CAMNet Rendezvous during 2007–2011 and yielded 48 responses. We found that practitioners do feel hampered by legal and institutional constraints: >70% of respondents not only believed that constraints exist, they could specifically name one or more examples of a legal constraint on their work implementing adaptive management. At the same time, we found that practitioners are generally optimistic about the potential for institutional reform.