TY - JOUR
T1 - Creating institutional flexibility for adaptive water management
T2 - insights from two management agencies
AU - Peat, Michael
AU - Moon, Katie
AU - DYER, Fiona
AU - Johnson, William
AU - Nichols, Susan J.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Elsevier Ltd
Copyright:
Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2017/11/1
Y1 - 2017/11/1
N2 - Adaptive management is an experimental approach used by water management agencies around the world to manage and restore aquatic ecosystems. The effectiveness of the approach can often be constrained by inflexible institutional arrangements. In this paper we compare two cases where agencies have implemented adaptive management to manage and restore aquatic ecosystems. Our aim was to understand practitioners' perceptions of how institutional flexibility can be created for adaptive management. We interviewed 14 adaptive management practitioners working in the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia and 14 practitioners in Southern Florida, United States of America. We found that in both cases, just enough flexibility was created to enable experimentation, but informal institutional arrangements tended to constrain adaptive management. We also found that adaptive management was effective when an agency adopted collaborative and distributed leadership, but these leadership styles were difficult to sustain, and not always appropriate when attempting to create institutional flexibility. Our results illustrate how agencies, stakeholders and researchers can develop a shared understanding of how to manage and restore aquatic ecosystems, which in turn, helps create institutional flexibility for an agency to manage adaptively.
AB - Adaptive management is an experimental approach used by water management agencies around the world to manage and restore aquatic ecosystems. The effectiveness of the approach can often be constrained by inflexible institutional arrangements. In this paper we compare two cases where agencies have implemented adaptive management to manage and restore aquatic ecosystems. Our aim was to understand practitioners' perceptions of how institutional flexibility can be created for adaptive management. We interviewed 14 adaptive management practitioners working in the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia and 14 practitioners in Southern Florida, United States of America. We found that in both cases, just enough flexibility was created to enable experimentation, but informal institutional arrangements tended to constrain adaptive management. We also found that adaptive management was effective when an agency adopted collaborative and distributed leadership, but these leadership styles were difficult to sustain, and not always appropriate when attempting to create institutional flexibility. Our results illustrate how agencies, stakeholders and researchers can develop a shared understanding of how to manage and restore aquatic ecosystems, which in turn, helps create institutional flexibility for an agency to manage adaptively.
KW - Aquatic ecosystem restoration
KW - Institution
KW - Leadership
KW - Qualitative research
KW - Social learning
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85025074976&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.jenvman.2017.06.059
DO - 10.1016/j.jenvman.2017.06.059
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85025074976
VL - 202
SP - 188
EP - 197
JO - Advances in Environmental Research
JF - Advances in Environmental Research
SN - 0301-4797
IS - 1
ER -