Coping with Complexity and Organizational Interests in Natural Resource Management

Abstract

To cope with the daunting challenges posed by system complexity while maximizing their organizational interests, resource management institutions must implement strategies aimed at reducing some of the particular dimensions of complexity. Virtually all of the recent initiatives to improve resource management—ecosystem management, adaptive management, stakeholder negotiation, disturbance prevention, multiple mandates for resource management agencies, resource homogenization, restoration ecology, the creation of protected areas, the restoration of local-user rights, and algorithmic resource exploitation rules—are vulnerable to inappropriate interest-driven simplifications, many of which result from patterns of perverse learning. A research agenda designed to identify better means of coping with complexity and the effects of organizational interests could help to improve resource and environmental management.