Knowledge Transfer Through Adaptive Management and Environmental Governance

Abstract

With adaptive management and global environmental governance, earlier principles of knowledge use in environmental research, policy, and resource management are abandoned. Both knowledge practices are based on ideas from environmental and ecological research and aim to improve the practices of natural resource management, conservation, or environmental policies. The principles no longer applied include that of research guided by single theories; of working with linear models, single causes, quantitative data, and exact knowledge; and of maximisation of yields as economic principle of resource management. In the discourses of sustainability science and postnormal science, these principles have been critically discussed in the search for new epistemological framing of analyses of complex environmental problems and their solution in resource management and governance. It is concluded that adaptive management and environmental governance develop through application and methodological reflection; for their refinement, social-ecological theory provides some framing and bridging concepts.