Abstract
Taking stock after a decade: Does the ‘thresholds of potential concern’ concept need a socio-ecological revamp?
Highlights
Strategic adaptive management as an operating philosophy has attracted wide interest in South Africa. It spread from its original usage on river issues in and around the Kruger National Park (Biggs & Rogers 2003) to a wide range of other biophysical themes associated with national parks elsewhere in the country and more generally, to natural resource management issues such as integrated water resources management (Freitag et al in press)
One central construct which has attracted interest is that of thresholds of potential concern (TPCs; Biggs & Rogers 2003)
A better formulation for future use might be ‘can social or biophysical descriptors qualify validly for societal preferences as embodied in threshold of potential concern (TPC)?’ Strategic adaptive management is rooted in human values as a basis for deciding on the desired state (Roux & Foxcroft 2011) which is described in joint social and ecological terms (Walker & Salt 2006)
Summary
Strategic adaptive management as an operating philosophy (see Roux & Foxcroft 2011) has attracted wide interest in South Africa. We distinguish ‘preference’ from, or at least recognise that it grades into, ‘acceptability’ the latter implying something closer to non-negotiable, a feature some users originally may have implicitly attributed to TPCs, even though clear processes of TPC revision (Rogers & Biggs 1999) were described because it was anticipated they would be required often We address these barriers explicitly and ask three questions, (1) how can we overcome the damper which arises because of uncertainty about whether a threshold exists and where it lies, (2) can TPCs be used for preferences and (3) can TPCs be adjusted to take embedded human behaviours, especially in the rate of institutional responses, into account?
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