Integrated and adaptive management

Engle, N. L., O. R. Johns, M. Lemos, and D. R. Nelson. (2011) Integrated and adaptive management of water resources: tensions, legacies, and the next best thing. Ecology and Society 16(1): 19.

Engle, Johns, Lemos, and Nelson specifically addressed the challenges and short comings in the water governance systems of integrated water resources management (IWRM) and adaptive management (AM).  They reviewed the issues found in the literature and then discussed their own empirical analysis of cases in Brazil.   They found many of the same problems and issues that IWRM and AM claim to resolve.  The top-down command-control paradigm is still present and decidedly difficult to replace.  When leadership is committed to more community and democratic policy development the distribution of stakeholders and priorities are still often in line with leadership.

As previously noted multiple and fragmented priorities results in unsustainable systems.  Thus, there has been a trend to combine the IWRM and AM approaches to create a new management technique.   This combined effort seeks to more broadly provide the means for (Engle et. al. 2011):

1. increase effectiveness through integration across social, ecological, and hydrological systems; 
2. add legitimacy and promote public acceptance through stakeholder participation, cooperation, decentralization, and democratic decision making; 
3. incorporate technical expertise through inclusion of different forms of knowledge and promotion of social learning; and 
4. promote flexibility and adaptability through experimentation and learning in managing water resources.

However, the research indicated that IWRM and AM have not been able to address all these issues in practice.   For example Engle et. al. notes that "Medema et al. (2008) argue that because these
theoretical frameworks are difficult to translate into practice, they mostly fail to provide successful examples of implementation."  The strongest representations for the more integrated adaptive approach has been supported by other authors reviewed in this blog.  Specifically, Engle et. al.mentioned "the NeWater project (www.newater.info/), which underscores the need for adaptive integrated water resources management (AWM) to address the uncertainty associated with increasingly complex and interconnected problems (Pahl-Wostl et al. 2007)."

More research is needed to evaluate how integration techniques can work.   Such research needs to address the tensions that come from such integrated approaches and how to avoid these issues.  Empirical analysis of the hybrid management systems will support further work in this area.