Biological Diversity: Balancing Interests Through Adaptive Collaborative Management PDF

Foreword

Adaptive collaborative management (ACM) is a concept as well as a practical strategy whose time is coming. ACM derives both from experience and from views of the world that have their foundations in natural science and contemporary culture. This book examines these worldviews as well as some of the experience with natural resource management that has encouraged and supported their articulation.

The worldwide movement to establish conservation policies and practices that will reverse the present loss of biodiversity has gained impetus from many sources: from government agencies and legislatures, civil-society institutions, academics and researchers, community resistance to commercial encroachment on natural resource domains, and a growing conviction among people everywhere that the maintenance of environmental integrity and services can no longer be taken for granted.

Initial responses, official and nongovernmental, to threats to the survival of ecosystems and to the flora and fauna they support have tended to be regulatory or coercive. The powers of the state were mobilized to enforce the protection of natural resources, and the logic and knowledge of science were enlisted to justify and guide such actions. The role of citizens was envisioned as principally one of compliance.

But this traditional approach has been found inadequate for stemming the erosion of biological resources, because state capacities were less than anticipated, the knowledge base for effective and sustainable management was inadequate, and cooperation from various publics was not necessarily forthcoming under such circumstances. Interest in ACM arises in the first instance because there is evident need to devise strategies for natural resource conservation that can be more successful in enlisting both knowledge and public support. In a modern, democratic age, purely authority-based approaches have become anachronistic, especially when the expertise supporting them is overstated.

As governments, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and others have become more engaged in conservation efforts, the limitations of our knowledge for conservation management have become more evident. Mechanistic, linear projections fail to predict the future of natural systems. They can underestimate the immense recuperative power of such systems in the same way that they overlook inherent vulnerabilities that can cause quick collapse. In nature, great sensitivity and tremendous resilience coexist, which makes its nurture and preservation more difficult and less certain than when systems are simpler and more predictable.

The conjunction of needing to proceed in more flexible ways - not simply implementing preconceived plans but always working in a learning process mode - and in a more participatory manner - enlisting not just the cooperation of various stakeholders but also their contribution of knowledge - has led us and others to formulate the concepts and principles of ACM, which are laid out in the introductory chapter.

ACM is still in its initial stages, so it is a work-in-progress. No final judgment can be rendered on how sufficient or effective it will be to cope with the many complexities and great difficulties of biodiversity conservation. And like the nature it seeks to protect, we can expect that ACM will itself evolve over time as experience accumulates. So ACM is more an approach than a fixed strategy. It certainly does not offer any detailed blueprints. However, the case for proceeding with such an approach is very strong, given both the shortcomings of past efforts and the apparent merits of ACM.

This approach is consistent in the social realm with an ecological perspective in the natural world. In both domains, one needs to appreciate the complexity and relatedness of things, expecting that relationships as well as components will continue to evolve. There can and will be conflict and competition, but at the same time there is interdependence and some necessary degree of cooperation. Just as blueprints can be constructed only post facto in nature, we expect that efforts to conserve nature must themselves be based on an understanding of complexity and interrelatedness, with multiple objectives being served. Since nature remains full of surprises, its management needs to remain empirical.

There have been many previous efforts to make the world fit mechanistic understandings of relationships and of cause and effect. But such a clockwork ("Newtonian") worldview has been strongly challenged by other branches of (more modern) science that encourage more holistic understanding and draw on the insights coming from chaos and complexity theories (such as Capra, 1982, Prigogine and Stengers, 1984, Stacey, 1993; Gell-Mann, 1994; Uphoff, 1996).

ACM is in tune with these ways of understanding reality, not abandoning more deterministic thinking altogether, but expanding upon it with contemporary insights into reality. Biophysical and socioeconomic domains have more in common than conventional disciplinary boundaries suggest, and ACM seeks to connect these realms for the sake of biodiversity conservation and for meeting human needs.

Mechanistic, deterministic images of reality can be useful approximations. But they are always metaphorical, not real, so when we use them, we should not accept them as absolute truths. We do well to understand the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclites who said: You cannot step in the same river twice - because it is always changing. Indeed, stepping into the river changes it.

In fact, Heraclites' river was a metaphor for the real world around us, which is itself always evolving, usually slowly, but sometimes fast. And even if certain things are changing relatively little, their surroundings are not. So the significance and possibilities of even slow-changing things are continually being modified.

There are a number of implications of such a worldview for approaching ACM. These can be simply stated:

1. We live in open systems, not closed ones. It is tempting, for the sake of simplicity or greater certainty, to assume the latter. But this is a trick of the mind, since closed systems are more artificial than real. This appreciation makes cause-and-effect relations more complex, so that steering and guiding are more appropriate words to describe the process of management than are controlling and regulating. Planning is a meaningful process if it is indicative and purposive, based on a learning process (Korten, 1980), rather than an attempt to determine the future unilaterally. Having continual feedback and evaluation is also essential.

2. Knowledge needs to be continuously validated and revalidated. We should not conclude that our knowledge is always or necessarily inadequate. It is possible to have useful and valid knowledge, and scientific efforts to develop universalizable principles and relationships are still important. (The extreme postmodernist position decrying scientific investigation defies the evidence of experience.) However, we should be appropriately modest about our knowledge and recognize its limits, remaining good observers and not being blinded by preconceptions. The application of knowledge to real-world situations needs to be empirical, and it is justified (or not) according to its relevance and impacts.

3. Reality is pluralistic. On this point, the postmodernists make a useful contribution, directing us away from monolithic and overly abstract, generalized concepts of truth. One problem is that our language tends to homogenize reality by using singular forms of nouns, rather than plurals. We should speak of conservations rather than conservation, as there are many kinds and degrees, some more desirable or sustainable than others. Indeed, the apparently plural term natural resources is still a monolithic abstraction, better replaced with more concrete referents like soil, water, forests, and flora and fauna. These are still rather general categories, but more closely related to reality. Few terms are more misleading than the small farmer or the environment when we should be talking about small farmers and environments, with the plural form reminding us of the diversity that exists.

4. The world continues to contain many surprises. We have invested hundreds of thousands of scientist-years by now in trying to understand the environment( s) with implications for how policies and practices can best maintain its (their) vitality and productivity. This productivity itself relates to human needs but also to natural processes. If we appreciate that our knowledge is imperfect and incomplete, not just because of our own intellectual limitations but because the world is changing, and that reality is pluralistic, we are better prepared for acting realistically and effectively toward the world as it is, not as we have preconceived it.

We hear at present debates over whether "markets" are good or are bad for conserving biological diversity. Any effort to generalize like this is bound to produce misleading conclusions. Leaving aside the question of whether one can meaningfully talk about biodiversity as a single phenomenon, there are surely ways in which certain market processes can be positive, and others can be negative. And outcomes that were observed at one point in time could be quite different at another time. So we should be prepared to find unexpected things. We will be better prepared for surprises, however, if we proceed in our biodiversity conservation efforts with the above four observations as ontological and epistemological premises.

We might also keep in mind an observation made by Jack Duloy of the World Bank at a Bellagio conference some years ago that "the real world is a special case." We should develop as much general knowledge as we can to be better prepared to deal with the pluralism and uncertainty of operational circumstances. But we should also remember that solving problems and meeting goals in concrete situations requires a blending of knowledge from various sources and disciplines, and a sagacious abstracting and application from experience. No two situations are the same; however, there are some recurrent or common elements that we can know and build upon. ACM does not proceed assuming a blank slate (tabula rasa). It explicitly draws on existing knowledge and experience, but it expects that solutions will have to be crafted, evaluated, modified, and evolved, that they are not fully determinable in advance.

This book gives substance, conceptual and empirical, to ACM. ACM is an approach that by its nature will evolve, as practitioners and policy makers as well as academics and evaluators assess the contribution it can make to the protection of natural ecosystems. Where the conservation of biodiversity is at stake, it frequently offers a state-of-the-art approach to increasing the likelihood that treasured natural resources will be sustained, not just for the 5 or 10 years of a project's life but over generations. It is urgent that we find better ways to ensure that ecosystems that have required millions of years to evolve to their present state do not deteriorate and disappear as a result of human actions - or inaction.