Emergent Learning for adaptive management in conservation

Like politics, conservation is inherently local — it's about places and the natural and social systems that live and interact in those places. It's also about how human communities learn to make sustainable livelihood in the places they inhabit.

Managing natural systems to conserve biodiversity and sustain the ecosystem services on which human livelihoods depend is wickedly complex. Increasingly, conservation practitioners aspire to employ adaptive management approaches that enable in-course correction of their actions, informed by continually assessing and reviewing the results of these actions, learning from the results, and incorporating learning into the next iteration action.

The practice of adaptive management, however, is in its infancy. And the least developed dimension of the practice, the weak link, is that part which is most expected to make a difference Ð learning and adapting.

The weak link in the adaptive management cycle

An Emergent Learning practice, supported by tools such as EL Map™ and Action Review Cycle, can transform this weak link into the strength envisioned by the originators and current proponents of adaptive management. An Emergent Learning practice focuses on the critical challenges and uncertainties in a strategy, framing them as questions that serve as a learning agenda. It draws lessons from actions taken and observed or measured results and uses these lessons to review and revise the logic and assumptions that underpin strategy. It produces course-corrections, and an action plan to implement and test them.

EL Maps™ provide a framework for conversations among stakeholders with varied objectives concerning results achieved and what they mean going forward. By focusing attention on future actions, the framework of an EL Map™ ensures that looking back to reflect on results is in service of informing next steps, not to swirl around the drain of blame and finger-pointing.

EL Maps™ enable stakeholders to carve out distinct but complementary plans to act and learn, while anchoring their autonomous efforts to a common set of learning questions that are grounded in shared hypotheses about what it will take to succeed.  Thus they are scalable for enabling learning across networks. Know-how created locally can be pooled with — and enriched by — synthesis with learning in other locales. Collective learning across locales is a basis for good practice that is robust in the face of diverse situations.

Signet provides design consultation, facilitation, training and coaching to help clients adopt an Emergent Learning discipline to make their adaptive management approach truly adaptive.

EL Map is a trademark of Signet Research & Consulting, LLC.

<< Accountability     Line of sight >>