A growing number of RAP practitioners and policymakers, including members of the International Joint Commission's Water Quality Board, are hailing adaptive management as the way to take practical steps to restore AOCs. Originally conceived by a group of natural resources managers in the late 1970s, adaptive management assumes there is much that environmental managers do not understand about the environmental systems they attempt to manage, thus they should treat policies as scientific experiments and learn from them. Traditional environmental management rests on the hope that environmental policies will produce cumulative, system-wide changes. In contrast, the premise of adaptive management is that hope is not a method .
Actual ecosystems are the units of management and laboratories for large-scale experimentation.
Organizations must have the stability to manage long enough to learn about environmental systems. For example, if fish populations are known to fluctuate in a decade-long cycle, they must be studied for several decades to detect reliable patterns. Models or systems of models are crucial. To be experiments, actions must produce changes that can be measured. Relevant monitoring of the spatial and temporal patterns in the system is necessary.