Adaptive management is a way of maximizing the amount of learning from our daily interactions with systems, both social and ecological. As resources become scarce, it is more and more important to 'manage to learn' in order to 'learn to manage' so that every choice will help us make better choices in the future. Adaptive Management is not necessarily an easy concept to apply. As with any management approach , there are risks and costs. There is much to learn about how to do these activities well.
Society often finds it difficult to maintain support for such long term projects.
Under adaptive management, the failure of a project to behave as we expected is as valuable a result in terms of learning as a success would be. But as human beings we have difficulty accepting failure both as individuals as well as societies. However, within complex systems, every action or non-action may yield surprising results. By taking an adaptive approach, we have the potential to learn more quickly from our activities. Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management.