The hybrid AMPE approach: Towards more effective environmental management

Abstract

In the Global North, attempts to manage environmental resources have resulted in uneven results for diverse ecosystems. Weak levels of participation are characteristic of these attempts, as well as a lack of accounting for the stochasticity of both human and environmental systems. To address this lacuna, adaptive management has integrated the concept of environmental stochasticity into the management of complex environmental systems. However, we contend that adaptive management does not ask critical questions that seek to ensure social and environmental equitability, calling into question the effectiveness of the approach in the long term. This article provides an alternative vision of adaptive management that incorporates theoretical approaches from political ecology. Adaptive management provides an applicable framework to sustain the critical questions that political ecology asks. Thus, this marriage of application and theory can result in a framework that recognizes system stochasticity and develops pathways to the equitable management of environmental resources. © 2011 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.