A Conversation with Barry Gold

A Conversation with Barry Gold Barry D. Gold, Chief of the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center, came to the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources and Environment to discuss the process of adaptive management and the importance of collaboration to implement the Glen Canyon Adaptive Management Program.

EMI: What characteristics do you think helped to facilitate progress in implementing adaptive management? How was the Glen Canyon Adaptive Management Program able to move forward?

Gold: One of the things that facilitated implementing the adaptive management process is the fact that the participants came from a very polarized EIS process, looking to a next process that would succeed. The group, even though their vision is fuzzy and they all have different endpoints, wants to succeed. Also, the early flood experiment and the national attention that was focused on it made the group feel they were doing something important and wanting to be successful at it. Finally, there has been enough litigation around natural resources issues in the Southwest, and no one in the group wanted to go down that road. There was a desire to find a better way to deal with these complex natural resource issues. The first head of the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center, Dave Garrett, was someone who was able to build trust among the group. He assured them that each of their individual interests would be addressed. He built a sense of confidence in the group. Having a resource like the Grand Canyon, which in the end people really do care about, is an advantage that others might not have. When things got really tough, we took the group out to do some of their work in the resource, in the Canyon. Finally, there was a huge commitment of staff time. It takes a lot of energy and a lot of resources to run a collaborative, science-based process. It is critical to invest those resources; otherwise you'll probably be investing them in litigation.

EMI: In your experience, what have been some of the primary barriers to implementing adaptive management?

Gold: People not understanding what they are committing to. That also turned out to be a strength. If they had understood what they were committing to, they might not have committed. Personnel issues. Having enough staff and people trained in collaborative processes, being able to educate the stakeholders to work collaboratively, and to be able to deliver scientific information in a way that all of the stakeholders can understand it. The design of a monitoring program, having to figure that out, not being able to go someplace where there was a framework that listed the steps that you ought to go through in designing a monitoring program. Concerns over the implications were of FACA or ESA or NEPA, those are all issues, and somehow this group really did a great job in tackling these issues and finding a way to continue moving together.

EMI: Now with the benefits of hindsight, how might you have changed things?

Gold: I wish we had up-front worked on a guidance document, that spelled out the legal and policy framework within which we were working in a much more detailed fashion. And that we had written process diagrams of how information was going to flow and how decisions were going to be made. We did not do any of that at the outset. What we discovered was that everyone had different expectations about how this relatively vague language was going to be implemented. The benefit was that we invented our process, or made it up collaboratively, as we moved forward. So we were laying the track and deciding how to run the railroad at the same time.

EMI: How important do you think collaboration is to facilitate the learning process?

Gold: Without collaboration we couldn't do this process. Adaptive management may be a bad moniker for this program. We may be better off talking about science based collaborative resources management as opposed to adaptive management, as long as you incorporate the concepts of each. And they are different but complementary. The reality is that adaptive management was never designed or thought about as a collaborative process. What adaptive management was intended to address is how we use management actions as experiments to address uncertainty and complexity in natural systems. So that we can learn more, instead of trial and error, instead of true creeping incrementalism. Collaboration is a different set of tools. Collaboration is required to establish the goals for what you are trying to achieve and it is the process that helps you integrate the new information that results from adaptive management. In the end, the reality is that you can't do what needs to be done to address complex environmental and natural resources management issues without both. The question is, do we have the people and the procedures to support adaptive management and collaborative processes?