The real river management challenge: Integrating scientists, stakeholders and service agencies

The experience of river scientists leads them to propose ecosystem variability as a central theme in management. The real challenge however lies in developing collective understanding, and integration, within and between scientists, citizens and management agencies. The prevailing view of scientists as experts who solve environmental problems is fallacious. A broad societal response, supported by humble public service agencies and scientists in the service of society, is more likely to succeed. This paper proposes a framework for structuring the science/management/society partnerships, and is based on experiences from managing rivers flowing through the Kruger National Park, South Africa. Scientists need to place between-discipline communication, constructive synthesis of their collective understanding and diffusion of this understanding into civil society, much higher on their collective agenda. Entering problem solving situations as co-learners, rather than experts, facilitates partnership building. Managers need to focus on: (1) preparing society to engage the knowledge, the problem and the solutions needed to achieve some collectively defined set of future conditions; (2) actively engage scientists in the development of technology for altering patterns of resource use and (3) undertake actions needed to achieve the desired future distribution of the costs and benefits of resource use in society. Managers have a very limited tool box with which to work, and modern society has largely transferred the risk of failure to them. Society therefore needs to accept more responsibility in these partnerships of co-operative decision-making. It should engage in them with a 'public good' ethic, a vision for a shared future, and an acceptance that resource and technological limits ultimately determine the distribution of costs and benefits of ecosystem services. Successful partnerships are based on adaptive management processes driven by consensus decision-making to ensure better distribution of knowledge, risks, humility and rewards in common property resource management. To achieve this we need to learn new ways to manage, while managing new ways to learn. Three models, social learning, learning communities and learning organizations, provide focus for learning. Copyright (C) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.