Page 82 - A bird’s-eye view of recreation - Rogier Pouwels

A bird's-eye view of recreation
Adaptive management is an appropriate approach in the event that the involved parties are in agreement about the nature and extent of the problem, although it is uncertain whether the chosen measures will be effective because of uncertainty in knowledge or unpredictability of the system response (Williams et al. 2007). Influencing recreation behavior has highly uncertain outcomes (Cole et al. 1987, Cole 2006), and recreation–biodiversity relationships are poorly understood (Sutherland 2007). Under these conditions, adaptive management provides a proper approach to deal with uncertainty. In using scientific tools, their uncertainty needs to be known.
However, adaptive management is not designed to resolve conflicts about management objectives (Williams et al. 2007). In biodiversity–recreation interactions, there is often disagreement about the problem. In most cases recreation does not lead to direct death of individual animals; what makes it hard for recreation stakeholders to accept is that populations might be at risk because of high levels of visitors. In the event that the nature and the cause of a conflict is in debate, and at the same time the degree of uncertainty about effective solutions is high, the management strategy needs to be based on communication, translocation, and mediation (Cash et al. 2003). This so-called boundary management is considered an appropriate approach if the agreement on the impact of management options is low. Cash et al. (2003) proposed that in using scientific tools to transfer information, credibility, saliency, and legitimacy of information are critical factors to enhance.
Current recreation management approaches often show characteristics of adaptive management (Nilsen and Tayler 1997, McCool et al. 2007). Scientific tools are used to compare the possible effect of alternative solutions. In contact with stakeholders, these tools are typically used in a one-way direction to inform stakeholders about changes in management. However, boundary management requires that stakeholders are actively involved in the development and use of scientific knowledge and tools. Knowledge held by stakeholders is regarded as a valuable part of the knowledge base that should be shared in a common process of fact finding and design of solutions, and to decrease uncertainty. There is therefore a need for tools that can support both adaptive management and boundary management, developed in accordance with the demands of transdisciplinary research (Thompson Klein 2004). We propose using four guiding principles for this.
First, the tools must be able to cross the boundary between recreation and biodiversity. They must therefore be built around the recreation–biodiversity relationship and
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