Law Commons^™

Regulation By Adaptive Management--Is It Possible?, J.B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Today's voluminous literature on adaptive management traces its roots to Professor C.S. Holling's seminal work, Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management. Although almost thirty years have passed since he and his colleagues first described the adaptive management methodology, no work on the topic has improved on their core theory. Its essence is an iterative, incremental decisionmaking process built around a continuous process of monitoring the effects of decisions and adjusting decisions accordingly. It is in other words, far more suited to the needs of future regulatory challenges than is prescriptive regulation. My focus, however, is not on what adaptive management should …