An important part of an 'ecosystem management strategy' is a 'management system' that can be used by a network of stakeholders to track ecological and socio-economic outcomes and to hold each other accountable to their commitments.

A 'plan / do / review' loop is basic. Organisational management systems do not apply 'as is' to networks of stakeholders managing their collective performance, however. Relationships across organisational boundaries are far weaker than those within organisations. Formal mechanisms to increase transparency (e.g. new kinds of public reporting) can add a lot of value in these contexts. Clearly skillful negotiation is needed here.

Ecosystems themselves present specific challenges. They are dynamic so the effects of management actions can be hard to read. Measuring outcomes is therefore often technically challenging and expensive. We confront quite high levels of uncertainty when we aim to achieve ecological outcomes. Some ways of addressing these issues in ecosystem management systems include:

1. measuring outcomes at multiple resolutions in space and time, to give more sensitive readings of the influence of management actions within ecological dynamics,
2. combining informal feedbacks (e.g. networking with the local community) with formal scientific monitoring programs to (i) reduce costs, and (ii) increase the likelihood of picking up surprising changes early, and
3. introducing adaptive management approaches, such as using management activities themselves to discover how the system behaves and how to manage well.

Whenever there is a substantial investment by multiple stakeholders in catchment or urban water management, and the stakeholders have an interest in acting together. This is usually the case when water cycle outcomes are the goal of planning.

Current standard practice (in Australia) in ecosystem management plans like catchment plans and estuary management plans involves:

• providing a list of actions with responsible parties, budgets and timeframes as a basis for holding stakehoolders to account re their commitments, and
• measuring ecological and socio-economic outcomes to determine whether the collective effort is influencing ecosystem dynamics as expected.

Difficulties with current practice include:

1. Checking whether an organisation has 'done what it said it will do', with a budget and in a timeframe in line with the plan, is usually done in an untransparent, unprobing way which leaves a large amount of discretion to the agency re how it presents itself. Checking on performance of actions is far from transparent and accountability is weak.
2. Determining how management actions have influenced dynamics at an ecosystem scale is difficult. Generally speaking change needs to be assessed at multiple resolutions in space and time, and measurement is often technically challenging. Feedback on ecological - and socio-economic - outcomes often lacks the rigour that the investment in ecosystem outcomes warrants.

Ecosystem management system design can be strengthened by:

1. Measuring outcomes at multiple resolutions in space and time so that managers get relatively early feedback (from the finer resolution assessments) before the 'bottom line' assessments (at the larger space-time resolutions) become available.
2. Combining informal feedbacks (e.g. networking with community members, water body users, etc) with more formal monitoring programs that are designed to tell rigorously whether management efforts are succeeding or failing.
   • This combination is much better than relying on scientific work alone because:
   • outcomes on many dimensions of a system that are of interest will not be measured because the the cumulative costs of the science are too high; and
   • what is formally measured will be a subset of what people expect to change, but the worst surprises may emerge in unexpected processes within the system.
   • On the other hand, relying solely on informal assessments is not wise, because anecdotal evidence may be very skewed and may reflect expectations as much as what is occurring on the ground.
3. Increasing the accountability of organisations to each other by introducing formal mechanisms to increase transparency, for example:
   • a program of mutual external audits (which could have a management system focus),
   • instituting an independent panel of review, with eminent members, who review progress and report in public, and
   • requiring very detailed reporting from each stakeholder organisation, in which they publish the reports or other data generated in their own internal performance checking processes (e.g. internal audit reports).

Making management arrangements explicit in a formal ecosystem management system (e.g. by laying them out in ecosystem management plans (i.e. catchment management plans, estuary management plans, etc) is helpful when many parties are involved in managing a place together. It reduces misunderstanding and makes it easier to deal fairly with each other - because expectations are clearer.

Good design clearly needs to address the kinds of difficulty we confront managing ecosystems. Unlike an engineered system (e.g. a water supply or sewage disposal network), we don't know what all the components of a (socio-economic)-ecosystem are, and we have little idea about many aspects of how many of them function. So the uncertainties are very great, and managing with the expectation of being surprised (as recommended by adaptive management) makes sense.

We are on a steep societal learning curve. For the most part we have not learned how to manage our activities without producing surprising and very unwelcome changes. The design of ecosystem management strategies and systems is an evolving art.

Design

• See Ecosystem Management Case Studies for further information on the design of ecosystem management systems
• See Adaptive Management for management system approaches that emphasise managing amidst multiple uncertainties.
• A Stocktake of Environmental, Socioeconomic and Governance Performance Assessment Systems in use by Australian Governments (pdf) (prepared for the National Oceans Office)
• Challenges for catchment management agencies: lessons from bureacracies, business and resource management (Zambia)
• Opportunities to improve resource and environmental management: a roundtable discussion (CSIRO)

Case studies

• See Australian Catchment Management Case Studies
• Chesapeake Bay Program (US)
  Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the United States.