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CONFERENCE REPORTS

Conference:
Organizational Learning: Adaptive Management of Salmon Conservation

Dates:
December 3 - 4, 2001

Location:
Bellevue, Washington

Organized By:
University of Washington Olympic Natural Resources Center

Conference Summary:
Olympic Natural Resources Center assembled a multi-agency planning team to prepare a conference intended to explore questions about how organizations learn and to check the status of adaptive management programs in resource management and regulatory agencies in the Pacific Northwest.  The planning team drew upon expertise from state and federal agencies in Oregon and Washington as well as from academic institutions and research labs.  The team organized a two day conference which was held December 3-4, 2001 to explore three questions relevant to the issues at hand:

1. Are resource management and regulatory organizations actually prepared to learn and make intelligent choices?
2. Are there successful examples for natural resource organizations to follow?
3. What changes in organizations are needed to successfully learn and adapt?

This meeting built on a previous conference held in December 2000, sponsored by the U.W. Olympic Natural Resources Center, focused on validation monitoring. Validation monitoring represents the feedback from the environment on the effectiveness of management actions, a critical component of adaptive management. However, the message is only useful if someone is listening: if the organization is prepared to take the environment’s feedback and respond. This conference therefore builds logically on what was discussed in December 2000.

The specific objectives of the December 2001 conference were to:

• Fill part of a critical gap in our ability to successfully achieve public policy of restoring salmon habitat and populations in the Pacific Northwest,
• Provide resource management and regulatory organizations with actions and strategies that may improve current governmental and organizational efforts to conserve salmon,
• Help answer the question: “How can we best organize ourselves for using research and management experience to learn how to conserve salmon?”

The conference was organized into five sections:

1. Introduction and setting the stage with the keynote address
2. Organizational Learning; what do we know?
3. Adaptive Management; what does it require organizations to do?
4. How can we best organize to recover salmon?
5. A facilitated discussion to develop a list of common principles for organizations that can learn and adapt.

Speakers were asked to contribute to the process with 20-30 minute presentations and participate in panel question-and-answer sessions.  From these presentations and discussions among those in the conference, a list of organizational characteristics was compiled.

Conference Proceedings