Sustainability Now! employs adaptive management in search for community practices that maintain the options important to a culture living in a place. Adaptive managers come to recognize that survival — a thriving human culture — is a matter of community adaptation, community foresight, and social learning, all of which evoke values that transcend individual, consumptive goods of economics and point toward a responsibility to a larger and ongoing culture. Adaptive management includes both the use of science in management and a collaborative process in which participation and social learning are an important part.

So adaptive management represents a philosophy of management; the same philosophy that governs the search for scientific understanding also governs the search for better management solutions and guides revisions of values and evaluations when observation and experience indicate the need for such revisions. Adaptive management is as much a search for the right thing to do as it is a search for the truth. Adaptive management, like medicine, is a normative science. It is a necessary and useful tool because of the uncertainty about how ecosystems function and how management affects these natural systems. Such an adaptive approach refers to:

As illustrated in the above diagram (after Biggs and Rogers, 2003), the adaptive management procedure includes the following components:

Adaptive management offers significant hope for moving beyond the quagmire of traditional decision-making because rather than imagining that the policy formation process is carried out in two realms — the realm of science and the messier realm of policy, goals, and values — we can more usefully think of the policy process (adaptive management) as having two related phases. In the action phase the focus is on what ought to be done, which includes asking what we do know and what we need to know if we are to achieve stated goals according to specified criteria and measurements. Here descriptive science is used to determine what is possible and what means are likely to achieve the stated goals.

The search for rational and democratically acceptable environmental and economic policies, however, also requires a reflective phase, in which policy discourse is focused on choosing goals and the sorts of measures and indicators we will use to keep score of how we are doing in the game of sustainable living. If we see the context of public discourse about management as one of deciding democratically what to do, then the public must in some way contribute to the choice of goals of management. And since goals are given operational meaning by choosing which variables to track, it seems to follow that there must be democratic input on the choice of indicators and on the standards that are set. This reasoning implies in turn that, in some sense, democratic participation requires that policymakers and at least some of the public can understand models chosen to determine success and failure.

Adaptive management is here understood as being undertaking within a democratic society, in which interested citizens, either as representatives of their interest group or simply as individuals, participate in this open-ended, experimental process of management. It is hoped that this strategy will result in social learning, in the emergence of shared goals and policies, and in greater environmental protection and economic security through the attention paid to Citizen Science. The possibility of social learning is therefore the central driving force of adaptive management; and this driving force should sharply focus our attention on the deliberative and political processes associated with an adaptive management partnership. Adaptive management is a strategy that can both reduce uncertainty regarding particular matters of fact affecting management decisions and reduce disagreement about goals, objectives, and values.

Adaptive management is a tool that guides a process in which the community seeks cooperative, collective actions that reduce uncertainty and result in social learning over time. We have shifted the approach, then, from trying to model an ideal decision process by which to represent a "rational" decision based on the best science and aggregations from individual valuations, to actually immersing the choice of goals and multiple criteria and requirements for sustainability into an ongoing public process, relying on democratic discourse and people's values and love of their place to encourage the use of scientific studies to reduce uncertainty and serve consensus-based community goals. Processes such as this, though messy, have the potential to encourage social learning, reduce conflict, and result in the choice of synoptic indicators that can be supported by coalitions of individuals and groups who may be expressing very different values.