Adaptation and Learning in Coastal Management: The Experience of Five East African Initiatives

This article explores principles of adaptive, learning-based resource management and their practical application in coastal management projects in East Africa. The principles of feedback and adjustment, experimentation, and carefully guided participatory processes that capture widespread knowledge are used to describe the experience of five projects in Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique. The findings are drawn from a variety of sources, including site visits and interviews. The main finding is that adaptive methods are a major feature of all projects, and the general approaches used in each case are similar.