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Adaptive management is reviewed a paradigm that addresses a widely perceived need to give more prominence to ecological imperatives. Its contribution to the management of complex problem situations is addressed with reference to the facilitation of social learning and the creation of institutions. The role of simulation modelling and ways to overcome social dilemmas are highlighted. Recent critical reflection on experience is offered with a deeper exploration of learning processes in adaptive management Adaptive management is of particular relevance in forestry to aid forest managers to accommodate multiple interests. Community forestry and collaborative forest management provide illustrative examples of adaptive management within the forestry domain and illustrate its relevance.

Over the last few years, a great deal of evidence has been amassed on the impact of seasonal adversities on women, children and their families. Attempts have been made to differentiate the varying impacts on households and, within households, on women and children in different income classes and to build dynamic models of the 'screws and ratchets' which push manageable seasonal stress toward the breakdown limits of livelihood systems.What is attempted here is an exploration of the contribution of female production, labour and domestic domain services to the management of interannual and intra-annual uncertainty, the steps in the sequence of deterioration under accumulating stress, and of the options open to women and their children through and beyond the point of family disintegration, when managing seasonalities becomes a matter of individual physical survival.The evidence of female mortality and morbidity rates, from some areas at particular times, suggests that the wastage of females may be countenanced in times of acute stress as necessary to the survival of social systems as a whole, however distressing at the level of family survival. It establishes the extreme end of a range of situations in which poor rural men and women act and react to expected inter-annual and intra-annual fluctuations, interspersed with shocks whose advent is always latent but whose timing and severity is unguessable.The management of uncertainty is inherent in small producers' and labourers' livelihood systems; not surprisingly, these are characterised by flexibility, the maintenance of a range of options to meet expected fluctuations in resource endowments, entitlements to food, work and income, climatic variation and the unreliability of government services. If it is true that the less flexible the livelihood system, the harder it is to manage seasonal stress and sudden shock, then it is Such an exploration leads to consideration of how members of households assess probabilities and how they express risk preferences. It has been fashionable, for example, to assert that small producers prefer to minimise risk by aiming for inter-annual yield stability around the minimum necessary to meet subsistence needs. The concentration on yield stability per se may be diverting attention from a more dynamic calculus in which household members complement each others' contributions to livelihood stability across seasons by maintaining the capacity to transfer resources in and out of the sub-systems which together constitute their livelihood.

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A bstract: Agricultural research designs tend to be bounded by agroecological conditions, farming systems and other dimensions assumed to be homogeneous for the population of interest (that is, a recommendation domain or population for whom a technology or practice is expected to be relevant). Scaling is then a question of'rolling out' results across the domain. But what if technology adoption and institutional context explain the variance in the output of smallholders, and agricultural development is also a question of institutional innovation? What if a domain is seen as a system of interest among actors who have a stake in the system and as an arena for concerted action and institutional innovation? This paper reports on six years of action research that attempts to answer these questions. It compares experimental interventions and subsequent systemic changes within each of nine agroenterprise domains. The experience suggests that the research approach used can explain variance in smallholder output that, in present-day West Africa, is not explained by technology adoption.