Recently, I reviewed the Planning Implementation Team’s final work plan. I was happy to see many of the deliverables focused on planning versus plans. Too often the emphasis has been on the CCP. This obscures the conversation. The plan is the product that documents the planning journey, it is more productive to frame the conversation around the planning processes necessary to deliver on the mission of the Refuge System, the shape of those processes, and the connections needed to ensure continuity between scales. Issues drive planning processes and issues facing refuges and the System come in all shapes and sizes. Our planning processes should match. Up to now, we have called upon the CCP process to address local, regional, and even global issues. A tall order indeed. A different way is to separate issues into ”containers” that correspond to size and scope of the issue with some issues, that cross scales, fitting in more than one container. We could examine each container, compare them to Refuge System priorities, and direct our planning resources accordingly.

So, if planning processes are matched to issues by scale, what planning continues under the moniker ”CCP”? My response is all of it. All planning relevant to a given unit collectively becomes the CCP. That means a CCP could or not , based on relevant isssues, contain regional plans, landscape plans, watershed plans, step-down management plans, and any others deemed necessary. In support I point to a recommendation from the Committee of Scientists (CoS) that completed a review of national forest planning back in 1999 (see included link to synopsis of the full report). They suggested viewing Forest Plans as ”loose-leaf notebooks” that include planning and decisions at all levels relevant to a particular Forest. I propose the same model is well suited to Comprehensive Conservation Planning and Refuge System lands. This model allows for planning at whatever scales are relevant to the issues and is friendly to adaptive management. I don’t need to go on, I’ll let the CoS speak for themselves (with a few modifications by me). –Dean

”Thus, the land- and resource-management plan Comprehensive Conservation Plan should be in the form of a loose-leaf notebook that contains all of the policy directions, strategies, and implementation proposals from decisions that have been made at all levels of the planning process. It is the official repository of decisions big and small that have been made and reviewed in the strategic and landscape-level planning processes. It must also contain the monitoring methodologies that will be implemented as well as the evaluation results from monitoring. Because this model of the land- and resource-management plan Comprehensive Conservation Plan is different than that employed during the first round of NFMA NWRS Improvement Act planning, the process of plan amendment is also different. Rather than a formal process involving review and comment, these loose-leaf plans are dynamic and evolving, readily reflecting and accommodating the outcomes of adaptive management. Thus, as decisions are revisited and revised in response to changing scientific and social understanding, natural events, and policy priorities, the loose-leaf notebook immediately reflects those changes. Consequently, any amendments made to these plans reflect decisions that have been made and reviewed elsewhere.

While adaptive management focuses on the learning generated by testing management approaches against actual results, this is not sufficient to ensure the kind of organizational learning necessary for planning to be effective. An adaptive planning method is also necessary to ensure that innovative approaches to assessments are tested and shared; new ways of working within a collaborative context are tried and evaluated; and new roles, responsibilities, and ways of organizing agency staff are also tested and effective ones passed on.”