Decision support, learning and rural resource management

Decision support technologies and paradigms have their origins in management and information sciences but have been widely proposed as providing a basis for improving management for sustainability rural resource management. As such, they provide a means of helping managers to deal with increased information, increasingly complex decisions and to professionalise their activities. However, decison support has, in practice, had limited impact in many rural resource management contexts. Failures can be attributed to non-delivery, non-adoption and to unexpected negative impacts where they are adopted. This paper proposes a response to these challenges by reappraising the role of decision support and proposing a generic framework for the implementation of decision support as a broader initiative than the development of a decision support output, and one that aims to foster learning and co-learning.