The Landscape of ICM Learning Activities

While scores of millions of dollars have been invested in coastal research, the proportion spent assessing the effectiveness of alternative management tools and analyzing how program attributes and contextual factors shape program outcomes is relatively small. Like other professionals, ICM practitioners are constantly seeking to "make sense" of what is happening in their program design and implementation activities as well as solve specific problems. Such learning involves gathering information about experience, processing this information to generate knowledge, and then applying that knowledge to create changes in organizational structures or practices. This article identifies some of the formal and informal "inquiry strategies" by means of which ICM intellectual capital can be expanded and lessons can be identified. The first section briefly focuses on the types of uncertainties and knowledge gaps around which learning activities need to be organized. The second and primary section reviews some of the formal "sense-making" and inquiry activities for harvesting ICM experience and creating lessons. The third section identifies some of the ways the knowledge gleaned from these inquiry strategies gets expressed.