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Natural disasters, extreme weather events, economic crises, political change and long term change, such as climate change and demographic change, are in many places forcing a re-think about the way governments manage their environmental resource systems. Over the last decade, the concept of adaptive governance has rapidly gained prominence in the scientific community as a new alternative to the traditional predict-and-control regime. However, many policy makers and practitioners are struggling to apply adaptive governance in practice. Drawing on an extensive, critical literature review of adaptive governance, network management and institutional analysis, we argue that the constraints to the uptake of adaptive governance relate to a large extent to the inability of practitioners and policy makers to cope with complexity and various uncertainties: (i) ambiguous purposes and objectives of what should be …