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Maintaining social welfare and opportunity in the face of severe ecological pressures requires frameworks for managing and governing long‐term social–ecological change. In this paper we analyse two recent frameworks, adaptive management and transition management, outlining what they could learn from each other. Though usually applied in different domains, the two conceptual frameworks aim to integrate bottom‐up and top‐down approaches, and share a focus on the ability of systems to learn and develop adaptive capacity whilst facing external shocks and long‐term pressures. Both also emphasize learning from experimentation in complex systems, but transition management focuses more on the ability to steer long‐term changes in system functions, whilst adaptive management emphasizes the maintenance of system functions in the face of external change. The combination of iterative learning and …