André E. Punt is a Professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University Washington, Seattle, USA and the currently the Director of the School. He received his B.Sc, M.Sc and Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Before joining the University of Washington, André was a Principal Research Scientist with the CSIRO Division of Marine and Atmospheric Research in Australia. He has been involved in stock assessment and fisheries management for over 30 years and has been recognized for his contributions in this area with awards from the CSIRO, the University of Washington, the Australian Society for Fish Biology, and the American Fisheries Society. The research undertaken by André and the MPAM (Marine Population and Management) group at the University of Washington relates broadly to the development and application of fisheries stock assessment techniques, bioeconomic modelling, and the evaluation of the performance of stock assessment methods and harvest control rules using the Management Strategy Evaluation approach.

The 1980s saw the introduction of adaptive management and in particular active adaptive management, where managers manipulate fishery regulations to maximize expected benefits from "learning through doing". While a comprehensive formal structure for implementing active adaptive management has been developed, it is seldom used in practice for major fisheries. In many regions of the wold, the term "adaptive management" has come to mean "anything that involves management" and generally relies very little on original aims of adaptive management. However, are things as bad as they first appear? I will outline how the principles of adaptive management are included include in key policy documents and provide examples where passive adaptive management, implemented following roughly the same lines as envisaged in the 1980s, has come to be the state-of-the-art for fisheries management, even if not stated as such.