Restoration is a new paradigm for resource management in river basins. River restoration activities are designed to mitigate the degrading impacts of land and water use, and include infrastructure such as fishways, riparian fencing, and urban rain-gardens. They also include changed practices: such as delivering environmental flows to wetlands. To be successful these activities must continue for long enough to bring about the desired environmental changes. How long the infrastructure and practices must continue depends on the recovery trajectory of degraded assets. A widespread problem is maintaining interventions over the long-term. Often interventions fail before recovery or environmental improvement has been achieved. It is fair to say that the focus of effort over the last two decades has been on deciding what to do, and where to do it, and much less effort has been put into how it can be maintained for the period required. There is abundant literature problems that occur during the initial phase of implementing restoration projects but much less attention given to the problem of restoration intervention persistence. This paper argues that interventions often fail because they are not well maintained, and that maintenance failure occurs because of how projects are managed. How projects are managed is as important as designing good interventions in the first place.

This paper presents a framework for understanding why maintenance is often neglected and how project management can be designed to improve restoration outcomes in the future. Management should be designed around the recovery trajectory of assets. Management should be informed by knowledge about geomorphic, ecological, and hydrological processes from the physical geographies. This requires coordination and communication between physical scientists and project planners, and an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of different management arrangements and instruments for implementing restoration. The success of the restoration ‘solution’ to degradation depends on how well projects are managed in the long-term.