Recognising that all knowledge is partial at best we are left with a variety of trade offs – none of our predictions is going to be foolproof. We continue to seek ways and means of making predictions about the world which provide useful guidance for actions and investment. The fact that the knowledge upon which we base our investments is noisy and incomplete at best does not alter the fact that investments still have to be made. This is a significant problem for regional and catchment-based management authorities. Subsidiarity is pushing decision making down to these bodies and they must cope with the lack of good data as best they can. In a world of ‘becoming’, of climate change and climate variability, even with new technologies it is going to be difficult to design and complete adequate performance monitoring after management interventions. Across the worlds of science, the community and the psychology of individuals there is a growing appreciation of increased complexity, recursive interaction and the importance of context. Science is developing concepts of complex adaptive systems, emergence and fractals but, in practice, data gathering in the field is not keeping up with the conceptual revolution. The emphasis here is on a more fluid and evolving epistemology built around becoming rather than being, on process rather than structure and on change rather than stasis.