Abstract Adaptive management is an approach for stewardship of social–ecological systems in circumstances with high uncertainty and high controllability. Although they are largely overlooked in adaptive management (and social–ecological system management), it is important to account for spatial and temporal scales to mediate within- and cross-scale effects of management actions, because cross-scale interactions increase uncertainty and can lead to undesirable consequences. The iterative nature of an adaptive approach can be expanded to multiple scales to accommodate different stakeholder priorities and multiple ecosystem attributes. In this Forum, we introduce multiscale adaptive management of social–ecological systems, which merges adaptive management with panarchy (a multiscale model of social–ecological systems) and demonstrate the importance of this approach with case studies from the Great Plains of North America and the Platte River Basin, in the United States. Adaptive management combined with a focus on the panarchy model of social–ecological systems can help to improve the management of social–ecological systems.