Abstract: Many efforts have been devoted to developing, constructing and refining fishways or fish passage facilities to facilitate the target fish species to pass barriers in fluvial systems. Once dominated by an engineering-focused approach, fishways science nowadays involves a wide range of disciplines from fish behaviour to socioeconomics, and to complex modeling of passage prioritization options in river networks. Designing efficient fishways, with minimal passage delay and post-passage impacts, requires adaptive management and continued innovations. After the completion of fishways construction, corresponding management systems usually need to be improved as well. In the current study, we first reviewed international fishways adaptive management systems (e.g., aspects of development, construction, and management) from 1991 to 2017 reporting on " fishway”, " fish passage”, " fish” and " dam”. The functions of fishways gradually transferred from conservation of economic stocks to overall biodiversity conservation, from facilitating upwards to both upwards and downwards passages, from developing a single project to considering the entire river basin, from fish passing function to habitats restorations as well, and from pure engineering construction to considering adaptive management. Finally, we discussed adaptive management systems and management prospects of fishways for China.