Quality of service (QoS) provisioning and management in ad hoc networks remains a challenging task. Policy-Based Network Management (PBNM) is one approach for QoS provisioning and management that has met with considerable interest in the networking community. However, its application has so far been limited mainly to fixed high-bandwidth networks. We extend and apply the policy-approach for QoS management in ad hoc networks. In this paper, we present our proposed policy-based management framework for wireless ad hoc networks, and briefly describe our proposed characteristics-based taxonomy that provides a platform to analyze and compare different architectural choices. We propose a solution suite that helps achieve our goal of a self-organizing, robust and efficient management system. One of the main contributions of this work is the prototype implementation and testing of the mechanisms and protocols comprising our framework in a multi-hop ad hoc network environment. Experiments are conducted using both an emulated ad hoc network testbed and a true wireless testbed. Degradation in management system performance is observed with an increase in the number of hops between a policy server and client. Our proposed k-hop clustering algorithm alleviates this problem by controlling the number of hops between a server and client. We demonstrate the operation of our prototype implementation, illustrating QoS management in a multi-domain ad hoc network environment using the proposed cluster management, redirection, and policy negotiation mechanisms.