The tremendous development of Internet infrastructures as well as communication technologies has led to an increase in network management complexity. Autonomic control is one way to manage complexity. Policy Based Management Systems (PBMS) provide a consistent model for decision making using a set of abstractions (i.e., to manage the system in a manner that is independent from the complexities of low level network technologies). In this paper, we develop a hierarchical bio-inspired PBMS based on mechanisms for organism regulation that supports self-organisation and self-management at different levels of the hierarchy. We employ this mechanism towards network management of autonomic communications systems.