Adaptive Co-Management: Collaboration, Learning, and Multi-Level Governance

Abstract

Co-management is of growing interest among researchers, government, and non-government and community-based actors involved in natural resource management, conservation, and development activities. Co-management may be at a crossroads, however. Nearly twenty years have passed since Evelyn Pinkerton’s influential volume on co-management, Co-operative Management of Local Fisheries: New Directions for Improved Management and Community Development, was published by UBC Press. Co-management has since entered the adaptive age. New concerns with adaptive processes, feedback learning, and flexible partnership arrangements are reshaping the co-management landscape. Increasingly, ideas about collaboration and learning are converging in the literature. There is a tremendous opportunity to examine co-management through additional perspectives, explore alternative directions and concepts, and critically examine the emergence of adaptive co-management as an innovative governance approach to social-ecological complexity.