Review
Evolution of co-management: Role of knowledge generation, bridging organizations and social learning

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Abstract

Over a period of some 20 years, different aspects of co-management (the sharing of power and responsibility between the government and local resource users) have come to the forefront. The paper focuses on a selection of these: knowledge generation, bridging organizations, social learning, and the emergence of adaptive co-management. Co-management can be considered a knowledge partnership. Different levels of organization, from local to international, have comparative advantages in the generation and mobilization of knowledge acquired at different scales. Bridging organizations provide a forum for the interaction of these different kinds of knowledge, and the coordination of other tasks that enable co-operation: accessing resources, bringing together different actors, building trust, resolving conflict, and networking. Social learning is one of these tasks, essential both for the co-operation of partners and an outcome of the co-operation of partners. It occurs most efficiently through joint problem solving and reflection within learning networks. Through successive rounds of learning and problem solving, learning networks can incorporate new knowledge to deal with problems at increasingly larger scales, with the result that maturing co-management arrangements become adaptive co-management in time.

Introduction

Many resources are too complex to be governed effectively by a single agency. Governance of many kinds of fisheries, forests, grazing lands, watersheds, wildlife, protected areas and other resources, requires the joint action of multiple parties. The concept of governance suggests that we look beyond government, toward public–private–civil society partnerships, as a way of dealing with the shortcomings of single agency, top-down management (Pierre and Peters, 2000, Kooiman, 2003). Co-management, or the sharing of power and responsibility between the government and local resource users, is an arrangement whereby such partnerships can come about. Increasingly, co-management is being combined with learning-based approaches. Adaptive management, or learning-by-doing, was originally formulated as a way to deal with uncertainty and complexity, in place of set management prescriptions (Holling, 1978). It has become collaborative in practice, and time-tested co-management increasingly relies on learning-by-doing. Thus, co-management and adaptive management have been evolving toward a common ground: adaptive co-management. Knowledge generation and learning have become central issues in such adaptive co-management (Olsson et al., 2004a, Olsson et al., 2004b, Armitage et al., 2007).

Kooiman (2003) recognizes three models of governance: hierarchical governance characterized by state intervention, self-governance, and co-governance consisting of collaboration and interplay among different actors. The market/private sector dimension can be added to co-governance, as there is a growing emphasis on incentives and entrepreneurship to achieve conservation objectives. Co-governance is particularly appropriate when user involvement leads to more legitimate management measures and to increasing compliance (Kooiman, 2003). In addition to legitimacy and compliance, justice, equity, and empowerment are also relevant because the basic idea behind co-management is that people whose livelihoods are affected by management decisions should have a say in how those decisions are made. Hence, co-management is not merely about resources; it is about managing relationships (Natcher et al., 2005).

Many researchers have warned against seeing co-management as a panacea for legitimacy (Jentoft, 2000, Mikalsen et al., 2007). As well, Béné and Neiland (2004) argue that the track record of co-management is weak in poverty reduction and empowerment of the marginalized. Co-management, and decentralization in general, often lead to reinforcement of local elite power or to strengthening of state control. Regarding the former, the exclusion of marginal stakeholders who are poor and politically weak may have negative impacts on equity and community welfare, as seen in fishery cases in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Philippines (Wilson et al., 2006) and in India's Joint Forest Management (Agarwal, 2001, Nayak and Berkes, 2008). Regarding the latter, co-management can lead to regulatory capture, as seen in a range of cases (Castro and Nielsen, 2001, Nadasdy, 2003). It can be used as a pretext to co-opt community-based management and extend the power of the state (Lele, 2000, Gelcich et al., 2006, Nayak and Berkes, 2008).

There is no single universally accepted definition of co-management but many (Armitage et al., 2007). The term refers to a range of arrangements, with different degrees of power sharing, for joint decision-making by the state and communities (or user groups) about a set of resources or an area. Co-management shares many features with other kinds of partnerships and co-operative environmental governance arrangements involving multiple actors (Berkes, 2002, Plummer and FitzGibbon, 2004).

A close relative, multi-stakeholder arrangements, are characterized by strong horizontal linkages among user groups at the same level of organization, as well as vertical linkages across levels of organization, between stakeholders and government. Many multi-stakeholder bodies are advisory and show a low degree of power sharing. There are other forms of arrangements with horizontal and vertical linkages: policy networks, polycentric governance systems and epistemic communities (Berkes, 2002). These tend to consist of policy makers and technical experts, and may not formally include community representation. By contrast, the hallmark of co-management is to have at least one strong vertical linkage involving the government and a user group, and some formalized arrangement for sharing power and responsibility (Pinkerton, 1989, Berkes, 2002, Borrini-Feyerabend et al., 2004). Most authors do not regard mere consultation or ad hoc public participation as co-management. Most definitions of co-management require some institutionalized arrangement for intensive user participation in decision-making.

The term co-management is relatively recent. Pinkerton (2003) traces the earliest use of the term to the late 1970s, in the management of salmon under the Boldt Decision by the US Treaty Tribes in Washington State. However, the practice of formalized power sharing in resource management goes back to earlier times. In the area of fisheries, the earliest documented legal arrangement seems to be the Lofoten Islands cod fishery in Norway in the 1890s (Jentoft and McCay, 1995), and Japanese inshore fisheries under Japan's 1901 Fisheries Act and its subsequent revisions (Lim et al., 1995). In the area of forest management, government–community partnerships existed in the community forests of the Kumaon Himalayas, India, from the 1920s and the 1930s (Agrawal, 2005), and in the council forests of Kirinyaga, Kenya, from the 1930s and the 1940s (Castro and Nielsen, 2001). India's Joint Forest Management started in 1972 in West Bengal State as a revenue sharing arrangement to replant degraded forest areas (Agarwal, 2001). The earliest wildlife co-management started in the 1980s in northern Canada and Alaska (Kendrick, 2003) and in Africa for revenue sharing from safari hunting (Getz et al., 1999, Frost and Bond, 2008). Watershed co-management is probably most advanced in the United States (Brunner et al., 2005) and river basin co-management in Europe (Pahl-Wostl and Hare, 2004, Pahl-Wostl et al., 2007). There are early examples of co-management of protected areas, such as the Kakadu National Park in Australia, but protected area co-management did not become widespread until the 1990s (Borrini-Feyerabend et al., 2004).

The early literature depicted co-management as a class of relatively simple partnership arrangements, for example, in the implementation of indigenous land and resource claims (e.g. Berkes et al., 1991). However, the wide range of international experience accumulating since the 1980s indicates that co-management has become more complex and dynamic than might be concluded from this earlier literature and evolved in diverse directions (Plummer and Armitage, 2007a, Plummer and Armitage, 2007b). This paper provides a critical review of some of the ways in which the theory and practice of co-management have evolved, and different aspects have come to the forefront. In particular, the paper analyzes the role of knowledge generation, bridging organizations, social learning and adaptation, and the emergence of adaptive co-management.

Section snippets

Many faces of co-management

Different aspects (or “faces”) of co-management have emerged in the literature with the unpacking of the concept over the last two decades. The earlier interest in the legal aspects of collaborative arrangements has been replaced by a greater emphasis on process and learning (Carlsson and Berkes, 2005), and on a number of areas that characterize complex adaptive systems: issues of scale, multiple perspectives and epistemologies, path dependence, and uncertainty (Berkes, 2007a). The different

Expanding the range of knowledge for co-management

Managing ecosystem services and human well-being is an information intensive endeavor (MA, 2005). It requires knowledge of social–ecological systems in their full complexity in order to monitor resource availability, make decisions about allocation, and respond to feedback from the ecosystem at multiple scales (Berkes et al., 2003). Because of this complexity, it is difficult for any one group or agency to possess the full range of knowledge needed to manage resources. Rather, knowledge for

Bridging organizations and leadership

Bringing together science and local knowledge can be facilitated by bridging organizations that provide an arena for knowledge co-production, trust building, sense making, learning, vertical and horizontal collaboration, and conflict resolution. Bridging organizations can respond to opportunities, serve as catalysts and facilitators between different levels of governance, and across resource and knowledge systems (Folke et al., 2005). They are similar to boundary organizations, as originally

Social learning and adaptation

Social learning is of interest to a number of disciplines, including education and business management. In environmental management, learning-based approaches, in place of set prescriptions, were originally proposed as a way to deal with environmental uncertainty. With its focus on learning-by-doing through iterative practice, evaluation and action modification, social learning came to be considered a defining feature of adaptive management (Holling, 1978, Lee, 1993). But how does learning

Adaptive co-management

Social learning is at the heart of iterated rounds of problem solving, along the lines of Fig. 3, which characterizes many long-standing co-management cases. The unfolding of co-management experience since the 1980s suggests the evolution of co-management into what might be called adaptive co-management. As noted by an anonymous referee, “Quite a few scholars and practitioners of adaptive management now practice what is called here adaptive co-management without calling it that.” Adaptive

Conclusions

In most kinds of co-management, there are multiple government agencies and multiple local interests at play, rather than a unitary state and a homogeneous “community”. Instead of focusing on the formal structure of co-management and its power sharing arrangements, one can regard power sharing as the result, rather than the starting point of co-management (Carlsson and Berkes, 2005). To do so, co-management can be examined as a problem solving process (rather than a static arrangement) involving

Acknowledgements

Many of the ideas in this paper were developed jointly with Lars Carlsson, Per Olsson, Carl Folke, Derek Armitage, and Nancy Doubleday. For helpful comments and suggestions on the paper, I thank Ryan Plummer, Derek Armitage, Carol Colfer and two anonymous referees. I thank Christian Orozco Quintero for drawing the figures. My work has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Canada Research Chairs program (http://www.chairs.gc.ca).

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