Adaptive Comanagement for Building Resilience in Social?Ecological Systems
Abstract
Ecosystems are complex adaptive systems that require flexible governance with the ability to respond to environmental feedback. We present, through examples from Sweden and Canada, the development of adaptive comanagement systems, showing how local groups self-organize, learn, and actively adapt to and shape change with social networks that connect institutions and organizations across levels and scales and that facilitate information flows. The development took place through a sequence of responses to environmental events that widened the scope of local management from a particular issue or resource to a broad set of issues related to ecosystem processes across scales and from individual actors, to group of actors to multiple-actor processes. The results suggest that the institutional and organizational landscapes should be approached as carefully as the ecological in order to clarify features that contribute to the resilience of social-ecological systems. These include the following: vision, leadership, and trust; enabling legislation that creates social space for ecosystem management; funds for responding to environmental change and for remedial action; capacity for monitoring and responding to environmental feedback; information flow through social networks; the combination of various sources of information and knowledge; and sense-making and arenas of collaborative learning for ecosystem management. We propose that the self-organizing process of adaptive comanagement dev…
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There is no single comprehensive or correct perspective in a complex fisheries system; it is best understood through a plurality of ways.
“Given these features, there is no single comprehensive or “correct” perspective in a complex fisheries system, but it is instead perhaps best understood through a plurality of ways (Olsson et al., 2004).”
From “Two‐Eyed Seeing”: An Indigenous framework to transform fisheries research and management (2021) · cites this paper as Olsson et al., 2004
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- Authors
- Olsson, P., Folke, C., & Berkes, F.
- Affiliations
- Stockholm University (SE)
- University of Manitoba (CA)
- Venue
- Environmental Management
- Published
- 2004-06-23
- Volume
- 34
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 75-90
- ISSN
- 0364-152X (ISSN-L)
- 1432-1009
- OpenAlex
- W2149482661
- Cited by
- 1,863
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 44 · 2025: 81 · 2024: 52 · 2023: 57 · 2022: 81 · 2021: 92 · 2020: 104 · 2019: 97 · 2018: 109 · 2017: 116 · 2016: 111 · 2015: 120 · 2014: 124 · 2013: 122 · 2012: 112
- FWCI
- 40.36
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Licence
- www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
- Locations
- Environmental Management (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Svenska Forskningsrådet Formas
- Stockholms Universitet
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Sustainability and Climate Change Governance
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law › Coastal and Marine Management
- Social Sciences › Public Administration › Public Policy and Administration Research
- Keywords
- social-ecological systems, resilience, self-organization, social networks, institutional environment, environmental feedback, cooperative learning, sensemaking, trust, leadership, enabling legislation, multi-actor governance, ecosystem management, stability region
- MeSH terms
- Canada, Conservation of Natural Resources, Ecology, Humans, Information Services, Social Conditions, Sweden, Organizational Culture, Ecosystem, Community Networks, Knowledge
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