Evelyn Pinkerton

Adaptive co‐management for social–ecological complexity

Building trust through collaboration, institutional development, and social learning enhances efforts to foster ecosystem management and resolve multi-scale society–environment dilemmas. One emerging approach aimed at addressing these dilemmas is adaptive co-management. This method draws explicit attention to the learning (experiential and experimental) and collaboration (vertical and horizontal) functions necessary to improve our understanding of, and ability to respond to, complex social–ecological systems. Here, we identify and outline the core features of adaptive co-management, which include innovative institutional arrangements and incentives across spatiotemporal scales and levels, learning through complexity and change, monitoring and assessment of interventions, the role of power, and opportunities to link science with policy.

Ecosystem Stewardship: Sustainability Strategies for a Rapidly Changing Planet

Ecosystem stewardship is an action-oriented framework intended to foster the social-ecological sustainability of a rapidly changing planet. Recent developments identify three strategies that make optimal use of current understanding in an environment of inevitable uncertainty and abrupt change: reducing the magnitude of, and exposure and sensitivity to, known stresses; focusing on proactive policies that shape change; and avoiding or escaping unsustainable social-ecological traps. As we discuss here, all social-ecological systems are vulnerable to recent and projected changes but have sources of adaptive capacity and resilience that can sustain ecosystem services and human well-being through active ecosystem stewardship.

Role of participatory governance and community - based management in integrated coastal and ocean management in Canada

There is compelling evidence that participatory governance is crucial for contending with complex problems of managing for multiple values and outcomes to achieve ecological sustainability and economic development. Canadas Oceans Act, and federal oceans policy provide a strong basis for the participatory governance and community-based management of coastal and large ocean resources. The implementation of the Oceans Act and oceans policy has resulted in some steps toward participatory governance but has not adequately provided the mechanisms for a strong role for communities in integrated coastal and ocean management (ICOM). In order to strengthen and develop community participation in ICOM, nine initiatives are recommended: (1) shifting paradigms, (2) overcoming ‘turf protection,’ (3) ensuring compatibility of goals, (4) ensuring sufficiency of information, (5) dealing with internal community stratification, (6) creating cross-scale linkages, (7) creating a participatory policy environment, (8) building community capacity, and (9) monitoring and assessment of local-level initiatives.

Resilience-based stewardship : Strategies for navigating sustainable pathways in a changing world.

Accelerated global changes in climate, environment, and social-ecological systems demand a transformation in human perceptions of our place in nature and patterns of resource use. The biology and culture of Homo sapiens evolved for about 95% of our species’ history in hunting-and-gathering societies before the emergence of settled agriculture. We have lived in complex societies for about 3%, and in industrial societies using fossil fuels for about 0.1% of our history. The pace of cultural evolution, including governance arrangements and resource-use patterns, appears insufficient to adjust to the rate and magnitude of technological innovations, human population increases, and environmental impacts that have occurred. Many of these changes are accelerating, causing unsustainable exploitation of ecosystems, including many boreal and tropical forests, drylands, and marine fisheries. The net effect has been serious degradation of the planet’s life-support system on which societal development ultimately depends (see Chapters 2 and 14).

Economic and Management Benefits from the Coordination of Capture and Culture Fisheries: The Case of Prince William Sound Pink Salmon

Abstract Aquaculture developments often create policy conflicts with established fisheries when the two are not coordinated through a common planning framework. The state of Alaska and community-based, fisher-led salmon aquaculture associations have been unusually successful at coordinating, through cooperative management, the traditional salmon capture fisheries and new culture fisheries for pink salmon Oncorhynchus gorbuscha, despite predictable problems. The Prince William Sound Aquaculture Corporation in particular has moved from its original involvement in resource enhancement into partnership with the state in harvest planning, allocation, and comprehensive regional planning. Some of the specific economic benefits and the general management benefits of this institutional arrangement are explored. One economic benefit was an 8-year period of price advantage for the associations cost-recovery fish because of large and consistent volume and quality. The ecological, political, and institutional conditi...

Toward Specificity in Complexity

The term ‘fisheries co-management’ has now been so broadly used in applied settings and in social science that it risks losing important aspects of its original thrust. In addition, as social science thinking about management in general has evolved over the last two decades, we have all refined and enriched the way we see this concept. For the concept to remain useful, I argue that it should become more specific and complex instead of more general and generic. In the discussion below I attempt to reevaluate, and reorganize a few key dimensions of this term into a form that is more theoretically useful for dealing with complexity. I use the evolution of my own research and thinking on fisheries co-management over the last 15 years as a means of attempting to hone and revitalize the term. Also, in dialogue with colleagues, I suggest key alternative perspectives about what meaning we should assign the phrase.

Coastal Marine Systems: Conserving Fish and Sustaining Community Livelihoods with Co-management

Community contributions to fisheries management are important to the sustainability of coastal ecosystems, including the people who most depend on fisheries. A majority of the world’s population lives along coastlines. People are an integral component of coastal marine systems because of what they do to either conserve or damage marine resources. Just as we think of ecological systems as having structure, function, and patterns of interrelationship and change, so too are human populations usually organized into communities that have institutions (laws, rules, customary practices) and measurable effects on coastal marine systems. Human communities and the coastal marine zone that they most strongly impact are thus logically viewed as an integrated social-ecological system (see Chapter 1).

Local and regional strategies for rebuilding fisheries management institutions in coastal British Columbia: what components of comanagement are most critical?

Aboriginal and nonaboriginal fishing-dependent communities on the coast of British Columbia, Canada, having lost traditional fisheries management institutions along with significant fishing opportunity, are in the process of rebuilding local and regional institutions to allow their survival. Sometimes, the rebuilding effort involves the creation of largely new institutions. It can also involve the reactivation, reinvention, or repositioning of older ones. We consider the aspirations, strategies, and activities of organizations in two regions of the coast involved in two different fisheries: salmon on the north coast and intertidal clams in the Broughton Archipelago. We analyze what the two regions have in common, as well as their differences, to generate general predictions and recommendations about what preconditions appear to be necessary for success in rebuilding institutions in communities and regions at these scales and what actions are likely to be most effective, according to a body of literature on self-management and comanagement. In both cases, we found favorable conditions in the communities, the external political arena, and in government to support the rebuilding goals of the organizations working in the two regions. Although both areas would benefit from greater financial resources, the most critical need is for external support in the form of alliances, issue networks, and access to multiple sources of power.

Small Sawmills Persevere While the Majors Close: Evaluating Resilience and Desirable Timber Allocation in British Columbia, Canada

We compared the resilience to economic shocks—such as the downturn of the U.S. housing market—of commodity sawmills, which tend to be large, and value-added specialty sawmills, which tend to be small or medium in size, that are located in one region of the province of British Columbia, Canada, as measured by their average days in operation over the last decade and during the 2007–2009 recession. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative measures, we then examined three behavioral characteristics contributing to their different degrees of resilience: flexibility, diversity, and orientation to place. We found that the specialty mills had greater resilience over the decade because they (a) contributed more jobs per volume of wood consumed and produced, (b) had greater flexibility to operate further below their capacity, (c) produced more diverse primary and secondary (value-added) wood products, (d) targeted more diverse markets, and (e) did more log sorting and trading in logs of different species with other specialty mills and with local commodity mills, with whom they acted as a resilient cluster. Although all these activities resulted in more logs flowing toward their highest value use, we found that the specialty mills lacked a secure and adequate timber supply, while the major timber tenures held by the commodity mills went largely unused during the downturn. This finding suggests that, in addition to contributing to resilience within the forest products sector, more access to timber tenure by the specialty mills, or having a greater portion of timber on the open market, would result in more value being produced from publicly owned timber.

Moving beyond panaceas in fisheries governance

In fisheries management—as in environmental governance more generally—regulatory arrangements that are thought to be helpful in some contexts frequently become panaceas or, in other words, simple formulaic policy prescriptions believed to solve a given problem in a wide range of contexts, regardless of their actual consequences. When this happens, management is likely to fail, and negative side effects are common. We focus on the case of individual transferable quotas to explore the panacea mindset, a set of factors that promote the spread and persistence of panaceas. These include conceptual narratives that make easy answers like panaceas seem plausible, power disconnects that create vested interests in panaceas, and heuristics and biases that prevent people from accurately assessing panaceas. Analysts have suggested many approaches to avoiding panaceas, but most fail to conquer the underlying panacea mindset. Here, we suggest the codevelopment of an institutional diagnostics toolkit to distill the vast amount of information on fisheries governance into an easily accessible, open, on-line database of checklists, case studies, and related resources. Toolkits like this could be used in many governance settings to challenge users’ understandings of a policy’s impacts and help them develop solutions better tailored to their particular context. They would not replace the more comprehensive approaches found in the literature but would rather be an intermediate step away from the problem of panaceas.