Introduction

For much of the twentieth century natural resource management centered on efforts to control nature in order to harvest products from it, while reducing risks to society. The central tenet was to achieve predictable outcomes, a strategy that almost invariably led to reduced biological diversity and a reduction of the range of variation in natural systems. However, reduced diversity, in turn, tends to create more sensitive systems, both ecological and social (Levin, 1999), and examples of this today are the highly controlled systems of conventional agriculture and forestry that are experiencing increasing problems, fighting pest outbreaks and declining populations of natural pollinators (Chapin et al., 2000; Lundberg and Moberg, 2003). From the 1970s onwards (Holling, 1973, 1978), it has been suggested that such attempts to control highly complex and non-linear systems inevitably lead to surprises and/or societal and environmental crises (Holling and Meffe, 1995). On the basis of these arguments, conventional resource management, or command-and-control management as it is often referred to, has been heavily criticized (Holling, 1973; Holling et al., 1995; Wondolleck and Yaffee, 2000; Folke et al., 2005, among many others) and several approaches have been proposed to overcome some of its limitations. These include, among others, adaptive management (Holling, 1978), cooperative management (Pinkerton, 1989; Jentoft, 2000), collaborative management (Borrini-Feyerabend and Borrini, 1996; Wondolleck and Yaffee, 2000), and adaptive co-management (Ruitenbeek and Cartier, 2001; Olsson et al., 2004a). These concepts share many similarities and readers are referred to Folke et al. (2005) and Armitage et al. (2008a, 2008b) for more in-depth reviews.