ABSTRACT
Natural resource systems are often large-scale, complex, and poorly understood. The difficulty or impossibility of preventing resource use encourages overharvesting and discourages investment in maintenance, thus threatening sustainability. These characteristics present numerous challenges for policy makers. The usual challenges to policy making are compounded because the complexity of natural resource systems supports diverse forms of resource use and obscures causal relationships. Uniform policies cannot address spatial variability in resource conditions adequately, yet designing policies that allow for local variability is a more demanding design task. Because the boundaries of natural resources and political jurisdictions rarely coincide, effective policy often requires cooperation across jurisdictions or the creation of special jurisdictions that overlap with existing jurisdictions.
