ABSTRACT
Proponents of institutional management of activities in coastal areas have had to face the need for compromise with respect to the sharing of the resource base. In the coastal areas of the Caribbean, the ecosystems and the resource users are diverse and complex in their organization and behavior. Development and management of coastal areas require an acknowledgment of the unique conditions inherent in coastal ecosystems. Coastal areas occur, for example, at the interface of land and sea and are therefore strongly influenced by both. Environmental management brings variables such as human motivation, responses, and uncertainty (for instance, size of stocks and how the political system will react to management initiative) into the same milieu as species recruitment and habitat status. The development of research programs and more effective methods of facilitating learning of resource and environmental management concepts requires new ways of structuring courses and the learning experiences of students.
