ABSTRACT
Governance failures associated with top-down natural resource management have spawned a variety of new institutional arrangements. One such approach, emerging from the idea of involving citizens in making decisions about their own livelihoods, and reducing implementation costs and improving compliance, is co-management. Some have argued that such an approach offers substantial promise as a way of dealing with natural resource conflicts in a participatory and equitable manner. This chapter provides an overview of co-management. It details a few case examples where co-management has helped to address conflict. Finally, as with the previous two chapters, co-management is assessed in terms of how it can, or cannot, address the four exacerbating factors: our rights (or lack of) to common resources, our needs for social justice, threats to our wellbeing, and poor governance. Of the three approaches examined, co-management appears to provide the most comprehensive means by which to address the exacerbating factors.
