Can Learning Based Approaches Take Root in Natural Resource Management?

This compendium of ‘reflective essays’ is an outcome of research conducted by the editors and authors over a period of 10-30 years during their professional lives. The book advances the frontiers of adaptive learning and collaborative governance on two key fronts. First, it offers in-depth explanation of why adaptive collaborative approaches are slow to emerge and expand, and how different types of constraints and challenges affect the process. As the contributors highlight, major challenges experienced are related to dealing with traditional reductionist science, balancing research and action in the process, dealing with institutional environments, managing sponsorship, and organizing collaborative actions. Second, it documents and highlights on-the-ground struggles of promoters and facilitators of adaptive collaborative approaches (ACA) and identifies any lessons. The book’s contributors capture experiences of applying an adaptive collaborative approach in some of the most fragile and unstable situations of Zimbabwe and Nepal in the early years of the new Millennium, while also capturing experiences of rapid agricultural modernization taking place in Ecuador and South-East Asia.