This book develops the Sustainable Governance Approach and the principles of Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM). It provides practical examples of successes and failures in implementation, and lessons about the economics and governance of wild resources with global application. CBNRM emerged in the 1980s, encouraging greater local participation to conserve and manage natural and wild resources in the face of increasing encroachment by agricultural and other forms of land use development. This book describes the institutional history of wildlife and the empirical transformation of the wildlife sector on private and communal land, particularly in southern Africa, to develop an alternative paradigm for governing wild resources. With the twin goals of addressing poverty and resource degradation in the world’s extensive agriculturally marginal areas, the author conceptualises this paradigm as the Sustainable Governance Approach, which integrates theories of proprietorship and rights, prices and economics, governance and scale, and adaptive learning. The author then discusses and defines CBNRM, a major subset of this approach. Interweaving theory and practice, he shows that the primary challenges facing CBNRM are the devolution of rights from the centre to marginal communities and the governance of these rights by communities, a challenge which is seldom recognised or addressed. He focuses on this shortcoming, extending and operationalising institutional theory, including Ostrom’s principles of collective action, within the context of cross-scale governance. Based on the author’s extensive experience this book will be key reading for students of natural resource management, sustainable land use, community forestry, conservation, and development. Providing practical but theoretically robust tools for implementing CBNRM it will also appeal to professionals and practitioners working in communities and in conservation and development.

There are dozens of emerging interactive web applications and services (often referred to as the participatory web, or Web 2.0). This title addresses such questions as how can Web 2.0 applications be integrated with participatory development approaches and how can they facilitate and contribute to people's participation and decision-making.

Professor Fikret Berkes provides a unique introduction to the social and interdisciplinary dimensions of biodiversity conservation. Examining a range of approaches, new ideas, controversies and debates, he demonstrates that biodiversity loss is not primarily a technical issue, but a social problem that operates in an economic, political and cultural context. Berkes concludes that conservation must be democratized in order to broaden its support base and build more inclusive constituencies for conservation.

Despite the widespread promotion of children’s voices by activists and policy makers over the last decade, the potential for young people’s knowledge to impact on adult agendas and policy arenas is by no means a certainty. This book presents critiques of participation in settings where young people are the centre of attention. The complexities and power-dynamics of youth- adult relationships are observed and analysed in a wide diversity of study environments, from Hull to Sao Paulo, rural Lesotho to Ghana, using varied methods and over different time frames, but with a strong focus throughout on context, practice, impacts and associated ethical considerations. The central concern of the book is not whether young people can produce better knowledge than adults, but rather how to better understand the different knowledges which emerge from diverse actors within different generations in order to ensure that the maximum benefits accrue to children and young people with and for whom the research is conducted. This book was originally published as a special issue of Children's Geographies.