A Systematic Review of Key Factors of Effective Collaborative Governance of Social-Ecological Systems

Abstract

Sustainable resource management requires governance systems that facilitate effective collaboration among a variety of stakeholder interests, across jurisdictional scales and resource sectors. Yet, there is not widespread scholarly agreement on the key ingredients that need to be present to facilitate the effective collaborative governance of natural resources. To address this scholarly gap, we conducted a systematic literature review which revealed 17 publications that compiled essential lists of key factors for effective collaboration. From these studies across multiple disciplines, we identified 22 common factors associated with effective collaborative natural resource management, including near unanimous acceptance of the importance of nested governance structures and conflict resolution mechanisms. These 22 factors, along with additional contextual and outcome-oriented factors, could begin to form a core set of factors to comparatively test large numbers of case studies on collaborative governance of social-ecological systems around the world.

Keywords:

• Collaborative governance
• collaborative resource management
• collective action
• community-based natural resource management
• co-management
• institutional analysis
• institutional design principles
• RepOrting standards for systematic evidence synthesis (ROSES)
• review areas
• social-ecological systems

Acknowledgements

This work was done as part of a project of the Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (Future Earth) working group on Collaborative Governance.

Notes

1 The predecessor to Table 2 is a series of tables containing the language selected from each article, which we have provided as supplementary materials.

2 While the Cheng and Sturtevant (2012) article included in our analysis focused on community-based forest governance systems, the aim of the paper was to analyze particular areas of collective action, including learning and decision-making, factors that are relevant across all resource governance systems.