Comanagement

Comanagement, or co-management, is a governance arrangement in which authority over a resource is shared between government agencies and non-governmental actors, such as local communities, Indigenous groups, and civil society organizations. In practice, this means joint decision-making, negotiated rules, and shared responsibilities for monitoring, enforcement, and adaptive management. The aim is to combine formal institutions with local knowledge to improve the legitimacy, effectiveness, and resilience of resource governance.

Comanagement is rooted in ideas from community-based resource management and indigenous governance and broader scholarship on collaborative governance. It is distinguished from standard top-down regulation and from mere consultation by embedding shared decision rights and mutual accountability within formal policy or legal frameworks. It often evolves through phased processes, from initial collaboration to formalized joint management agreements.

Applications are widespread in natural resource sectors, especially fisheries, forests, and watershed or water governance. Fisheries co-management remains one of the most common forms, with local communities participating in setting harvest rules, monitoring stocks, and enforcing rules. Forest co-management programs, such as joint forest management in various countries, involve communities in forest use and regeneration alongside government agencies.

Benefits include better local legitimacy, compliance, and adaptive capacity, as well as more comprehensive learning that integrates scientific and traditional knowledge. Challenges include power imbalances between actors, conflicting goals, unequal access to information, and the need for stable legal and financial support. Successful comanagement requires recognized authority in law or policy, representative governance bodies, clear rules, joint monitoring, conflict resolution mechanisms, and ongoing collaborative learning.