Moving beyond panaceas in fisheries governance.

In fisheries management-as in environmental governance more generally-regulatory arrangements that are thought to be helpful in some contexts frequently become panaceas or, in other words, simple formulaic policy prescriptions believed to solve a given problem in a wide range of contexts, regardless of their actual consequences. When this happens, management is likely to fail, and negative side effects are common. We focus on the case of individual transferable quotas to explore the panacea mindset, a set of factors that promote the spread and persistence of panaceas. These include conceptual narratives that make easy answers like panaceas seem plausible, power disconnects that create vested interests in panaceas, and heuristics and biases that prevent people from accurately assessing panaceas. Analysts have suggested many approaches to avoiding panaceas, but most fail to conquer the underlying panacea mindset. Here, we suggest the codevelopment of an institutional diagnostics toolkit to distill the vast amount of information on fisheries governance into an easily accessible, open, on-line database of checklists, case studies, and related resources. Toolkits like this could be used in many governance settings to challenge users' understandings of a policy's impacts and help them develop solutions better tailored to their particular context. They would not replace the more comprehensive approaches found in the literature but would rather be an intermediate step away from the problem of panaceas.

Evaluating British Columbia's Municipally Owned Community Forest Corporations as Governance Structures.

The province of British Columbia, Canada, began its community forests (CF) program by permitting a range of governance structures, both to allow flexibility and to discover the most appropriate structures for this new forestry tenure. The majority of municipalities participating in this program elected to hold their CF tenure through a separate corporation or limited-liability partnership arrangement, sometimes jointly with Indigenous communities or other parties. We consider the strengths and vulnerabilities of the most common ownership and governance structure adopted by municipalities, the municipally owned corporation (MOC), by reviewing the performance of three different MOCs against standards of democratic and effective decision-making, and the record of each of these three CFs in achieving its stated objectives. We hypothesize that ten key conditions increase the probability of success in meeting these standards and achieving goals. Our findings are also especially relevant to other governance of small-scale common pool resources situations with high-cost reporting requirements, poor regulatory oversight, and weak economies of scale. They add substance, nuance, and complexity to conditions previously identified in the co-management literature.

Ecosystem stewardship: sustainability strategies for a rapidly changing planet.

Ecosystem stewardship is an action-oriented framework intended to foster the social-ecological sustainability of a rapidly changing planet. Recent developments identify three strategies that make optimal use of current understanding in an environment of inevitable uncertainty and abrupt change: reducing the magnitude of, and exposure and sensitivity to, known stresses; focusing on proactive policies that shape change; and avoiding or escaping unsustainable social-ecological traps. As we discuss here, all social-ecological systems are vulnerable to recent and projected changes but have sources of adaptive capacity and resilience that can sustain ecosystem services and human well-being through active ecosystem stewardship.