Browsing by Author "Fernandez-Gimenez, Maria E."
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Journal Article Adaptive Management and Social Learning in Collaborative and Community-Based Monitoring: A Study of Five Community-Based Forestry Organizations in the western USA(2008) Fernandez-Gimenez, Maria E.; Ballard, Heidi; Sturtevant, Victoria E."Collaborative and community-based monitoring are becoming more frequent, yet few studies have examined the process and outcomes of these monitoring approaches. We studied 18 collaborative or community-based ecological assessment or monitoring projects undertaken by five community-based forestry organizations (CBFs), to investigate the objectives, process, and outcomes of collaborative ecological monitoring by CBF organizations. We found that collaborative monitoring can lead to shared ecological understanding among diverse participants, build trust internally and credibility externally, foster social learning and community-building, and advance adaptive management. The CBFs experienced challenges in recruiting and sustaining community participation in monitoring, building needed technical capacity for monitoring, and communicating monitoring results back to the broader community. Our results suggest that involving diverse and sometimes adversarial interests at key points in the monitoring process can help resolve conflicts and advance social learning, while also strengthening the link between social and ecological systems by improving the information base for management and increasing collective awareness of the interdependence of human and natural forest communities."Journal Article Ambivalence Toward Formalizing Customary Resource Management Norms Among Alaska Native Beluga Whale Hunters and Tohono O'odham Livestock Owners(2008) Fernandez-Gimenez, Maria E.; Hays, John U.; Huntington, Henry P.; Andrew, Regis; Goodwin, Willie"Natural resource management planning has become a central activity in the management of resources across all levels of agency. Increasingly, management plans are being called for to secure rights to, and guide management of resources used or held by, indigenous people in less developed regions. A problem that is being encountered in the development of natural resource management plans and indigenous peoples is the differing understandings and perspectives each stakeholder has towards natural resources. While natural resource planners often break up a resource into its constituent parts, indigenous peoples often view them more holistically. This is especially true when it comes to what are known as common pool resources (CPR) and customary resource use norms associated with those natural resources."Journal Article Integration of Local Ecological Knowledge and Conventional Science: A Study of Seven Community-Based Forestry Organizations in the USA(2008) Ballard, Heidi; Fernandez-Gimenez, Maria E.; Sturtevant, Victoria E."Natural resource management decisions can be based on incomplete knowledge when they lack scientific research, monitoring, and assessment and/or simultaneously fail to draw on local ecological knowledge. Many community-based forestry organizations in the United States attempt to address these knowledge gaps with an integrated ecological stewardship approach that balances ecological, social, and economic goals. This paper examines the use and integration of local knowledge and conventional science in ecological stewardship and monitoring by seven community-based forestry demonstration projects. Through document reviews and interviews with both participants and partners of all of these community-based organizations, we found that all the community-based forestry groups incorporated local ecological knowledge into many aspects of their management or monitoring activities, such as collaboratively designing monitoring programs with local ranchers, forest workers, and residents; involving local people in collecting data and interpreting results; and documenting the local ecological knowledge of private forest landowners, long-time residents, and harvesters of nontimber forest products. We found that all the groups also used conventional science to design or conduct ecological assessments, monitoring, or research. We also found evidence, in the form of changes in attitudes on the part of local people and conventional scientists and jointly produced reports, that the two types of knowledge were integrated by all groups. These findings imply that community-based forestry groups are redistributing the power of conventional science through the use of diverse knowledge sources. Still, several obstacles prevented some local, traditionally under-represented groups from being significantly involved in monitoring and management decisions, and their knowledge has not yet been consistently incorporated."Conference Paper Law and Disorder in Mongolia: Local Implementation of Mongolia's Land Law(2000) Fernandez-Gimenez, Maria E.; Batbuyan, B."With the dismantling of herding collectives in Mongolia in 1992, formal regulatory institutions for allocating pasture vanished, and weakened customary institutions were unable effectively to fill the void. Increasing poverty and wealth differentiation in the herding sector combined with the lack of formal or strong informal regulation led to declining nomadic mobility and increasing trespassing and out of season grazing--a downward spiral of unsustainable grazing practices. In 1994, Mongolia's parliament passed the Land Law, which provides for the issuance of land possession contracts (leases) over pastoral resources such as campsites and pastures. Implementation of leasing provisions began in 1998-1999. This paper examines the implications of land lease implementation at the local level, including differing interpretations of the law by various stakeholders, the potential impacts of leases on poor herders access to resources, and the potential role of pasture land leases in rangeland co-management institutions. Changes in herders' patterns of resource use since 1995 are explored based on a 1999 resurvey of herding households studied in 1994-1995."Conference Paper Spatial and Social Scales and Boundaries: Implications for Managing Pastoral Land-use in Mongolia(1998) Fernandez-Gimenez, Maria E."The goal of this paper is to examine the roles of spatial and social scales and boundaries as they apply to changing land-use patterns and tenure regimes in post-socialist Mongolia. In this paper I make two contentions. First, the spatial (ecological) and social scales at which the dynamics of land-use change are observed profoundly affect our perceptions of the processes at work, and hence the policy responses we propose. Second, the vagueness, permeability, and overlap of boundaries around pastoral resources and user groups (rights-holders) pose significant difficulties for implementation of formal tenure regimes designed to address insecure pastoral tenures and unsustainable land-use patterns. Alternative approaches to solving land-use and tenure problems must be developed for nomadic pastoral societies, where many of the assumptions of common property theory do not hold. One such approach, which may be suitable to Mongolia, is the local regulation of seasonal nomadic movements."Journal Article Tools for Resilience Management: Multidisciplinary Development of State-and-Transition Models for Northwest Colorado(2013) Kachergis, Emily J.; Knapp, Corrine N.; Fernandez-Gimenez, Maria E.; Ritten, John P.; Pritchett, James G.; Parsons, Jay; Hibbs, Willow; Roath, Roy"Building models is an important way of integrating knowledge. Testing and updating models of social-ecological systems can inform management decisions and, ultimately, improve resilience. We report on the outcomes of a six-year, multidisciplinary model development process in the sagebrush steppe, USA. We focused on creating state-and-transition models (STMs), conceptual models of ecosystem change that represent nonlinear dynamics and are being adopted worldwide as tools for managing ecosystems. STM development occurred in four steps with four distinct sets of models: (1) local knowledge elicitation using semistructured interviews; (2) ecological data collection using an observational study; (3) model integration using participatory workshops; and (4) model simplification upon review of the literature by a multidisciplinary team. We found that different knowledge types are ultimately complementary. Many of the benefits of the STM-building process flowed from the knowledge integration steps, including improved communication, identification of uncertainties, and production of more broadly credible STMs that can be applied in diverse situations. The STM development process also generated hypotheses about sagebrush steppe dynamics that could be tested by future adaptive management and research. We conclude that multidisciplinary development of STMs has great potential for producing credible, useful tools for managing resilience of social-ecological systems. Based on this experience, we outline a streamlined, participatory STM development process that integrates multiple types of knowledge and incorporates adaptive management."