Building trust through collaboration, institutional development, and social learning enhances efforts to foster ecosystem management and resolve multi‐scale society–environment dilemmas. One emerging approach aimed at addressing these dilemmas is adaptive co‐management. This method draws explicit attention to the learning (experiential and experimental) and collaboration (vertical and horizontal) functions necessary to improve our understanding of, and ability to respond to, complex social–ecological systems. Here, we identify and outline the core features of adaptive co‐management, which include innovative institutional arrangements and incentives across spatiotemporal scales and levels, learning through complexity and change, monitoring and assessment of interventions, the role of power, and opportunities to link science with policy.

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This paper reviews studies of transformative learning through public involvement in natural resource and environmental management (NREM). It summarises evidence regarding instrumental, communicative, transformative and sustainability-oriented learning outcomes, and learning processes such as reflection, rational discourse and applying new frames of references in individual and social action. The paper discusses the implications for the design of NREM and public involvement, and presents a new framework connecting non-formal education, involvement in NREM, transformative learning and sustainability. The paper concludes with suggestions for promising future research, such as scaling up transformative learning in the context of NREM, including examining potential complementarities with leading models of social and organisational learning.

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