On the Tohono O'odham (TO) Nation, an American Indian nation in southern Arizona, where local institutions and community norms govern management of communal rangelands, government interventions in rangeland management have historically overlooked social aspects of management and consequently met with little success. Similarly, past research on the TO Nation has fueled resentment due to a lack of local collaboration. Participatory research offers one way to create power-sharing relationships between researchers and communities and to develop locally appropriate resource management strategies. In partnership with local groups on the TO Nation, we used participatory research to develop, implement, and evaluate a rangeland ecology and management curriculum. The participatory curriculum development and research processes led to increased social capital among participants, creation and adoption of a locally tailored curriculum, and institutionalization of participatory approaches within tribal organizations, demonstrating high levels of quality and validity according to emerging post-positivist criteria for evaluating qualitative research.

ABSTRACT. Adaptive collaborative management emphasizes stakeholder engagement as a crucial component of resilient social-ecological systems. Collaboration among diverse stakeholders is expected to enhance learning, build social legitimacy for decision making, and establish relationships that support learning and adaptation in the long term. However, simply bringing together diverse stakeholders does not guarantee productive engagement. Using critical discourse analysis, we examined how diverse stakeholders negotiated knowledge and power in a workshop designed to inform adaptive management of riparian livestock grazing on a National Forest in the southwestern USA. Publicly recognized as a successful component of a larger collaborative effort, we found that the workshop effectively brought together diverse participants, yet still restricted dialogue in important ways. Notably, workshop facilitators took on the additional roles of riparian experts and instructors. As they guided workshop participants toward a consensus view of riparian conditions and management recommendations, they used their status as riparian experts to emphasize commonalities with stakeholders supportive of riparian grazing and accentuate differences with stakeholders skeptical of riparian grazing, including some Forest Service staff with power to influence management decisions. Ultimately, the management plan published one year later did not fully adopt the consensus view from the workshop, but rather included and acknowledged a broader diversity of stakeholder perspectives. Our findings suggest that leaders and facilitators of adaptive collaborative management can more effectively manage for productive stakeholder engagement and, thus, socialecological resilience if they are more tentative in their convictions, more critical of the role of expert knowledge, and more attentive to the knowledge, interests, and power of diverse stakeholders.

Hundreds of locally based watershed initiatives have mobilized stakeholders to take voluntary action to restore the ecological conditions of North America's watersheds. Lead organizations rely on project‐based grant funding, alignment with government programs, and volunteerism to incrementally restore what is ultimately a vast and complex ecosystem. Structurally, the vision and goals of these initiatives often exceed available resources and capacity. In 1999, the Bonneville Environmental Foundation began to test ways by which a funder might increase the capacity of local watershed organizations to achieve long‐term watershed restoration goals through a 10‐year commitment of funding and technical support. We partnered with other funders, collectively seeking solutions to increase the impact of this work. Reflecting on 13 years experience across 21 watersheds in 7 western states (USA), we have concluded that the scale of ecological change desired requires a time frame for planning, implementation, and public engagement that is inconsistent with present‐day approaches. This has left us asking how can the capacity and impact of a watershed initiative be sustained over many decades—a time frame that exceeds the tenure of any individual leader, the proven life cycles of many nonprofit organizations, and the commitment of most funders? Clear themes have emerged: (1) engaging diverse stakeholders in planning, (2) orienting the work around broader goals, (3) emphasizing human well‐being, and (4) developing resilient partnerships. Reimagining watershed restoration in this context, we suggest a new agenda for action and research that emphasizes a multidecadal planning horizon integrating climate change projections and changing demographics and social values. WIREs Water 2017, 4:e1174. doi: 10.1002/wat2.1174 This article is categorized under: Water and Life > Conservation, Management, and Awareness Engineering Water > Planning Water Human Water > Water Governance

Adaptive management is a systematic approach to learning from outcomes to improve management. Although its virtues are commonly praised, it has been implemented infrequently in natural resource management because of the challenges of developing a feasible process that can be sustained over time. Our analysis of regional experiences from private, state, and federal lands in the Pacific Northwest (United States and Canada) finds that the questions addressed by private organizations tend to be more specific, associated with a narrower scope of uncertainties, and addressed in a shorter time frame with limited stakeholder involvement. On publicly managed lands, questions tend to be more complex and open-ended, usually driven by their mandate for multiple use and high level of stakeholder engagement. We present a structured adaptive management framework that translates theory into action by describing an implementation process and organizational structure, explicitly linking learning to management planning and implementation, and integrating the technical and social aspects of adaptive management. Forest managers and policymakers can customize our example according to their mandate and management objectives. The framework is particularly relevant to land management for multiple uses, where the uncertainties are abundant and complex, and the decisionmakers increasingly use mathematical modeling to inform their decisions.

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