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Effective and sustainable ecosystem management is becoming a vital societal issue. Increasingly, there is a growing mandate among all sectors of society-public, governmental, business, civic, and environmental-to become collaborative stakeholders in dialogues about the management of ecosystem resources. What has been missing, however, is an explicit analysis of interorganizational networks for sustainable ecosystem management as emerging learning organizations. This article demonstrates the explanatory and diagnostic power of applying the concepts of virtual learning networks to sustainable ecosystem management to guide stakeholders in cocreating a shared conceptual infrastructure for generative learning, consensus building, and collaborative decision making. Related dynamics of collaboration and power and the diffusion of rules and practices are also explored. Next steps are indicated for further development, demonstration, and documentation of the applicability and utility of this model to sustainable ecosystem management.

Adaptive ecosystem management (AEM) requires building and managing an interorganizational network of stakeholders to conserve ecosystem integrity while sustaining ecosystem services. This paper demonstrates the usefulness of applying the concepts of interorganizational networks and learning organizations to AEM. A case study of the lower Roanoke River in North Carolina illustrates how an AEM network can evolve to guide stakeholders in creating a shared framework for generative learning, consensus building through collaboration, and decision making. Environmental professionals can use this framework to guide institutional arrangements and to coordinate the systematic development of cohesive interorganizational AEM networks.

Ecosystems management can be viewed as an explicit attempt to build and manage interorganizational networks. A review of environmental management literature, however, reveals very little use of network organization models. For environmental professionals who encounter diverse stakeholders in their practice, this article offers a conceptual framework and case study that demonstrate the utility of approaching ecosystems as networks. Virtual network and learning organization models, combined with holographic (systems) thinking and generative learning paradigms, help explain how collaboration among multiple stakeholders in ecosystems management can work. The case of "Monroe 2020," the process for generating and implementing the comprehensive plan for Monroe County, Pennsylvania, provides a real-life illustration. The Monroe 2020 plan focuses on environmental quality and community economic goals, melded with resolution of longstanding conflict and commitment to a shared vision of the County's future. It emerged through a deliberate effort to build a broad-based, long-term constituency and tools for implementation. Monroe 2020 as plan and process represents a practical, mutually reinforcing alignment of natural ecosystems management and management of the built environment for human settlement. By fostering better understanding of how to create and manage effective collaborative partnerships, the ideas expressed here can contribute significantly to improved ecosystems management. Environmental Practice 5:119-133 (2003) o be effective, ecosystems management needs not only Afiliation ofauthors:

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