From Community-Based Resource Management to Complex Systems: The Scale Issue and Marine Commons

Most research in the area of common property (common-pool) resources in the last 2-3 decades sought the simplicity of community-based resource management cases to develop theory. This was mainly because of the relative ease of observing processes of self-governance in simple cases. However, this creates a problem. Whether the findings of small-scale, community-based commons can be scaled up to generalize about regional and global commons is much debated. Even though some of the principles from community-based studies are likely relevant across scale, new and different principles may also come into play at different levels. Cross-scale institutions (such as institutions of co-management) have something in common: they provide ways to deal with complex adaptive systems. They all pertain to various aspects of complexity, such as selforganization, uncertainty, and resilience, and deal with the challenges of scale. Communities themselves can be seen as complex systems -embedded in larger complex systems. Thus, community-based resource management needs to deal with cross-scale governance and external drivers of change, as I illustrate with examples of marine commons.