COLLABORATIVE STRATEGIES FOR MANAGING ANIMAL MIGRATIONS: INSIGHTS FROM THE HISTORY OF ECOSYSTEM-BASED MANAGEMENT

摘要

Twenty years of experience with collaborative ecosystem-based management (EBM) provides insights that can be applied to the management of animal migrations. Since the principles underlying EBM are the same as those informing migration conservation, and they exhibit many of the same challenges, it is reasonable to presume that factors that have facilitated progress in EBM will be helpful in migration conservation. These include factors related to motivation, organization, resources, adaptability, legitimacy, and energy that create the incentives and capacity to carry out landscape-scale collaborative action to secure migratory corridors. The EBM experience also suggests that these factors are best considered as elements of a dynamic project lifecycle that calls for different strategies at varying points of time. Less demanding social outcomes, such as communication, precede more complex ones, such as trust, and procedural and social improvements often precede ecological change. While collaborative action is almost by definition voluntary, in fact, collaborative EBM exists within an incentive structure that promotes joint decision making and action. Legal mandates such as the Endangered Species Act form part of this incentive structure. Well-managed collaborative processes can be effective at finding creative, win-win type strategies when given a credible goal with the space to invent solutions and the incentives to do so.