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Collaborative Management, Environmental Caretaking, and Sustainable Livelihoods

Feature-in-Progress

Guest Editors: Mehana Vaughan, Sibyl Diver, Merrill Baker-Médard
This special feature endeavors to deepen the field of collaborative care and governance of lands and waters. We are particularly interested in inquiries that expand understandings of reciprocal relationships and how collective responsibilities are enacted in natural resource management. This includes governance rooted in meaningful participatory processes devolving decision making to those most affected or connected to a given resource and the physical and spiritual sustenance it provides. Along with locally centered governance efforts, we are interested in how communities engage in increasingly complex cross-border polycentric efforts to influence the global and regional threats currently endangering local environments. Contributions may suggest interventions that advance environmental justice, including just transitions that support sustainable livelihoods and regenerative economies at local and transnational scales. We also seek research exploring creative means of collective action, and insights into the "communing" practices. From communities rooted in place to transnational coalitions, this issue will explore moments and movements of accountability and connection that stretch across space and time. This special feature will include both informal community practices and formal policy-based avenues that facilitate resurgence and restoration of indigenous sovereignty. Research efforts focused on transmitting knowledge and responsibility across generations are welcome, along with stories of education for adaptation grounded in ancestral relationships between people and the places they inhabit. This issue will further expand current literature by highlighting ways in which community leadership, indigenous and allied partnerships, and new voices offer paths to reshape management agencies, institutions, and collaborative processes for the future. We will bring together both established and emerging scholars across a range of geographies, including Africa (Madagascar), the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, the Russian Far East, India, Australia, New Zealand, and Hawai‘i.

Research

Synthesis

Insight

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