Currently, collaborative and community-based approaches to natural resources management are being widely promoted in the United States. They are manifested in the increasing numbers of partnerships, consensus groups, community-based collaboratives, watershed councils, and similar groups that are involved in natural resources management. In this report, the movement is referred to as collaborative conservation, but it goes by many different names, including community-based ecosystem management, grassroots ecosystem management, community forestry, community-based conservation, and coordinated resources management.

As the collaborative conservation movement has grown, a broad body of literature has both informed and commented upon its expansion. The literature is diverse, coming from many different disciplines, each with its own publications, theoretical constructs, and jargon. This makes for stimulating interactions between different perspectives but also creates some degree of confusion. There is no one database or set of keywords to search, and even the literature that focuses specifically on collaborative conservation uses a bewildering range of terms and approaches.

The aim of this document is to bring together a selected, representative sampling of the literature to give the interested reader a beginning on which to base further investigations.

This collection began as a briefing paper for a workshop of the Consortium for Research and Assessment of Community-based Collaboratives , held in Tucson, Arizona, in October 1999. The workshop was organized and hosted by the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at The University of Arizona and the Institute for Environmental Negotiation at the University of Virginia. Members of the consortium were asked to identify the works they felt were most relevant to discussions of collaborative and community-based conservation. Thus, the initial version of this review was built from their lists of recommended sources.

A second, much abbreviated version of this report has been published as an appendix in Across the Great Divide: Explorations in Collaborative Conservation in the American West (Brick et al. 2000) and incorporates the suggestions of several of the book's authors. This final, expanded version brings together both of these earlier efforts and supplements them with additional works chosen by the authors. As such, this review represents a synthesis of the recommendations of people with a wide range of personal, professional, and academic backgrounds.

The review is presented in two sections. The first section looks at the different theories that have informed the development of collaborative conservation. While the works cited in this section may not directly mention collaborative conservation, they all present ideas that have been used to develop, justify, and understand it. The second section includes literature that deals explicitly with collaborative conservation as practiced in the United States. Some citations are included several times, so that each section can stand on its own.

Collaborative conservation draws upon theories of democracy, international development, and alternative dispute resolution. It can be associated with critical theorists who have developed models of ideal communication, wildlife managers looking for ways to give local communities incentives to stop poaching, essayists exploring how we are shaped by the landscapes we live in, and economic developers searching for sustainable livelihoods for rural communities.

Collaborative Conservation in Theory and Practice: A Literature Review (ISBN 1-931143-13-7, $10.00)

To purchase this paper, please contact Jen McCormack at jenmack@email.arizona.edu