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Conflicts between humans about wildlife, sometimes also referred to as conservation conflicts, are a challenging issue all over the world. Comparing conservation conflicts from different settings helps to better understand general strategies for conflict management and provides opportunities for mutual learning to solve conservation conflicts. This paper analyses commonalities and differences of conservation conflicts in one Ghanaian and three German national parks, and discusses lessons and implications for conflict management. Using the social-ecological system framework and social conflict theory, we conducted focus groups and interviews with relevant actors, collected secondary sources of information and conducted a qualitative content analysis. Results describe resource systems, resource units, governance systems, and actors. Conflict issues identified for both cases revolve around wildlife populations and wildlife impacts, disagreements about conservation, hunting, disputes among actors, as well as issues of inadequate involvement of actors. Results further indicate that similar drivers such as contrary values, different interests, structural problems, legislative issues and inadequate involvement contribute to conflict development. However, the contexts of the case studies within which these conflicts develop, basically differ. From our findings, we developed both general as well as case-specific management principles necessary for conflict management. The paper concludes that root causes of conflict emergence and social processes should be addressed to facilitate conflict management. If appropriate general and case-specific instruments are chosen, a solution to conservation conflicts can be possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural resource management literature has documented three paradigm shifts over the past decade: from co-management to adaptive co-management and adaptive governance respectively and, more recently, towards landscape governance. The latter is conceived as a governance approach towards negotiated land use at the landscape level to deal with global challenges such as food insecurity, climate change and biodiversity loss. There is not a lot of clarity about how co-management systems could actually evolve into landscape governance. This paper aims to address the gap by exploring how a stalled co-management system for the reforestation of degraded forest areas—the modified taungya system (MTS) in Ghana—could be revitalised and redesigned as a landscape approach. Drawing on case studies and expert consultation, the performance of the national MTS and the MTS under the Community Forestry Management Project is reviewed with regard to five principles (integrated approach, multi-stakeholder negotiation, polycentric governance, continual learning and adaptive capacity) and three enabling conditions (social capital, bridging organisations and long-term funding) distilled from the literature. The authors conclude that some of these principles and conditions were met under the Community Forestry Management Project, but that continual learning, transcending jurisdictional boundaries, developing adaptive capacity, and long-term funding and benefits still pose challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the management of water resources becomes increasingly complex due to climatic stresses on socio-ecological systems, growing evidence suggests that collaborative governance with meaningful local participation is vital for building institutional adaptive capacity. Using a participatory institutional framework – Adaptive Co-Management – we assessed the nature and role of formal institutional collaboration in facilitating rural capacities to adapt water supply to climate change-related salinization. Findings include local perceptions of climate change occurrence, insufficient local adaptive responses, poor integration of external responses into local practices, and concurrent opportunities and constraints of institutional collaboration in capacity development. We concluded that framing adaptation strictly as a technical problem and restricting broad participation undercut embedded collective decision making processes in informal regimes, which provide accumulated institutional memory of intimate and detailed ecological knowledge relevant for adaptation. Also, collaboration between intermediary and local institutions needs strengthening. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]