Adaptive co-management: Lessons from coastal Cambodia

This paper focuses on how community-based management is unfolding in coastal Cambodia through the facilitation of a donor-funded, Cambodian-led government research team. Coastal communities in Peam Krasaop Wildlife Sanctuary illustrate the strong potential for community-government partnerships. Several lessons are highlighted: community-based management requires support from the provincial and national level; facilitation between stakeholders is important; and experimentation is an essential component of management. Creative models of community-based management, emerging despite the absence of a legal framework, may be best described as systems of adaptive co-management combining the elements of trial and error, learning-by-doing, and the sharing of management responsibility.