Co-management, that is the sharing of responsibilities between governmental institutions and groups of resource users, is rapidly becoming popular in Asia. In many countries environmental management is reformulated from exclusive state control to various kinds of joint management in which local communities, indigenous peoples and non-governmental organizations share authority and benefits with governmental institutions.

In this book case studies of experiments with co-management in a number of countries are combined with more reflective contributions pointing to underlying assumptions and problems in the actual implementation of co-management.