Introduction

“The more you know, the less you understand” is a well-known proverb that in some ways aptly depicts our relationship with the natural environment around us. This does not mean that science and our understanding of nature has not advanced over time – it has. But with increasing knowledge we have also come to realize that the complexity of natural systems is far greater than imagined and that this complexity causes ecosystems to continuously change in non-linear and sometimes unpredictable ways (Carpenter et al., 2001; Scheffer et al., 2001; Folke et al., 2004). To be able to deal with such uncertainty requires management approaches which can also learn and adapt to changing conditions over time. Adaptive co-management, outlined in more detail in Chapter 3, is one approach which has been championed as a way to deal with uncertainty and surprise in natural resource management. This concept has two key defining characteristics; learning and collaboration. Learning is seen as a key to remaining adaptive. Collaboration, more specifically the involvement of local stakeholders in the governance process, is assumed to provide legitimacy for governance action and management decisions, but it is also a potential source of diversity of perspectives and knowledge which can contribute to increased learning and improved management decisions (e.g. Armitage et al., 2008). However, for adaptive co-management to work, (self-) organization of stakeholders and collective action have also been suggested as vitally important (Olsson et al., 2004), and this in turn is influenced by the ability of the involved parties to agree on resource-related problems and resource status (Ostrom, 2005 and references therein). In this chapter we are particularly concerned with how the ability of a community to learn and adapt, and to collectively respond to common resource problems, can be affected by the structure of the social networks within it. Furthermore, we explore to what degree the existence of cohesive subgroups, and their composition in terms of actors’ attributes in the form of occupation and tribal ethnicity, can help to explain why a community experiencing significant decline in marine resources over a number of years has not come together to alter unsustainable practices.