1 Accepted for publication. Reference as: Crona, B., H. Ernstson, C. Prell, M. Reed, and K. Hubacek. in review. Combining social network approaches with social theories to improve understanding of resource governance. Page Ch 1 in Ö. Bodin and C. Prell, editors. Social Networks and Natural Resource Management: Uncovering the Social Fabric in Environmental Governance. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Chapter 3: Combining social network approaches with social theories to improve understanding of resource governance Crona, B.I., Ernstson, H., Prell, C., Reed, M. and Hubacek, K. 3.1. INTRODUCTION For much of the 20 th century natural resource management centered on efforts to control nature in order to harvest products from it, while reducing risks to society. The central tenet was to achieve predictable outcomes, a strategy that almost invariably led to reduced biological diversity and a reduction of the range of variation in natural systems. However, reduced diversity, in turn, tends to create more sensitive systems, both ecological and social (Levin, 1999), and examples of this today are the highly controlled systems of conventional agriculture and forestry that are experiencing increasing problems, fighting pest outbreaks and declining populations of natural pollinators (Chapin et al., 2000; Lundberg and Moberg, 2003). From the 1970’s and onwards (Holling, 1973; Holling, 1978), it has been suggested that such attempts to control highly complex and non-linear systems inevitably leads to surprises and/or societal and environmental crises (Holling and Meffe, 1995). On the basis of these arguments, conventional resource management, or command-and-control management as it is often referred to, has been heavily criticized (Holling, 1973; Holling et al., 1995; Wondolleck and Yaffee, 2000; Folke et al., 2005, among many others) and several approaches have been proposed to overcome some of its limitations. These include, among others, adaptive management (e.g. Holling, 1978), co-operative management (e.g. Pinkerton, 1989; Jentoft, 2000), collaborative management (Borrini-Feyerabend and Borrini, 1996; Wondolleck and Yaffee, 2000), and adaptive co-management (Ruitenbeek and Cartier, 2001; Olsson, 2004). These concepts share many similarities and readers are referred to e.g. Folke et al (2005) and Armitage et al (2008a; 2008b) for a more in-depth review. The goal of this book is to outline how social network analysis can be used as a conceptual tool and an analytical method for uncovering a variety of social factors affecting resource governance, particularly as it is conceptualized by these more recent perspectives. We will therefore confine our discussion to adaptive co-management (hereafter ACM), in an attempt to show how this theory, and related concepts, are linked