Copyright © 2013 by the author(s). Published here under license by the Resilience Alliance. Plummer, R., D. R. Armitage, and R. C. de Loë. 2013. Adaptive comanagement and its relationship to environmental governance. Ecology and Society 18(1): 21. http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-05383-180121 Research Adaptive Comanagement and Its Relationship to Environmental Governance Ryan Plummer 1,2 , Derek R. Armitage 3 and Rob C. de Loë 3 ABSTRACT. We provide a systematic review of the adaptive comanagement (ACM) literature to (i) investigate how the concept of governance is considered and (ii) examine what insights ACM offers with reference to six key concerns in environmental governance literature: accountability and legitimacy; actors and roles; fit, interplay, and scale; adaptiveness, flexibility, and learning; evaluation and monitoring; and, knowledge. Findings from the systematic review uncover a complicated relationship with evidence of conceptual closeness as well as relational ambiguities. The findings also reveal several specific contributions from the ACM literature to each of the six key environmental governance concerns, including applied strategies for sharing power and responsibility and value of systems approaches in understanding problems of fit. More broadly, the research suggests a dissolving or fuzzy boundary between ACM and governance, with implications for understanding emerging approaches to navigate social-ecological system change. Future research opportunities may be found at the confluence of ACM and environmental governance scholarship, such as identifying ways to build adaptive capacity and encouraging the development of more flexible governance arrangements. Key Words: adaptive comanagement; adaptive governance; environmental governance; integrated management; multilevel governance; resilience; systematic review INTRODUCTION Social-ecological resilience emphasizes the interdependence of people and nature (Berkes and Folke 1998, Berkes et al. 2003), and refers to the amount of change a social-ecological system can undergo while maintaining structure and function; the capability for self-organization; and the extent to which the capability for learning and adaptation and transformation can be built and enhanced (Carpenter et al. 2001, Folke 2006). Building social-ecological resilience and sustaining adaptive capacity, the ability to be robust to disturbances and adapt to new situations, actual or anticipated changes, while keeping open future options, is critical to addressing change for sustainability (Folke et al. 2002, Berkes et al. 2003, Plummer and Armitage 2010). Approaches to navigating the dynamics of social-ecological systems are a growing area of scholarship and practice. These approaches typically emphasize collaboration, learning, and building adaptive capacity (Folke, et al. 2002, Folke et al. 2005, Plummer and Armitage 2010). Examples of these approaches in practice are increasingly common as resource users, managers, and communities endeavor to deal with change. They can be seen in Arctic comanagement arrangements where efforts to bridge knowledge systems are linked to shared decision making about resources, e.g., harvest levels (Armitage et al. 2011), in the Murray-Darling Basin in the creation of water markets and expansion of planning roles to address changes in water availability (de Loë and Bjornlund 2010), and in South Africa where collaborative efforts have emerged to resolve profound livelihood challenges in social- ecological systems that have changed dramatically in a very short period of time (Fabricius and Cundill 2010). Multiple terms characterize these approaches. Examples include resilience management, interactive governance, transition management, collaborative governance, adaptive governance, and adaptive comanagement. However, we are concerned principally with an association that is routinely and often ambiguously made between governance and adaptive comanagement (ACM). For example, ACM is frequently described as an approach or strategy for the governance of social-ecological systems in the face of complexity and uncertainty (Carlsson and Berkes 2005, Armitage et al. 2009, Kofinas 2009, Plummer 2009, Cundill and Fabricius 2010). Conversely, “good” governance, in other words, governance that is characterized by polycentric institutions, legitimacy and transparency, empowerment and social justice, diversity of participating actors, and where multilevel institutions are matched with social-ecological dynamics (Lebel et al. 2006, Lockwood et al. 2010), also is identified as characteristic of ACM (Olsson et al. 2004a, Folke et al. 2005, Berkes 2007, Berkes 2009). Despite these interrelationships, the concepts of governance and ACM have different intellectual and disciplinary foundations. Governance perspectives draw broadly on literature from political science and international relations, and are applied in a wide range of contexts, including global governance, corporate governance, organizational governance, information technology governance, nonprofit governance, 1 Brock University, Canada, 2 Stockholm Resilience Centre, Sweden, 3 University of Waterloo, Canada