Institutional Adaptation and Community-Based Conservation of Natural Resources: The Cases of the Tao and Atayal in Taiwan Ching-Ping Tang & Shui-Yan Tang Published online: 30 September 2009 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2009 Abstract Traditional institutional rules, values, and beliefs help support conservation regimes of natural resources in many indigenous communities. Such traditional conservation regimes may break down as a result of influences from the outside world. This paper examines two cases in Taiwan—the Tao communities on Orchid Island and the Atayal community in Smangus. The former illustrates a process in which traditional institutions supporting local conservation broke down as a result of external influences, leading to the loss of the local community’ s ability to govern the use of a coastal fishery. The latter, in contrast, demonstrates how local people are able to adapt their traditional institutions to meet the challenges from the outside world while preserving a local forest. The paper concludes by examining factors that affect institutional adaptation in community-based conservation of natural resources. Keywords Taiwan . Institutional change . Community-based conservation . Forests . Fisheries Introduction Community-based governance has gained increasing attention as an effective approach to natural resource conservation (Agrawal and Gibson 1999). At the interface between social and ecological systems, local appropriators tend to have both the incentives and knowledge to conserve local natural resources for sustainable use (Folke et al. 1998). Many, but not all, aboriginal peoples have been identified as successful in preserving such local natural resources as coastal fisheries, forests, and water systems by means of self-governing arrangements that effectively limit the rate of resource extraction and use (Kellert et al. 2000; Ostrom 1990, 2005). It is possible that such successes result less from effective conservation practices than from low demand relative to supply or poorly developed resource distribution networks (Hunn 1982; Alvard 1995). Nevertheless, in many cases, there is evidence that aboriginal institutions did function effectively in preventing overconsumption of renewable local resources and thus played a vital role in conservation (Gibson et al. 2000; Warren and Pinkston 1998). Can these aboriginal institutions survive the increasing pressures on their local resource systems triggered by various internal and external socioeconomic changes (cf. Ross 1978)? As part of the overall trends of modernization and globalization, for example, many historically isolated indigenous communities have come into contact with the outside world and begun to undergo social, economic, and cultural transformations; their traditional arrange- ments for natural resource governance are being chal- lenged, often leading to an imbalance between supply and demand. As a result, local resources in these indigenous communities could be ruined within a relatively short period of time, manifesting what some refer to as the “real tragedy of the commons” (Anoliefo et al. 2003; Monbiot 1993). One often-suggested solution is the involvement of indigenous communities as partners in modern conserva- tion efforts (Rangan and Lane 2001; Ross and Pickering 2002). This approach advocates the application of local knowledge (Berkes 1999) and, in some cases, the revival C.-P. Tang (*) National ChengChi University, Taipei, Taiwan e-mail: cptang@nccu.edu.tw S.-Y. Tang University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA Hum Ecol (2010) 38:101–111 DOI 10.1007/s10745-009-9292-8