Capacities for developing adaptive management strategies: the case of the Calakmul municipality

The ability to collaborate and to share information about ecosystem dynamics and successful management practices is increasingly important in terms of addressing the constant changes and uncertainties that prevent the formulation of activities that promote natural resource sustainability. This is particularly true in very recent institutions of natural resource management that have very few sources of traditional knowledge, e.g., the Calakmul municipality. The southern Mexican municipality of Calakmul was established relatively recently and is a biodiversity hotspot, although 46% of its human population live in extreme poverty. To address the challenges implied by this social-ecological system, successful collaboration between stakeholders requires development of capacities to make joint decisions. Social networks have been identified as channels of transmission of knowledge, which is vital to achieve solutions to management problems. The aim of this paper is to identify the different types of organizations with a stake in the natural resource management of Calakmul municipality and to evaluate the network structure of the inter-organizational collaboration in order to understand how adaptive co-management is either being facilitated or obstructed. The structural characteristics of the Calakmul collaboration networks, such as heterogeneity of knowledge sources, can bring some advantages, but they mainly confer disadvantages because of the low interaction density between organizations and the low capability for achieving collaborative action. The example of Calakmul demonstrates how social network structure can influence the number of opportunities for collective learning and indicates how these could be modified in order to improve adaptive co-management.