Building resilience in local management systems

In dealing with multiple-scale systems, a useful place to start is local management systems. In the development of common property theory in the 1980s and the 1990s, the local or the community level received by far the greatest part of research attention. This was not because the local level was necessarily perceived as the most important scale of organization, but because social–ecological systems at this level provided a ‘laboratory’ in which principles can be generated, before they can be tested in the real world of external drivers and cross-scale interactions.