This book, which contains 15 separately authored chapters, discusses both the principles and applications of an integrated approach to natural resource management. Such an approach must embrace the complexity of systems and redirect research towards the greater inclusion of issues such as...

To meet the challenges of poverty and environmental sustainability, a different kind of research will be needed. This research will need to embrace the complexity of these systems by redirecting the objectives of research toward enhancing adaptive capacity, by incorporating more participatory...

The importance of bounding the problem of assessing the performance of natural resource management and preparing a conceptual model of the system (as applied to Zimbabwe) is highlighted. We suggest that the capital assets approach to livelihoods may be an appropriate organizing principle for the...

This paper summarizes the results of a study on parallel concepts for forest conservation that have emerged during recent times in order to cope with new trends and challenges in sustainable forest management. Various case studies from different regions are presented, i.e., Australia, USA, India,...

Assessing the impact of integrated natural resource management (INRM) research poses a challenge to scientists. The complexity of INRM interventions requires a more holistic approach to impact assessment, beyond the plot and farm levels and beyond traditional analysis of economic returns. Impact...

Natural resource management research has to evolve from a focus on plans, maps, and regulations to an acknowledgment of the complex, sometimes chaotic, reality in the field, with a large number of actors making their own decisions. As outside actors, we can only try to facilitate and support a...

To help integrated natural resource management research "deliver the goods" for many of the world's poor over a large area and in a timely manner, the authors suggest a problem solving approach that facilitates the scaling out of relevant agricultural practices. They propose 7 ways to foster...

This paper develops the "follow-the-technology" (FTT) approach to catalysing, managing, and evaluating rural technology change as a framework that both "hard" and "soft" scientists can work with. To deal with complexity, integrated natural resource management (INRM) needs ways of working that are...

This paper describes a different system-based approach based on new developments in ecological and general systems theory. Performance assessment in holistic approaches such as integrated natural resource management has to deal with a complex set of interacting and self-organizing natural and human ...

The thesis of this paper is that the "rational fool" syndrome can be applied to mainstream public sector agricultural research that is conducted in a way that is rational in the short term, but acts against its own long-term viability. A long-term strategic research agenda for the public sector is...