Creating and managing interorganizational learning networks to achieve sustainable ecosystem management

Effective and sustainable ecosystem management is becoming a vital societal issue. Increasingly, there is a growing mandate among all sectors of society-public, governmental, business, civic, and environmental-to become collaborative stakeholders in dialogues about the management of ecosystem resources. What has been missing, however is an explicit analysis of interorganizational networks for sustainable ecosystem management as emerging learning organizations. This article demonstrates the explanatory and diagnostic power of applying the concepts of virtual learning networks to sustainable ecosystem management to guide stakeholders in cocreating a shared conceptual infrastructure for generative learning, consensus building, and collaborative decision making. Related dynamics of collaboration and power and the diffusion of rules and practices are also explored. Next steps are indicated for further development, demonstration, and documentation of the applicability and utility of this model to sustainable ecosystem management.