154 Agroecology and Sustainability
and organizations. Hence, if polycentric cross-level institutions provide the struc-
ture for adaptive co-management, multiple-overlapping networks of key persons
provide the processes.
As an example, Bebbington (1997) identifies brokers as key stewards in sus-
tainable agriculture intensification in the Andes, including their role in coordinat-
ing social networks in the management process. In all the cases of sustainable
intensification, outsiders have played a key role in bringing in new ideas, but more
importantly they have brought in networks of contacts. These brokers had differ-
ent backgrounds, including a priest, university professor, European volunteers and
funding agencies. The connections they brought with them helped the members
of the local communities gain access to non-local institutions and resources,
including access to NGOs with technical assistance and financial resources, sources
of technology, donors, and alternative trading networks. These networks spread
across national and international boundaries in ways that would have been hard
for the locals to do on their own.
In addition to leaders, we have previously identified other essential actors and
actor groups that serve social mechanisms in adaptive co-management networks:
knowledge carriers, knowledge generators, stewards and sense-makers. Folke et al
(2003), based on several case studies, identified the following actor groups: knowl-
edge retainers, interpreters, facilitators, visionaries, inspirers, innovators, experi-
menters, followers and reinforcers. In coastal communities of Eastern Africa, actor
groups like beach recorders of fish catches and middlemen that link fishers to mar-
kets are of major significance in shaping exploitation patterns of coastal and marine
ecosystems and thereby influencing the capacity of these social-ecological systems
to generate and sustain ecosystem services (de la Torre-Castro, 2006; Crona, 2006).
Holling and Chambers (1973), in their analyses of social roles in resource manage-
ment workshops, stressed the importance of also including individuals with oppo-
site views that oppose and criticize. These roles of actor groups are all important
components of social networks and essential for creating the conditions that we
argue are necessary for ecosystem management.
Transforming Social-ecological Systems
Crisis, perceived or real, seems to trigger learning and knowledge generation
(Westley, 1995) and opens up space for combinations of different social memories
and new management trajectories of resources and ecosystems (Gunderson, 2003).
Olsson and Folke (2001) described how threats of acidification, overfishing and
disease successively initiated learning and generated knowledge and institutions
for landscape management among local groups in the Lake Racken catchment in
western Sweden. Based on empirical work Olsson et al (2004a) observed the
following sequence of local self-organizing toward adaptive co-management of
ecosystems.