In this paper, we examine stakeholders’ efforts to design and implement a marine management policies in the context of the Coral Triangle Initiative (CTI). We explore CTI stakeholders’ policy beliefs and preferences, their patterns of collaboration and trust, their access to resources and level of influence, and their views on the overall performance of the CTI. The findings suggest that the CTI is best viewed as a nascent, collaborative policy subsystem wherein there is strong support for the CTI objectives among stakeholders, convergence in policy beliefs and preferences, and instances of collaboration. However, some tensions are highlighted, which risk undermining the effectiveness and long-term sustainability of the Initiative. We argue that, as the CTI matures, it is important to maintain broad convergence in policy beliefs to prevent the formation of adversarial coalitions, and/or to avoid unilateral prioritisation of powerful global interests to the detriment of national and local priorities.
FIDELMAN, P.; EVANS, L.; FOALE, S.; WEIBLE, C.; VON HELAND, F.; ELGIN, D. 2014. Coalition Cohesion for Regional Marine Governance: A Stakeholder Analysis of the Coral Triangle Initiative. Ocean and Coastal Management, 95: 117-128; doi: 10.1016/j.ocecoaman.2014.04.001
A recent article in the Financial Times reflects on two different perspectives espoused by Garrett Hardin and Elinor Ostrom on the management of shared resources (common-pool resources). For Hardin, the only way to manage common-pool resources sustainably would be either by government or private sector control. Conversely, Ostrom demonstrated that resource users were in fact capable of devising enduring rules to successfully manage common-pool resources upon which they depended. The FT article may be accessed at 
Another paper of ours, now on multilevel adaptation to climate change, was published in August in Global Environmental Change. Here we examine how climate change adaptation takes place in a complex multilevel system of governance, in the context of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef region. We analyse over one hundred adaptation strategies at federal, state, regional and local levels in terms of type, manifestation, purposefulness, drivers and triggers, and geographic and temporal scope. We also investigate interactions between strategies both at the same level of governance and across governance levels.
Our article on alternative scenarios as a way to explore potential futures in the context of climate change is now available