Introduction and overview: environmental knowledge,rights, and ethics: co-managing with communities

This special issue of Environmental Science & Policy presents various approaches for assessing local environmental knowledge and perceptions. Many environmental management problems are caused by a mismatch between environmental decision-makers and locally affected communities. Our objective with this special issue is to present a range of environmental decision-making approaches to be matched with a range of community types. On one end of this range are traditional, indigenous communities where careful co-management is needed. On the other end are mixed residential/transient communities, where a regional survey of awareness of an environmental issue can provide adequate information for a practitioner to design an appropriate solution from the office. We may also have a wide range of environmental knowledge from the traditional community's elders to the transients. It may be encoded in folkloric symbols or verbal references to Internet WebPages, or a combination of these and other codes, signifying membership in social groups. Such diversity requires skill in assessing levels of environmental knowledge and appropriate strategies for engaging local knowledge as a basis for building culturally and environmentally appropriate projects.