The survival of co-management initiatives varies across sets of social-ecological features that drive collective action

Co-management is a crucial strategy for balancing local communities’ access to natural resources with sustainable development and conservation goals. Despite widespread recognition of co-management’s importance, understanding of its endurance remains limited, constraining the design of initiatives that can be appropriately scaled and sustained over time. This paper aims to advance theoretical and empirical work on co-management by deepening the discussion on how different sets of social-ecological features or configurations support co-management survival. We provide a national-scale empirical evaluation of conditions for co-management survival, using Chile’s Territorial User Rights for Fishing (TURF) policy as a learning platform. Guided by collective action theory within social-ecological systems, we applied interpretable cluster analysis to 750 TURFs established over two decades, identifying distinct configurations for collective action.  We then employed survival analysis to examine differences in TURF survival across these configurations. High survival rates were observed in social-ecological configurations with high initial resource abundance. However, configurations with lower initial abundance achieved similarly high survival rates when characterized by high resource dependency, proximity to regional markets, and lower surveillance costs. Our findings suggest that focusing on single determinants for assessing co-management survival may not be a fruitful way forward. Instead, emphasis on different social-ecological configurations, context-based interpretations, and the dynamic incentives faced by participants can offer actionable insights for ensuring enduring co-management outcomes.