The development of resource tenure interventions that promote sustainable management practices has been challenged by the difficulties of determining how contextual factors affect environmental outcomes given the complexity of socio-ecological systems. Our paper describes the application of a realist approach to synthesizing evidence from 31 articles examining the environmental outcomes of marine protected areas governed under different types of property regimes. To enhance the priming of adaptation pathways into development planning under these conditions, three recommendations are made: (1) provide long term support for emergent leaders and brokers to become 'policy entrepreneurs' who can capitalise on policy windows when they appear, (2) establish and support local livelihood innovation niches as 'bridgeheads' for ACM, and (3) maintain participatory evaluation amongst primary stakeholders to rekindle ACM. This was attributed to the absence of policy windows due to ineffective and insufficient time for political engagement, and the fluid institutional environment caused by a national decentralisation policy. However, there was limited evidence of institutional change to existing planning processes. Stakeholder interviews at the project's closure indicated that through ACM, stakeholders had been successfully primed: leaders emerged, trust, cross-scale social networks and knowledge integration grew, communities were empowered, and innovative adaptation strategies were developed and tested. A participatory evaluation method was designed to test the ToC's assumptions and measure ACM outcomes. The first phase established a trans-disciplinary research team to act as facilitators and brokers, a multi-stakeholder planning process demonstrating adaptation pathways practice, and tri-alling of 'no regrets' adaptation strategies in case study sub-districts. The project's Theory of Change (ToC) consisted of three causally-linked phases which mirrored the evolutionary stages of ACM: priming stakeholders, enabling policies and programs, and implementing adaptation. This paper describes a 4 year governance experiment in Nusa Tenggara Barat Province, Indonesia, which applied adaptive co-management (ACM) as a governance approach to 'prime' a transformation to adaptation pathways-based development planning. However, there are no examples of how to operationalise adaptation pathways in developing countries, or how to evaluate the process. By taking a complex systems approach to decision-making, the adaptation pathways construct provides useful principles. Mainstreaming climate change and future uncertainty into rural development planning in developing countries is a pressing challenge.
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