Organising and enacting inter-organisational coordination in long-term social-ecological monitoring

This article focuses on the coordination of long-term social-ecological monitoring programmes between different organisations. Effective long-term social-ecological monitoring (LTSEM) is considered to be of crucial importance to inform conservation policies in an era of accelerating global changes. However, many LTSEM programmes are led by individual organisations with a narrow thematic and spatial focus, and fail to provide an integrated understanding of the trajectories of social-ecological systems. Inter-organisational coordination is increasingly presented as a promising way to overcome this limitation of LTSEM programmes, but in practice it remains limited. Our article contributes to understanding this situation by empirically documenting how inter-organisational coordination of LTSEM programmes is organised and enacted in practice. It proposes a working heuristic framework to characterise patterns of inter-organisational coordination based on two criteria: the degree of monitoring centrality and the degree of verticality of inter-organisational coordination. This framework can be used to compare patterns of inter-organisational coordination both across cases and over time. The article also proposes recommendations for the coordination of LTSEM programmes led by different organisations, especially in the early stages of the coordination process.