The Community-based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) Research Consortium was established to provide a forum to engage CBNRM leaders and researchers focused on the Western US in collaboratively addressing key knowledge gaps and needs for information. Through research collaboration these efforts are intended to help practitioners catalyze economic resilience in impoverished rural public lands communities of the Western US by providing critical information to foster change in their own communities and in national policy.

The consortium was initiated with a grant from the Ford Foundation to the Ecosystem Workforce Program in the Institute for a Sustainable Environment at the University of Oregon. In late 2007 the Ecosystem Workforce Program organized a steering committee comprised of roughly equal numbers of academic researchers and nonprofit practitioners to set direction for the consortium. The consortium held its first workshop in November 2008. Fifteen researchers and practitioners attended the workshop from six CBNRM organizations, five academic institutions, and two US Forest Service research stations. At this first workshop, participants helped to outline the substance, structure, and objectives for the consortium.

Social science researchers have the skills to help with these challenges. Researchers with the CBNRM Research Consortium work with CBRNM leaders in research project identification, development, and implementation to ensure that these agendas are driven by the critical needs of rural communities.

What is CBNRM?

For more than a decade, CBNRM has fostered efforts across the United States to develop resilient social and ecological systems that move impoverished rural communities beyond the "boom-bust" cycles of resource extraction. These efforts recognize that the long-term health of communities is dependent on the long-term health of the land. Increasingly, communities and agency partners work together to reach agreement on how to restore public and adjacent private lands and how to implement those agreements in ways that foster rural economic development.

As community-based approaches to natural resource management have become more sophisticated, practitioners have developed an increasing need for high quality information and research that allows them to solve complex problems, evaluate the impacts of their innovations, and effectively advocate for policy change.