For area-based Community-based Conservation (CBC) projects to be effective in the long term, they need to have effective governance institutions and receive the support of the communities involved. Commons scholarship and the broader literature on collective action can help inform the design, implementation, and evaluation of CBC governance systems. In this paper, I present work we have been conducting with community-based pastoralist conservancies in northern Kenya. Conservancies are legally-recognized organizations that seek to benefit from managing non-state land for purposes of wildlife conservation and other compatible land uses. Under this model, sustainable management of the communally-owned rangelands has the potential to create win-win situations for pastoralist livelihoods and wildlife. However, conservancies face many challenges and there is variation in the extent to which conservancies appear to be working in meeting the needs of communities or protecting their environments. Using quantitative analyses of monitoring & evaluation data, here I illustrate the connections between governance concepts that have been identified in wider literature as being important aspects of the governance of socio-ecological systems, and different measures of conservancy success (Attitudinal, Ecological, and Economic), while also examining the potential synergies and trade-offs in these different forms of success. I also present quantitative and qualitative analyses of surveys and discussions with community members that link willingness to cooperate in conservancy actions with how strongly respondents identified with their conservancy, and the extent to which other people in the community were perceived to share cooperative norms. Our findings point to the need to consider the wider ecological and cultural landscape in which conservancies and pastoral communities are embedded, especially the importance of interactions between different conservancies and communities. I discuss how commons research and related fields can provide practical guidance for improving social and ecological outcomes in CBC projects, and the need to engage with issues of governance at different levels of organization in order to achieve collective action at larger scales.
