Exploring pathways to the persistence of community engagement in co-management across social-ecological archetypes

Evaluating when and under what conditions community engagement in co-management endures is critical for tracking conservation progress and sustaining impact. Yet assessments of initiatives persistence remain rare. We analyze 750 co-management initiatives under Chile’s Territorial Use Rights for Fishing policy (1998–2021), examining persistence across conditions theorized to shape collective action in social-ecological systems. Using cluster analysis, we identified three collective action archetypes and evaluated their persistence with survival analysis. Nationally, initiatives had a 75% probability of lasting beyond 15 years. Those with high initial resource abundance persisted longest (84%). Initiatives with low initial abundance still endured at similar rates under favorable collective action conditions (78%) but had greater abandonment rates when coupled with low poverty, low productivity, and high surveillance costs (54%). These results reveal multiple pathways to lasting co-management, refine hypotheses for future research, and show how tracking persistence supports adaptive, context-specific interventions for durable and equitable conservation.