Based on long-term research on community-based resource management, and using small-scale fisheries as an example, alternatives to conventional management may be characterized by: a shift in philosophy to embrace uncertainty and complexity; an appreciation of fisheries as social-ecological systems and more broadly as complex adaptive systems; an expansion of scope of management information to include fishers’ knowledge; formulation of management objectives that incorporate livelihood issues; and development of participatory management with community-based institutions and cross-scale governance. Such alternative management is adaptive as well as participatory in nature, as it engages the knowledge of resource users, their adaptive learning, and their institutions for self-governance. It is human-oriented but uses an ecosystem approach, effectively linking social systems with natural systems. Such management breaks out of the old tradition of management-as-control. It effectively redefines resource to mean, not commodity, but elements of an ecosystem that supports essential processes as well as human needs. It also redefines management to refer to governance, learning and adaptive management, oriented to maintaining the productive capacity and resilience of the linked social-ecological system.