Integrating activities for conservation and development with community participation and collaboration among different institutional and social actors is increasingly recognized as one of the more promising approaches towards achieving sustainable communities and ecosystems. This recognition is leading to the development of more collaborative – often referred to as community-based or participatory – approaches for environmental monitoring and natural resource management. These approaches recognize that science alone cannot provide all the answers, and must be combined with a structured process of local participation that emphasizes shared learning and locally relevant indicators and methods. However, undertaking community participation and collaboration among different institutional and social actors is a complex process, and there are no single approaches or methodologies that have universal acceptance. Participation is not an on-off event; it is a continuously ongoing process. It takes time, resources, understanding and perseverance; but the end result should be a developmental process that involves local people – as well as their ideas, skills and knowledge. Participation of this kind can contribute towards achieving sustainability and making environmental activities more effective while simultaneously building the capacity of the involved communities to continue expand the initiative. Participatory collaborative learning is a process of knowledge generation through the interactions of people with many different viewpoints, experiences and belief systems. This process has a philosophical foundation called constructivism. Constructivism holds that “realities” are constructions of the human minds that represent the outside world. Therefore, people with different experiences may very well construct different visions of reality. Participatory collaborative learning takes advantage of this attitude towards knowledge, using a dialectic approach among community members, stakeholders, and regulators to construct a collective base of common knowledge from which to approach the issues of sustainability and the future of the community.