I have been awarded a residential fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for the Advanced Studies (NIAS) to work on my book manuscript that is based on my longitudinal study of mobile pastoralists in the Logone Floodplain in Cameroon. The working title of the book – Management of Open Access: Making Sense of a Complex Adaptive System – reflects the two interrelated goals of the book: first, explaining how pastoralist management of open access to common-pool grazing resources works as a complex adaptive system; and second, explaining how researchers come to understand (and misunderstand) these property regimes in complex social-ecological systems. It thus both a book about the product and process of scientific research, in which I reflect on conceptual and methodological approaches that we and others have used in the study of complex social-ecological systems, including the challenges and opportunities of interdisciplinary research.