Marine social-ecological systems are threatened by multiple and overlapping human pressures (including overfishing, pollution, climate change) resulting in long-term trajectories of environmental degradation and decline. Governance and management responses to deal with these changes have been small, fragmented, incremental and inadequate. Recent years have seen a call for major transformational changes, but shifting from conventional approaches to new multilevel, participatory, flexible governance approaches has proven to be difficult. In Chile, a trend towards multilevel participatory governance has begun to be manifest in a rescaling of small-scale fisheries governance, mixing ‘top-down’ directives from government with ‘bottomup’ approaches in which fishers participate directly in policy implementation. Initially this trend took the form of a co-management approach, which granted exclusive territorial user rights (TURFs) to artisanal fishers for the management of benthic resources. More recently, in 2013, Chile passed legislation to further transform resource management through the creation of what have been termed Management Plans. The Management Plan legal framework allows the fisheries agencies, in a joint process with artisanal fishers and the fishing industry, to create a multi-stakeholder, multi-scale management committee and a fishery management plan for what are currently de facto open access areas. This talk reviews these governance transformations with special emphasis at identifying different dimensions of adaptive capacity, mainly agency and social capital. It emphasizes on the challenges of co-production of knowledge and scale dynamics as enabling conditions to tip and maintain the coastal social-ecological system into new sustainable pathways. The empirical examples provide a basis to examine both the challenges of adaptive capacity in governance transformations and how opportunities to increase adaptive capacity might be further fostered. This presentation is part of the session “Building adaptations to transformative change in coastal regions”. Contributed session oral presentation: Socio-cultural transformations and environmental change in SolomonFONDECYTFONDECYT