Due to the lack of appropriate market valuation, natural and environmental resources face the phenomenon of market failure, which consequently intensifies their suboptimal allocation and destruction. At the same time, existing experiences show that government interventions and mechanisms have also been ineffective in the effective management of resources such as water, rangelands, and forests, while the trends of pollution, erosion, and over-exploitation persist. In this framework, the participation of stakeholders and local exploiters is proposed as an efficient strategy for the governance of common-pool resources, and cooperatives can serve as an appropriate organizational framework for organizing this participation and reducing pressure on resources. However, the structural weaknesses of cooperatives, the abundance of inactive cooperatives, and the inefficiency of traditional models have prevented the potential of environmental cooperatives from being realized in Iran. Proposed strategies include identifying resources with the highest potential for participatory management (such as rangelands, forests, and groundwater), designing and formalizing novel and precise cooperative structures with clear definitions of membership models, institutional coordination with stewardship agencies such as the Department of Environment and the Ministry of Energy, providing financial and promotional government support during the formation stage, evaluating existing experiences like water user associations, conducting limited-scale pilot implementations prior to generalization, and utilizing the experiences of leading cooperative countries to reduce trial-and-error costs and increase the efficiency of participatory resource governance.