This article is a response to the excellent comments made by Luigi Curini, Carlo Donolo, and Guglielmo Wolleb on my earlier article on Collective Actions and Local Development Processes. In my response I have addressed the key questions raised by these three distinguished social scientists. I also discuss the multi-tiered, structured framework useful for analyzing patterns of interactions and outcomes obtained in a diversity of social-ecological systems (SESs). I hope this tiered framework is the beginning of a cross-disciplinary effort to develop more structured theory in general for systems in which there are humans interacting with resource systems.