In a wide-area network with high-speed links, congestion may lead to poor utilization and the degradation of the service provided to the users. This paper presents a cooperative congestion management scheme in which the intermediate nodes in the vicinity of a congested link share their resources to offload this link before packets are discarded. The scheme uses a progression of proactive control mechanisms on selected traffic bursts: from local rerouting, through upstream rerouting and quenching, to packet discarding. It complements existing open-loop mechanisms by allowing a more liberal packet admission while preserving the underlying switching architecture. The performance evaluation results obtained via simulation show that its implementation reduces the probability of packet discarding by an order of magnitude.