Section 4. Concept files
"We know 90 per cent of the conservation science we need to know, but still we are not capable of implementing it on the ground. We need a much better understanding of social and institutional factors ..."
This section includes a number of short papers on topical subjects of relevance for social concerns in conservation. The papers provide a condensed introduction to the topics and a brief illustration of some relevant terms and concepts. The views expressed in the papers do not necessarily agree with one another, and some even challenge others. We hope this will offer both a basis to discuss issues and a stimulus to think further and debate them.
4.1 Social actors and stake-holders
Grazia Borrini-Feyerabend and Michael Brown
Different stakeholders generally possess different interests, different ways of perceiving problems and opportunities about natural resources, and different approaches to conservation. They should all be equitably represented in developing an effective management system for the resources of common interest.
Decisions and actions that affect the conservation of a given territory
or set of natural resources are taken by different 'social actors' at
different places and levels.
There is no single, general classification for such actors which, among
others, can include:
| Box 1 Community-based groups (CBGs)
Community-based groups (CBGs) are formal and informal groups of
local people (e.g., a user group, a local cooperative, a village
council, a residents' association) established to support the socio-economic
and environmental interests of their individual members or of the
community as a whole.
The naam groups are traditional village youth associations composed of women (age 15 to 21) and men (age 20 to 35). The groups have several purposes, including promoting solidarity, cooperation, friendship and loyalty among the young and carrying out socially useful tasks. Typically, a naam group engages in paid activities — such as harvesting for others or selling various products — to collect money for a once-a-year festivity. As affiliates of the national association 6S, the naam groups have begun channelling part of this money into development initiatives they run themselves, with impressive results. Example the zanjeras in the Philippines The zanjeras of the Philippines are traditional associations that aim to assure adequate and consistent delivery of irrigation water to all their members. The zanjeras distribute water rights and labour duties (e.g., for maintenance and repairs) to land ownership proportionally by means of the atar system (for instance: owning one hectare of land = one atar = receiving the water needed to irrigate one hectare + providing one day of labour per month). The zanjeras can earn income by selling water to non-members; usually such income goes to cover maintenance costs of the irrigation system (cement, construction supplies, tools, food for the workers, lawyers' fees, etc.). Many zanjeras have been in operation for more than two centuries. They allow for the costs and benefits of communal work to be distributed proportionally, and for remarkable ease and flexibility of accounting procedures (e.g., when land is subdivided, the new owners share water and labour duties among themselves). |
The most basic stakeholders in the conservation of a given territory or set of natural resources are the people living within or close to them, usually grouped under the term "local community" (or communities). In many situations these people are directly and strongly dependent on the local resources for their livelihood, cultural identity and well-being.
Communities are complex entities, within which differences of ethnic origin, class, caste, age, gender, profession and economic and social status can create profound differences in interests, capacities and willingness to invest for the management of local resources. That which benefits one group and meets conservation objectives may harm another. For example, wildlife revenues may bring revenues to men, but more abundant wildlife may create a cost to women (e.g., because of crop damage). Even people sharing the same livelihood basis or personal characteristics (e.g., farmers, unemployed youth) should not be assumed to speak with one voice. In other words, local communities generally include a variety of stakeholders. Local divergences and conflicts need to be recognized, together with the practical necessity of negotiation.
| Box 2 Non-governmental organizations (NGOs)
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are non-profit groups —
staffed by voluntary and/or professional workers — acting in
society on the basis of common concerns and specific capacities.
The aim of this Costa Rican NGO is to promote sustainable development in the region of Talamanca, Costa Rica. Work is centred on supporting community-based groups (see previous box), assisting them in their tasks (e.g., through technical advice in agroforestry and agro-ecology, organizational aid, training in a variety of skills) and promoting the conservation and sustainable use of natural resources (e.g., by sustainable yield practices, assurance of land tenure, reforestation with native tree species, strategic support to endangered wildlife, creation of protected areas and ecotourism zones, etc.). Example Zimbabwe Trust, Zimbabwe Zimtrust is registered in Zimbabwe as a welfare NGO, and in the United Kingdom as a charity. All full time staff are Zimbabwean and based in Zimbabwe. The NGO aims to relieve poverty and improve the quality of life in rural areas. Its strategy emphasizes participation of local people in identifying, appraising, planning, implementing, monitoring and evaluating their own development initiatives. It also emphasizes the development of local institutions capable of managing natural resources while generating employment and income. The trust provides managerial, technical, material and financial support to several programmes, as well as training in various skills. The best known programme co-assisted by Zimtrust is the Communal Areas Wildlife Management Programme (CAMPFIRE). |
I f it is rare for local residents to avoid diverging perspectives and
conflicts, situations become even more complex when non-local stakeholders
enter the picture. District administrators expecting to hold their post
for just a couple of years, international conservation advocates, aggressive
entrepreneurs, staff of national NGOs: they all bring forth particular
views, capacities and interests. They both enrich and complicate the process
and outcome of management.
| Box 3. Peoples associations (PAs)
People's associations (PAs) are district, regional or national bodies established with the explicit objective of representing the views and interests of a category of people (e.g., people with the same ethnicity, caste, gender, age group, profession, etc.). Typical main assets:
The Amazon's rubber tappers are extremely poor; their economic survival is tied to the preservation of the tropical forest. Their union — headed in the 1980s by Chico Mendez — came to the world's attention because of its opposition to the clearing of large parts of the forests in the state of Acre to create cattle pastures. The union demanded that forest areas — much of which under ownership that was disputed or unclear — be designated by the state government as reserves where only non-timber products could be extracted. The interests at play were powerful and ruthless. Mendez was assassinated in 1989 for his leading role in the union's struggle, but not in vain, since the following year the governor of Acre established four reserves according to the union's request. The largest of them, Chico Mendez Extractive Reserve, covers almost a million hectares of forest. Today the reserves have the support of the Brazilian government and of many international donors. |
When an agency aims at facilitating a management agreement among various
parties, at least two crucial, difficult-to-answer questions need to be
addressed. First and foremost: who are the 'legitimate' stakeholders to
take part in discussions and, possibly, in management roles? For instance,
in the case of the coastal resources of a small Caribbean island, is a
recently migrated hotelier who is interested in developing the beach front
as much a stakeholder as the fishermen and families who have lived on
the island for generations? If a forest constitutes a crucial water catchment
for several communities downstream, are those communities to be considered
stakeholders as much as the communities upstream, those living side by
side with the forest and directly depending on it for their livelihood
and income? If a management agreement for a protected area has to be signed
between a state agency and local residents, should parish-level representatives
be involved or village-level representatives? To answer questions such
as these, it may be useful to clarify and apply some considerations and
criteria, which could include:
After stakeholders have been identified, a second challenging question is: how can the stakeholders meet, communicate, build trust among themselves, negotiate and agree on a common course of action? Section 5 of Beyond Fences offers a variety of ideas for a professional team to interact with stakeholders and involve them in several ways in a conservation initiative. These may be able to help in the establishment of a management institution in which the stakeholders are permanently represented. (See also the concept file "Collaborative management for conservation" in this section.)
References
Borrini-Feyerabend, G., Collaborative Management of Protected Areas:
Tailoring the Approach to the Context, Issues in Social Policy, IUCN,
Gland (Switzerland), 1996.
IIED (International Institute for Environment and Development), Whose
Eden? Russel Press, Nottingham, 1994.
West, P. C. and S. R. Brechin, Resident Peoples and National Parks,
University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1991.
Boxes from
Borrini, G., Enhancing People's Participation in the Tropical Forests Action Programme, FAO, Rome, 1993.
4.2 Indigenous
resource management systems
Janis B. Alcorn
Indigenous resource management systems cannot be separated from other aspects of life in those areas where people depend on their immediate environment for their livelihood.
The term "indigenous resource management system" (IRM) includes local strategies, institutions, and technologies of farming, herding, hunting, fishing, and gathering. Local people often have a rich and detailed knowledge of local plants, animals and ecological relationships, sometimes called traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) or indigenous knowledge systems (IKS). People who have derived resource management systems appropriate to their local ecological and social situations are sometimes called ecosystem people, as opposed to biosphere people (such as the urbanized citizens of industrial societies) who depend on resources imported from distant places (Dasmann, 1984). The specific knowledge of ecosystem peoples is but one aspect of their resource management systems.
In most traditional societies, the Earth is understood to be the source of all that is good. Local folklore warns of the misfortunes that befall those who fail to respect the Earth, water, wildlife, and trees. These values and beliefs are learned from relatives and neighbours as part of childhood experience. They are embedded in the local language, including songs and stories, and reflected in art. The value given to nature is evident in decision-making in all spheres of life. "Making a living" and "taking care of things" are not separated from "conservation" as is the case in urban societies. The successful evolution and functioning of an IRM depend on shared cultural values, social rules, and systems for conflict management which have local legitimacy. In other words, in those areas where people depend on their immediate environment for their livelihood, indigenous resource management systems cannot be separated from other aspects of life. Appropriate social behaviour includes appropriate behaviour toward nature; e.g., correct ways to hunt animals, showing respect for the prey and its family, etc.
Agro-ecosystems
The land and waters of a group (or coexisting groups) form the agro-ecosystem within which their IRMs operate. Usually, IRMs maintain wild species and their habitats in some parts of the group's territory, while altering habitats in other areas to favour the growth of crops and livestock. For example, wild species such as edible grubs, caterpillars, and termites are often managed, insofar as their food plants and/or other habitat requirements are maintained or encouraged within the agro-ecosystem. In some cases, farmers increase the food plants of insects or game by planting or protecting them. In other cases, their habitats are normal byproducts of the farming system, such as secondary growth in fallows of swidden systems.
In weighing factors as they make farming decisions, farmers include the benefits of maintaining the habitats of useful insects and game. Agroforestry systems (the inclusion of trees in agricultural systems) are a common, complex type of IRM in the humid tropics; such systems may maintain trees among crops, create successional situations where trees follow crops in a given field, or maintain forest patches separate from fields (particularly where watershed management is a concern).
Through their IRMs, communities and individuals "embroider on a canvas of nature" (de Schlippe quote on the Zande) to create mosaics over the existing ecological diversity. Some of the "embroidery" is very subtle. The mosaics are made of many more pieces than residential areas and agricultural fields (those which outsiders usually recognize as areas under management). Areas important for fishing, hunting game and gathering fuelwood, medicine, artisan's materials and other wild products are often very important for local livelihoods and regulated by subtle mechanisms such as the rules governing inheritance of tenurial rights to use particular areas or resources. Often it is these zones that are "cut out" of village territories during demarcation of protected areas. Such alienation undermines the traditional dispute-management regime (including the authorities who traditionally allocated rights to resources in those areas) and undermines existing curbs on land/resource use.
Among ecosystem people, local feedback leads to recognition of resource over-exploitation. The response may be to substitute another species, if one is available. Or, the feedback may lead to taboos on the use of a species or its exploitation. In some cases, despite feedback, over-exploitation may lead to local extinction of a species, particularly if a substitute is not available. But if damage to the ecosystem becomes clearly visible, a shift in livelihood strategy is also likely to occur.
Institutions and tenure
In response to feedback and tensions among individuals seeking access to resources, institutions have arisen to ensure continued community access to resources and restrict use by outsiders. These institutions result from a political process of trade-offs among members of a community who must work together because of their interdependence. These are often referred to as "communal property" management systems, since access to the resources in question is regulated by the local group of individuals, as opposed to public property claimed by the state. Communal property regulation is integrated into a broader community system that defines and allocates individual and group rights to particular resources within the lands held by the community. (See also the concept file: Common property, communal property, and open access regimes.)
Tenure refers to a bundle of rights and responsibilities in regard to specified resources — who can, and can't, do what with which resource. The effectiveness of tenure systems depends on their widespread acceptance and adherence to rules governing access; on the strength of local institutions and organizations that administer local justice; and on the guidance of local leaders committed to the values of the system. Some have described traditional tenurial systems as a form of "institutional capital" (Field, 1984), because compliance is sustained with a low investment in enforcement.
Within a given community, some rights to resources may be close to individual ownership (e.g., they may include right of inheritance). At the same time, rights to other resources may be shared within the community: a form of communal property. Often, while farmers have individual tenure over crop land, the community recognizes the rights of all community members to gather from noncultivated lands. Or private individual rights (usually given to a kin group or family) may hold for part of a year, and community members have the right to use the space and its resources at other times.
Farmers may have rights to their crop yields, but may also recognize the rights of migratory pastoralists over wild forage and crop residues after harvest, as well as the rights of anyone to collect medicinal plants from the field at any time of the year. In addition, rules often regulate the harvest of particularly valuable wild resources. There may also be communal labour obligations for maintaining wild resources. Enforcement is often accomplished through social pressure, but may include stiff penalties determined by a group of elders or other traditional authoritative body. In societies that rely primarily on gathering, different groups may have rights to particular geographic areas, but still allow neighbouring groups to use their territories when local weather conditions reduce productivity during particular years. Communities often recognize reciprocal rights to share the resources of other communities during times of famine or social unrest.
While communal property is a type of tenure, in traditional societies the community to whom the resources belong includes the ancestors, the spirits, and the unborn, as well as the living people of a community. These resources are part of a unit that includes living things, air, water, land, forest, reefs, and the subsurface space. Rituals often mark the boundaries of the lands and waters belonging to the community. An individual's rights to community membership and hence to community resources are usually determined through kinship. Disputes over "who" has rights to "what resources" for "what purposes" are resolved locally through dispute-resolution mechanisms that evolve as the community changes with time.
Management rules
Local rules that restrict who uses how much of a biological resource require effective local social institutions, accepted rights and obligations, and a shared vision for interpretation and action. Traditional conservation ethics support local tenurial institutions using social pressures to influence an individual's decisions and encourage compliance. This involves not only people vested with authority within particular local organizations designed to regulate resource access; it also includes local curers and diviners who use shared ethics to identify and apply social pressure against those who break the rules. The effectiveness of the tenure system depends on widespread acceptance of and adherence to rules governing access, strong local institutions to administer local justice, and guidance by local leaders committed to the values of the system itself.
Farmers, fishers, and pastoralists generally value the diversity of available ecological zones and allocate resource use in ways that are both: a) conscious of the spatial, distributional and ecological consequences on the broader landscape-wide mosaic; and b) conscious of the social impacts of resource distribution on individuals and on the community at large. An IRM can include rules for allocation of resources within a community and/or between communities. Less obvious rules, such as those involving marriage, may reinforce the desired resource allocation. For example, Tukanoan fishing communities in the rich waters of the upper Amazon are responsible for distributing fish to other Tukanoan communities with few fishery resources (Chernela, 1993). Marriage rules require out-marriage between resource-rich and resource-poor villages and support reciprocity.
| Box 4. Caste and resource management
In India, IRMs often require cooperation among castes. These are endogamous groups who are bound to each other by kinship, reciprocal obligations and customs and have a particular profession that relies on particular set of resources. Access to the resources necessary for a given profession is restricted to a particular caste, which in turn functions as an essential element of the larger society. For example, in Uttara Kannada District of Karnataka state, there are 19 castes (Gadgil, 1989). People who fish from boats are divided into three castes, which use three different areas for fishing: river, estuary, and coast. The subclans of each of these castes use particular territories within their caste's larger territory. Three castes are agriculturalists who also collect shellfish, hunt mammals and birds. Each agriculturalist caste has other special differences; two weave mats but use different species of plants. In addition, there is one horticulturist caste, two entertainer castes (one of which taps toddy palms), barbers, washermen, artisans (potters, goldsmiths, carpenters, blacksmiths, lime-makers, stone-workers, tanners, and basket-weavers), and traders. Bamboo is reserved for the use of hide tanners, and deer can only be hunted by one of these 19 castes. All the castes work together in close-knit villages. Prior to colonization, villages and their castes managed their common forest and fishery resources successfully through their local IRMs. |
Maintaining watershed forests and fishing waters often requires cooperation within and among villages that share access to the resource. Annual rituals are often used to reaffirm villagers' respect for nature and the spirits that will punish them if they damage nature. Offerings are made to the forest and water spirits. These annual rites reaffirm villagers' commitment to each other and everyone's right to enough of the resource for subsistence needs. The rituals may initiate formal meetings where people discuss substantive issues and disputes that occurred during the previous year. They may also provide opportunities to amend regulations about resource distribution, maintenance of infrastructure (such as barriers and canals), conflict management, and watershed forest preservation.
IRMs manage game-hunting in a variety of ways similar to those used for regulating extraction of wild plants, e.g., through regulating the number of hunters (as in the lineage husbandry described by Marks, 1994), restricting access to areas that can be hunted or fished, or establishing the seasons when hunting is allowed. Hunting, like gathering, depends on the availability of natural habitat as part of the land-use mosaic. Hence, management of agricultural areas also affects game management. IRM regulation of hunting is not well-documented, but some surprisingly complex systems have been found. Traditional use of fire technology for game management, for example, relies on ecological knowledge in order to use fire in the right season and places in order to maintain the desired mosaic of microhabitats. In northern Alberta, Canada, trappers maintain fire yards (meadows, prairies, and small forest openings) and fire corridors (banks of streams, lakeshores, sloughs, and trails) to create microhabitats as a "fire mosaic" in the larger forested landscape (Lewis, 1989). Aborigines in northern Australia use fire to create a mixture of different ages of successional situations within a given habitat type, and to protect other sites from fire, enhancing the available range of habitats for game (Lewis, 1989).
Sacred forests may be strategically placed to cover different ecological zones where they provide a haven for animal reproduction and other wild resources, especially medicinal plants and plants that are not used in large quantities. Societies often delimit sacred forests in areas where most natural forest has been cut down for agriculture, degraded by overgrazing, or threatened by other land-use changes. Sometimes these forests serve as burial grounds for high-status individuals, or as the grounds of temples or homes of spirits. IRMs include a variety of means for creating and maintaining crop and livestock genetic diversity through social mechanisms such as seed trading networks, lineage ownership, etc. as well as through specific local techniques for propagation and experimentation.
Conservation as culture
While the techniques and tools of resource management are easily seen, and some aspects of traditional knowledge are easily documented, direct discussion of "resource management" is not usually a productive way to understand local IRMs. Local people often do not view nature as a bundle of resources; there may be no translation of the term "resource" in their language. IRMs themselves are rarely visible and labelled in local languages. Their patterns, however, can be identified by studying the landscape (through exercises like RRA and PRA, or by community-based mapping) and by exercises in which the outsider attempts to make the choices necessary to carry out livelihood activities as if he or she were a naive new member of the community.
Social factors are the most fragile components of IRMs; they are most susceptible to damage or loss due to changes in apparently unrelated spheres of local life. Formal schooling and loss of local language are among the most radical change agents. Cultural values that support IRMs are shared and passed on to younger people through songs, stories, ritual texts, and other verbal communications in the local language. When language is changed, the new values of the new language are adopted. These new values often do not support the old ways. Second, increasing influence of the market economy has a profound indirect influence on IRMs through transformation of non-monetary values into monetary values. It introduces the idea that land, labour, and nature are commodities, instead of a sacred heritage that binds the members of the community to one another.
The labour requirements of IRMs (building communal fish traps, patrolling forest areas, serving as game bosses, etc.) often involve reciprocal exchanges. If people choose instead to take jobs for pay, then IRMs may fail for lack of contributed labour.
The loss of authority of elders' councils and other traditional decision-makers is the third critical threat to IRMs. When the central government imposes a new local government and fails to recognize the tenurial rights of communities as mediated by traditional governing bodies, then the traditional rules regulating resource access lose their legitimacy. When a community's legitimacy as an authority has been usurped by the state, community property becomes no one's property. Hardin's famous "tragedy of the commons" model (1968) describes the problems of open access that can occur in this way.
Where social and economic conditions are in flux, migrants, contract labour, or people resettled by states often enter areas claimed by other communities. They may not recognize the subsistence values of many species, and may harvest known valuable wild products using a "deplete and switch" strategy. This type of activity often occurs along roads opened by logging or mining companies. The immigrants may be able to run IRMs appropriate to their old resources, but they often lack the knowledge and institutions necessary to manage the new sets of resources. Their activities often come into conflict with the IRMs of the original residents.
References
Chernela, J., The Wanano Indians of the Brazilian Amazon: A
Sense of Space, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1993.
Dasmann, R. F., Environmental Conservation, 5th Edition, John Wiley,
New York, 1984.
de Schlippe, P., Shifting cultivation in Africa, Routledge and
Kegan, London, 1956.
Field, A. J., "Microeconomics, norms, and rationality", Economic
Development and Cultural Change, Vol. 32: 683-711, 1984.
Gadgil, M. and P. Iyer, "On the diversification of common property
resource use by the Indian society" in Berkes, F. (ed.), Common
Property Resources, Belhaven Press, London, 1989.
Hardin, G., "The tragedy of the commons", Science, 162:
1243-48, 1968.
Lewis, H. T., "A parable of fire: hunter-gatherers in Canada and
Australia", in Johannes, R. E. (ed.), Traditional Ecological Knowledge:
A Collection of Essays, IUCN, Gland (Switzerland), 1989.
Marks, S. A., "Managerial ecology and lineage husbandry: environmental
dilemmas in Zambia's Luanga Valley" in Hufford, M. (ed.), Conserving
Culture, University of Illinois Press, Urbana (Illinois), 1994.
Poole, P., Indigenous people, mapping, and biodiversity conservation,
Biodiversity Support Program, World Wildlife Fund, Washington D.C., 1995.
4.3 Local institutions for resource management
Elinor Ostrom
One option is to build "nested institutions", which protect the interests of a larger community while allowing for flexible regulations for the smaller communities. Simply building nested structures is not enough, however.
Local institutions for resource management include a wide diversity of organizational forms. Institutions include rules and a common understanding about how problems are to be addressed and solved in a particular community. Sometimes institutions are formally established, with electoral procedures for selecting officials, specified dues (or taxes) for members, and rules that outline the rights and duties of all members. In other cases institutions are not formally constituted but still manage to regulate the use of resource systems over long periods of time. The diversity of types of local institutions is immense. It is possibly as valuable for the survival of humanity as the diversity of biological resources.
Before determining how best to govern and manage local resources, one needs to know a great deal about the type of resource system involved. Many resource systems are "public goods"; that is, one person's use of a public good does not subtract from the amount available to others. An example is enjoying the beauty of a forest or the other non-consumptive ecological services that forests provide. It should be noted that, once public goods are provided for some individuals, it is difficult to exclude others.
Other resource systems are "common-pool resources". Common-pool resources share one attribute with public goods: the difficulty and cost of excluding potential beneficiaries. They differ from public goods in regard to the "subtractability" of resource use. When one farmer diverts water onto his or her land, for example, that water is subtracted from the amount available to others. When one additional animal is put out on a common pasture, the fodder consumed by that animal is not available to others.
Many resource systems generate some benefits that are public goods and others that are common-pool resources. Forests not only provide peace, quiet, and beauty to many people; the ones who harvest timber or non-timber forest products receive personal gains and subtract resource units every time. Inshore fisheries not only provide important aesthetic values and values related to biodiversity; they also provide essential protein for local residents.
When resources are primarily public goods, the major incentive problem that public policies must face is that of 'free riding'. Those who can gain benefits without contributing to the cost of providing the benefits are trying to ride free on the efforts of others. This is also a problem when resources are primarily common-pool resources. Overuse leading to congestion or destruction of the resource system is an additional difficulty.
Both local users and government officials should be involved in designing appropriate institutions for resource management. The key challenge is to overcome the perverse incentives of ungoverned or open-access common pool resources. Designing appropriate institutions is, however, an activity with many hazards. These include the following.
Including too many or too few individuals in the institutions created to govern and manage resource systems. Ideally, all those people and groups who stand to gain or lose significantly by the controlled use of a resource system (stakeholders) should be included. However, including too many individuals who are indifferent to the long-term sustainability of a resource raises the cost of decision-making, brings in people strongly opposed to paying their share of costs (because they receive few benefits), and involves those with little direct information about local conditions. On the other hand, if too few individuals are included, those who are included may not want to bear costs that benefit those who are excluded. In addition, a smaller group may have difficulty generating sufficient resources to control and manage the resource, and their interests may not preclude depleting a resource that could be sustained over a long period.
Using a blueprint approach to institutional design. Because a particular set of rules works well in one setting, it does not necessarily work equally well elsewhere. This is true even when two sets of resources appear to be similar. Many factors affect the particular costs and benefits of governing and using a resource system. One issue, for instance, is whether or not there is "physical storage" to even out the flow of resources. This makes a substantial difference, particularly when the resources have market value.
Marketable rights to stored water work relatively well. It is possible to define a long-term safe yield for groundwater basins through careful empirical research. Once defined, water rights to this yield can be allocated. When rights are allocated, a market for them frequently emerges. Rights can then be sold to those with the highest valued use. While it is expensive to carry out the initial research to define a sustainable level of use, costs can be spread over a long period of time. Continued investment is also needed, however, to monitor the amount of water withdrawn each year. In a region where electricity is used to power pumps, monitoring electricity-use data is a low-cost method of monitoring.
These rights are often called "individual transferable quotas" (ITQs). In fishery policy, the ITQ system does not work well when fish stocks fluctuate wildly and the cost of obtaining annual information about them is high and not considered reliable by participants. Thus, no good rule is a panacea for all kinds of problems. The rules used to govern a resource need to match the attributes of the resource itself.
Presuming that local institutions will solve problems rapidly. In addition to storage, there are many other attributes of a physical resource system that may affect participants' incentive to follow some rules of use. If a resource system is relatively small and the people using it can get and share accurate information, then sustainable use should be achieved over time.
Yet learning rarely occurs rapidly. Finding rules that are efficient and fair is a trial-and-error process of great complexity. Some rules may lead to unexpected results. Some local systems will fail to find solutions. Others will falter and then learn from their mistakes. If central officials believe they can do better than local institutions, and resent sharing power, they may use any failure of a local institution as an example of what happens when authority is placed at a local level (information about the failures of national or international systems may be kept confidential or blamed on others).
Presuming that local (or national, or international) institutions are the correct scale for all governance arrangements. Resource systems do not come in one size; neither should their governance arrangements. For instance, many resource systems have diverse flows of benefits and costs that affect more than one community. Whether the long-term benefits are enough to offset high initial costs depends to a large extent on how much the future is valued by participants and on the security of their rights to the resources in the future. In addition to those benefits and costs directly tied to harvesting resources, other benefits (such as protection of biodiversity), which are non-consumptive in nature, should be considered.
One option is to build "nested institutions", which protect the interests of a larger community while allowing for flexible regulations for the smaller communities. Simply building nested structures is not enough, however. There must be sufficient long-term incentives for stakeholders at diverse scales, or tensions among them may become a problem. Again, time is needed to achieve a balance among diverse interests.
When resource systems are already stressed, it is difficult to find the time to design effective, nested institutions. Short-term harvesting prohibitions may work if harvesters understand that this will lead to rebuilding the resources. However, such measures are successful in the long term only when this time can be devoted to designing a complex, nested institution that can respond to future concerns before they reach emergency levels.
References
Ascher, W., Communities and Sustainable Forestry in Developing
Countries, Institute for Contemporary Studies Press, San Francisco,
1995.
Blomquist, W., Dividing the Waters, Institute for Contemporary
Studies Press, San Francisco, 1992.
Bromley, D. et al. (eds.), Making the Commons Work: Theory, Practice,
and Policy, Institute for Contemporary Studies Press, San Francisco,
1992.
Keohane, R. O. and E. Ostrom, Local Commons and Global Interdependence,
Sage Publications, London, 1995.
Ostrom, E., Governing the Commons, Cambridge University Press,
New York, 1990.
Tang, S.Y., Institutions and Collective Action: Self-Governance in
Irrigation, Institute for Contemporary Studies Press, San Francisco,
1992.
| <<< BACK | CONTENTS | NEXT >>> |