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Abstract:
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"Yunnan Province, Chinas biodiversity hotspot, has one of the highest amount of forests held by villagers. The area under examination is the subject of a logging ban from 1998, and has been inscribed under a World Heritage Site since 2003. For about twenty years before the logging ban, villagers had been managing a successful (and some argue sustainable) logging enterprise with the state forestry bureau. Since the ban, village forest resources have come under increasing pressure from a neighbouring timber market resulting in much pilfering of forest resources across the border. The case study illustrates the interactions between communities incentives to log, government arrangements to control the amount harvested, and its resulting demise when the policy environment prohibits the internalisation of externalities, such as putting a ban on logging while not coordinating market timber demand. However, the paper does not propose another analysis based on new institutional economics nor does it refute the utility of NIE. Rather, it seeks to illustrate the impacts of these arrangements and state policies on villager motives through the notion of environmental responsibility. By doing so, it captures issues of power, perceptions of inequities, relationships of accountability between villager and state, and within the communities. The paper seeks to answer: how do previous institutional arrangements that may appear to be successful, and long-standing state- peasant relations, mould perceptions of responsibility in governance? How in turn does that affect villager participation in forest management? The paper attempts to (1) link institutional arrangements and their impacts on perceptions of capacity and burden-sharing; (2) critically examine the notion of community through the notion of responsibility and interaction with the state. It also highlights how international processes of inscribing a place under a World Heritage Site place unequal burden of responsibilities on local populations and the local state, with potentially disempowering effects."
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