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Abstract:
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From the Authors' Paper:
"The residents of the settlement Moran, located along the border of the Sierra de las Minas Biosphere Reserve, have lived and farmed in the area for over a century. Despite a lack of community level rules about protecting their communal forest, a limited amount of arable land, and a strong birthrate, their forest is in no immediate danger of being cleared. This study seeks to explain the pattern of forest use, the lack of forest-conserving institutions, and the implications of this study for the development of theories regarding common-pool resources more widely. Using social and biological data, we argue that communities do not create institutions concerning a resource unless two conditions apply: first, those community members depend significantly on the resource; second, that there is a perceived scarcity of the resource. These two necessary conditions do not hold in Moran and, as a result, their communal forest is an open-access resource. Although an open-access resource, we also attempt to account for the fact that the communal forest is in good general condition.
"The literature regarding institutions has provided a great deal of work about how communities have managed to protect their communally-held natural resources, in contradiction to what was perceived by some as their inevitable destruction. Design principles (Ostrom, 1990) and their various refinements have attempted to explain how a community can overcome this social dilemma, and construct institutions or rules to help manage their resource more successfully. What is stressed in this debate is the value of the resource to the local community: if the members of a community do not depend significantly on a resource, then they will not construct rules to manage it (Ascher 1995). Less emphasized is how community members perceive the scarcity of the resource. In an economic approach to individual behavior, if a resource is valuable, but not perceived to be scarce or in danger of being scarce, then it may not make sense to individuals to incur the costs resulting from the construction and maintenance of an institution regarding that resource. This would be true no matter how much the community depended on the resource.
"In Moran, we find the first condition met: members of the community depend on the forest for a number of products. They use their communal forest's timber for construction, limbs and trunks for fuel, resinous pieces for fire ignition, undergrowth for grazing, and wildlife for eating. Individuals assert that without the products of the forest, they would not be able to survive in the area. However, the second condition does not appear to be met: residents of Moran do not perceive the forest or its products to be scarce, nor do they believe that scarcity will characterize their forest in the near future. Residents resent having to travel a little further and longer to obtain some of the forest products on which they depend. They also resent some government restrictions aimed at forest conservation. But in general they see no great decline in the forest's bounty. In addition to the oral testimony of Moran's residents, biological data also show that residents follow a type of optimal foraging theory when using the forest.
"To investigate community members' perceptions, we construct a regression model that evaluates the impact of biophysical and social causes for the number and distribution of pine stems. The biophysical factors do not emerge signficant in the model. However, the areas closer to the settlement or to the major road are significantly more likely to have been exploited for their pine than areas further away from the settlement or road. Further, the average size of the pine is significantly smaller, indicating that larger stems have been cut. These patterns of use suggest that residents follow no rules in their use of pine ... Their communal forest is thus an open-access resource."
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