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PDF
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Type:
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Conference Paper |
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Author:
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Southgate, Douglas; Ramos, Hugo |
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Conference:
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Constituting the Commons: Crafting Sustainable Commons in the New Millennium, the Eighth Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property |
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Location:
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Bloomington, Indiana, USA |
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Conf. Date:
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May 31-June 4 |
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Date:
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2000 |
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URI:
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https://hdl.handle.net/10535/2095
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Sector:
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Forestry
Agriculture |
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Region:
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Central America & Caribbean
South America |
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Subject(s):
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IASC
common pool resources
institutional analysis--comparative analysis
communes
cooperatives
community forestry
agriculture
regulation--comparative analysis
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Abstract:
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"In various settings around the world, local communities have responded to mounting demands for environmental services by instituting cooperative arrangements for resolving trade-offs and fostering conservation. The value and viability of these arrangements are addressed in a large and growing literature. Game theory has been used to identify the circumstances under which individual people find it worthwhile to cooperate with one another. In addition, there have been multiple case studies documenting actual instances of resources managed (reasonably well) by groups. The traditional institutions that villages in Southeast and East Asia have employed to deal with the local spillovers inherent in irrigated rice production are a case in point.
"To be sure, traditional cooperative arrangements are not a panacea for all environmental problems. It is unrealistic, for example, to scale up village-level water management institutions to a large river basin occupied by millions of people. However, local responses to local environmental problems can also prove inadequate. Sometimes the problem has to do with turnover among the actors involved. For example, rapid migration to agricultural frontiers militates against voluntary bargains being struck to contain deforestation in areas where legal claims are ambiguous or do not exist.
"In other settings, the collapse of local institutions has little or nothing to do with their intrinsic characteristics. Quite often, the problem is one of subversion. This is obvious when the state, not distinguishing between common properties and open access resources, nationalizes village or tribal holdings. But subversion can also take less obvious forms. In particular, laws and regulations can be applied that interfere with the adaptation of community- level institutions to local realities. When and where this occurs, those institutions may be weakened irretrievably and the opportunity lost for collective environmental action at the community level.
"This paper addresses the subtle subversion of local institutions for natural resource management in Ecuador, where indigenous comunas possess extensive forested tracts, and El Salvador, where agrarian reform cooperatives own a large share of the country's best farmland. In both places, national laws and regulations prevent these local entities from acting effectively on behalf of their members interests. This institutional subversion also causes natural resources to be wasted and misused on a grand scale.
"A fundamental conclusion of the paper is that local institutions need to be given much more freedom to decide among modes of governance. For instance, management of group-owned forests could be improved if comunas were to begin functioning like sociedades anónimas (corporations)."
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