Browsing by Author "Dowsley, Martha"

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Developing Multi-Level Institutions from Top-Down Ancestors
(2008) Dowsley, Martha
"The academic literature contains numerous examples of the failures of both top-down and bottom-up common pool resource management frameworks. Many authors agree that management regimes instead need to utilize a multi-level governance approach to meet diverse objectives in management. However, many current operating systems do not have that history. This paper explores the conversion of ancestral top-down regimes to complex systems involving multiple scales, levels and objectives through the management of the polar bear (Ursus maritimus) in its five range countries. The less successful polar bear management systems continue to struggle with the challenges of developing institutions with the capacity to learn and change, addressing multiple objectives while recognizing the conservation backbone to management, and matching the institutional scale with biophysical, economic and social/cultural scales. The comparatively successful institutions incorporate these features, but reveal ongoing problems with vertical links that are partially dealt with through the creation of horizontal links to other groups. This case study suggests that it is possible to convert top-down institutions into multi-level governance structures, but that particular attention must be paid to the lower levels of the institutional scale. These lower, often less formal, levels also need different types of support than higher, more bureaucratic levels."
Hunting with Polar Bears: Questioning Assumptions of Passive Property
(2008) Dowsley, Martha; Schmidt, J. J.
"Research in Canada's Arctic reveals that Inuit conceptualize both hunters and polar bears as active participants of the hunt and as part of a larger socio-economic system requiring the involvement of both humans and animals. The Inuit viewpoint creates serious conflicts with Western wildlife management systems that utilize a more traditional common property approach. This finding calls into question assumptions in common pool resource theories that treat natural resources as inherently passive and fully available for human appropriation. In fact, when polar bears are understood as active participants in the hunt, the rights of use, exclusion and transfer typically associated with property ownership in Western thought require significant revision. In this paper we present an argument for the incorporation of natural resources as worthy of consideration in common pool resource decisions and identify how a tenure system of active relationships operates in Arctic Canada. We offer this argument as one example of how a common pool resource may be managed within a larger socio-economic system without the attendant assumption that natural resources exist passively outside of ownership regimes."
The Role of Regional Government in Sustainable Use of Common Pool Resources: The Case of Polar Bear Management
(2006) Dowsley, Martha
"This paper examines the role of three regional governments in the management of polar bears. In Nunavut, Canada a quota system has been used to control harvest, but the increasing de facto role of harvesters, who do not unanimously subscribe to conservation concerns, threatens the management structure. In Nunavik, Canada, no controls of polar bear harvest levels were instituted by higher levels of government and nor have grassroots organization developed such controls. In Greenland, Denmark, the conservation and economic need for quotas to be implemented by regional government has been recognized and quotas were introduced in January 2006. These three case studies show that regional governments must accept three roles for the sustainable use of polar bears. The first two are coordinating and the third is fostering. The coordinating roles are to provide a biologically appropriate level of management and to provide legal harvest control incentives to all resource users in order to offset economic incentives to over harvest. The fostering role is first to create local institutions, since these are not likely to develop as grassroots organizations, and then to assist harvesters in both understanding the conservation challenges and creating solutions."
'The Time of the Most Polar Bears': A Co-management Conflict in Nunavut
(2008) Dowsley, Martha; Wenzel, George
"Since the 1990s, Inuit traditional knowledge (Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit) has taken on a substantial role in polar bear management in the Canadian territory of Nunavut through its direct use in quota-setting procedures. A co-management conflict has arisen from an increase of hunting quotas in January 2005 for Inuit living in the Baffin Bay and Western Hudson Bay polar bear population areas. The quotas were based on Inuit observations and their conclusion that these polar bear populations had increased. Scientific information suggests that climate change has concentrated polar bears in areas where humans are more likely to encounter them, but that the populations are in decline as a result of overhunting and climate-change effects on demographic rates. During consultations with wildlife managers and through other interviews in 2005, Inuit indicated their lack of support for quota reductions. Discussions with Inuit reveal two categories of problems that, though couched in the polar bear management issue, involve the co-management system and the integration of Inuit and scientific knowledge more generally. The first relates to direct observations of the environment by both Inuit and scientists and the synthesis of such information. The second relates to Inuit conceptualizations of human-animal relationships and the incorporation of scientific studies and management into that relationship. These problems reveal that differences between Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit and scientific knowledge are not fully understood and accounted for within the co-management system and that the system does not effectively integrate Inuit cultural views into management."