Browsing by Author "Jodha, Narpat S."

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Common Property Resources and Dynamics of Rural Poverty: Field Evidence from Dry Regions of India
(1994) Jodha, Narpat S.
"Despite advances in agricultural technologies, access and availability of external inputs and supplies, income transfers through subsidies, relief etc, locally available biomass continues to be an important element in the fulfillment of basic needs of rural people, especially the poor in several parts of India including the dry tropical regions. In addition to meeting the direct needs of fodder, fuel, food, timber, fencing, thatching, etc, biomass plays crucial role in local resource regenerative processes of farming systems. These benefits not withstanding, the supplies and sources of biomass are rapidly depleting in India. The farm produced supplies suffered due to anti-biomass bias of new crop technologies favoring high grain-stalk ratios, short duration sole cropping systems and emphasis on cash crops. The natural supplies of biomass declined both due to decline in the areas of natural vegetation as well as their productivity. The heaviest burden of these developments have fallen on the rural poor, who do not have enough other options to meet the basic requirements of these products. This is illustrated by the changing situation of rural common property resource (CPRs) on which the poor depend very heavily."
Common Property Resources and the Dynamics of Rural Poverty in India's Dry Regions
(1995) Jodha, Narpat S.
"Despite a rapid decline in their area and productivity, common property resources constitute an important component of community assets in the dry areas of India (Bromley and Cernea, 1989; Magrath, 1986; Ostrom, 1988) and are one of the community's responses to the scarcities and stresses created by agroclimatic conditions. They are sources of a range of physical products, offer employment and income generation opportunities and provide broader social and ecological benefits. "This article first, presents village-level evidence regarding the dependence of poor households on common property resources, a second section comments on their decline and the causal factors, while the final section examines public interventions involving the rural poor and common property resources."
Community Management of the Commons: Re-empowerment Process and the Gaps
(1998) Jodha, Narpat S.; Bhatia, Anupam
From Pages 1 and 3: "Common Property Resources (CPRs) are broadly defined as those resources in which a group of people have co- equal use rights, specially rights that exclude the use of those resources by other people. However, looking at CPRs from 'rights' perspective may disguise the more important 'obligation or responsibility' aspects as well as the basic driving forces that help in shaping and enforcing these obligations and rights. In rural areas these rights, obligations, and enforcement mechanisms, as the society's institutional arrangements, are a product of community's collective concerns, norms and action for common good, which in turn are manifestations of what is described as 'social capital'. The latter though a social and cultural phenomenon, is a product of society's prolonged processes of adaptation to its natural resource base. The institution of CPRs or rather rights and obligation towards CPRs are a part of the adaptation process. This is more visible in fragile resource zones such as mountains and dry tropics focussed by this paper. "The key conclusion of our discussion is that effective community management of CPRs is not simply a matter of according legal rights and autonomy to the communities but an integrated process where collective stake in CPRs, culture of group action (or social capital), people's functional knowledge and adaptation to biophysical features of CPRs, and explicitly identifiable economic gains from CPRs play important role. The devolution planners, therefore, should give more attention to what makes community management of CPRs effective and structure devolution accordingly. Some possibilities to address the imperatives aforementioned factors are discussed in the paper."
From Customary to Customized Institutions for Adaptation to Change in the Mountains
(2012) Kotru, Rajan; Pradhan, Nawraj; Jodha, Narpat S.
"The effects of climate change in Nepal are pronounced among poor and marginal populations whose livelihoods are primarily natural resource based, and where climate change has a potential to cause long-term transformations in local socio-ecological systems. In the study pilots of district of Mustang community livelihoods in the mountains are characterised by subsistence agriculture. History shows that communities here are managing key natural resources like forests, rangelands, and water under traditional governance structures. The local institutional arrangement on CPR?s are organised by the local 'Mukhiya System'. Traditionally the selection of village head men or 'Mukhiya' is not only democratic, but even distribution and allocation of water are inbuilt in their social hierarchy, the informal rules and regulations according to local communities have proven to be an efficient customary governance model. However, with changing times, these institutions are being challenged since apart from non climatic factors such as dominant role of the states in shaping development policy and practice, imposing of top-down statute by the state and increased role of elected local governance bodies, and finally out-migration, climate change impacts are fast affecting such institutions. It is important to understand how traditional institutions are managing CPRs or whether their transformation to manage change is happening. The study analysis draws on Ostrom?s Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, One of Ostrom's defining contributions is the framework, used to analyze policy relevance and effectiveness of institutions. The framework also describes three levels of action: operational, collective choice and constitutional choice. These three are interconnected since, for instance, the outcomes of the 'constitutional choice' affect any 'collective choice' decision-making, which in turn affects operational-level activities. Generic data collection methods were used and data was analyzed using 'systematic qualitative technique'. Five assessment criteria were identified: validity; reliability; objectivity; acceptability to respondents. The most popular and widely used methods were one-to-one interviews and FGDs. Institutional diagnosis of CPRs was done by analysing locally pertinent issues for institutional arrangements such as ppolicy and development; markets; and out-migration. The institutions were assessed by using good governance parameters such as efficiency, equity, accountability and adaptability. The early analysis shows that roles of CPR's for sustaining rural livelihoods has changed over time as multi-stakeholdership in resource use and diversification are shaping future incomes. This means that institutional arrangements need to adjust. Moreover, effective service delivery, whether it involves health care or natural resource management, requires more than implementing policy."
IASCP and the Challenge of Managing Global Commons
(2005) Jodha, Narpat S.
"This note in a way represents loud thinking on usability of IASCP model (approaches/ processes/experiences etc. underlying the CPR focused research, advocacy and decision, effectively used in dealing with local CPRs in many countries) to address the governance or management problems of global commons. For doing so, (i) first we identify the key features of approaches/processes focused on CPRs, facilitated by IASCP directly or indirectly; (ii) next we outline the major constraints to effective governance of global commons; (iii) finally, we try to see the indicative match or mismatch between (i) and (ii). The purpose of this note is not a scholarly message but some pre-mature ideas for sharing, developing or rejecting by CPR researchers."
Mountain Commons: Changing Space and Status at Community Levels in Himalayas
(2006) Jodha, Narpat S.
"This paper deals with the imperatives of nature society interaction in Himalayas seen through CPR lens. It specifically looks at the process and factors that characterize the dynamics of the above interactions, with particular reference to the changing status and governance of CPRs at community levels. The paper puts together the synthesis of observations and inferences of different studies by ICIMOD and others in mountain regions, particularly in different parts of Nepal, India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, China and Pakistan. "In fact rural CPRs (providing sustenance supplies and services) as an important component of community's natural resource base, manifest the institutional arrangements evolved by the communities to facilitate their adaptations to nature. The above process can be more clearly illustrated with reference to specific characteristics of mountain areas, called mountain specificities, such as high degrees of inaccessibility (forcing people's crucial dependence on local resources for sustenance and hence need for their protection), fragility (favouring conservation focused, diversified and extensive type of land use practices promoting collective stakes in CPRs), marginality both physical and socio- political (promoting social cohesion for collective self help and risk sharing), diversity (making CPR as a key component of community's diversified resource use systems). This may be added that the mountain circumstances and people's traditional adaptations alluded to above, reflected the primacy of supply side factors in land resource allocation and usage including the provision of CPRs. "However, overtime the situation of CPRs, in terms of their extent and status, governance and management as well as contributions to community sustenance has changed with the process of socio-economic and administrative as well as physical and infrastructural changes in mountain areas. These changes have made the management and usage (over-exploitation) of CPRs highly demand driven, ignoring the imperatives of mountain specificities. The major agencies contributing to this change process focused by the paper are the state, market forces, rapidly differentiated rural communities and of late the spread of economic globalization. Following the percept that problems also carry seeds of their solutions, the paper attempts to indicate potential lead lines for searching options for rehabilitation of CPRs, based on closer understanding of the factors contributing to decline of CPRs."
Population Growth and Future of Rural Commons Field Evidence From Fragile Resource Zones
(1997) Jodha, Narpat S.
From Page 1: "This paper deals with some relatively unrecognised consequences of demographic changes and equally unrecognised processes behind these changes. Our thematic focus is on rural common property resources or common pool resources (CPRs) and their changing situation following the demographic changes in the dry tropical regions of India. Despite the decline in their area and physical productivity, CPRs constitute an important component of community assets in India as in other developing countries, and significantly contribute towards the people's sustenance. Hence, a need for looking at their changing status, the factors causing their decline and possible remedial measures."
Property Rights and Development: Privatisation Process of Rural Common Property Resources in Dry Regions of India
(1993) Jodha, Narpat S.
"This paper deals with the changes associated with the process of rural development in the dry tropical regions of India, which have adversely affected the communities' control and management of their common property resources (CPRs) or rather customary arrangements relating to community resources i.e. Common Property Regimes. The collective rights and obligations are central to the management and sustainable use of local natural resources represented by CPRs. In the dry regions of India (and most other parts of dry tropics as well), such rights and obligations in the past has been in the form of conventions, as well as customary rules and practices, with very little formal codification in legal documents. This is so because the CPRs represent a part of the institutional adaptations, evolved and inherited by village communities, against the strains and stresses generated by agro-climatic conditions in the dry tropics. Due to the absence of formal, legal codification and de-jure rather than de-facto nature of community rights vis a vis CPRs, it is much easier for the modern state to disregard them while extending its authority to the areas and spheres which traditionally formed the mandate of local communities. This seems to have happened in the case of CPRs and the community rights, in the dry region of India. This paper illustrates the situation by commenting on the state interventions which have disrupted the community management of CPRs and have made them open access resources with all the resource degradation and associated consequences."
Rural Common Property Resources: Contributions and Crisis
(1990) Jodha, Narpat S.
"Common property resources (CPRs) can be broadly defined as those (non-exclusive) resources in which a group of people have co-equal use rights. Membership in the group of co-owners is typically conferred by membership in some other group, generally a group whose central purpose is not the use or administration of the resource (per se), such as a village, a tribe, etc. (Magrath 1986, Bromley and Cernea 1989). In the context of Indian villages the resources falling in this category include community pastures, community forests, waste lands, common dumping and threshing grounds, watershed drainages, village ponds, rivers, rivulets as well as their banks and beds. Even when the legal ownership of some of these resources rests with another agency (e.g. waste lands belonging to the Revenue department of the State), in a de facto sense they belong to the village communities. "The first three of the resources mentioned above, being large in area and major contributors to rural people's sustenance, are more important. Unlike in high-income countries, in the case of developing countries CPRs continue to be a significant component of the land resource base of rural communities. This is more so in the relatively high-risk, low-productivity areas such as the arid and semi-arid tropical regions of India. Historically, (i) the presence of factors less favourable to rapid privatisation of land resources; (ii) community level concerns for collective sustenance and ecological fragility; and (Hi) dependence of private resource based farming on the collective risk sharing arrangements, constituted circumstances favourable to the institution of common property resources in these areas. CPRs in turn contribute to the production and consumption needs of rural communities in several ways. However, notwithstanding their private contributions, CPRs are faced with a serious crisis, as reflected by their area shrinkage, productivity decline, and management collapse. "This paper, based on field studies of CPRs in the dry tropical regions of India, presents micro-level evidence on contributions of CPRs, their present crisis, and future prospects. The evidence presented here on different aspects of CPRs, especially their decline, user groups, productivity and management aspects etc. has been corroborated by other micro-level studies on the subject in different parts of the dry regions of India. (Iyengar 1988, Brara 1987, Chen 1988, Blaikie et al. 1985, Gupta 1986, Wade 1988, Ananth Ram and Kalla 1988 and Oza 1989)."
Understanding and Responding to Global Climate Change in Fragile Resource Zones
(1991) Jodha, Narpat S.
"Global climate change, judging from the debate on the subject, is one of the major concerns of the world today. However, the concern of those closely following the debate is that it has created more panic than concrete strategies to abate and adapt to the global change. The situation seems to present a crisis where the uncertainties of predicted global change scenarios combine with the risk averse nature of decision makers to obstruct concrete action and encourage the 'wait and see' approach. However, the cumulative nature of warming may not permit the luxury of 'wait and see.' "Hence, there is a need for action, despite the uncertainties of predicted changes; but action requires concrete contexts to facilitate anticipatory measures by the decision makers. In order to resolve the problem, one should look for certainty components in the complex of uncertainties that characterize the whole problem. This paper argues that such certainty components can be projected by altering the current skewed perspectives on the problem. Taking the lead from recent conceptual work on 'cumulative change,' as against 'systemic change,' to properly understand global environmental change, the paper presents an approach to identify and use the 'certainty components.' The paper illustrates this approach with reference to the semi-arid tropical region of India and, to a limited extent, the Himalayan mountain region. "Based on work on sustainable agriculture in fragile resource zones in South Asia, the paper identifies concrete current problems and their possible solutions. The current problems and their remedial measures are linked to the impacts of future climate change in the regional context. Because of such linkages, measures to solve current problems will have the potential to facilitate adaptation to future climatic impacts, without exclusively planning for 'uncertain' impacts. Though not a substitute for direct action against global warming, this approach can help insofar as the problem is accentuated by cumulative types of changes such as deforestation and desertification. Its strong point is that it helps to integrate the concerns of current problems with those of the future impacts of global warming, and advocates dual purpose strategies to treat the two without being unduly obstructed by the uncertainties of global change-scenarios."