Browsing by Author "Menzies, Nicholas K."

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Communities and Their Partners: Governance and Community-Based Forest Management
(2004) Menzies, Nicholas K.
"A number of agencies closely associated with community-based forest management have recently commissioned reviews to assess the impacts of opening the arena for decision making and benefit sharing in forest management to a wider spectrum of players. This article draws on the findings of a set of reviews commissioned by the Ford Foundation and on an interactive process in which partners in activities supported by the Foundation had opportunities to respond to the conclusions drawn by the reviews. It analyses how governance is emerging as a central concern of all the partners involved in efforts to forge new relationships between government agencies, forest communities and intermediaries such as NGOs that work with them. All those involved in the process considered that the scientific bureaucratic model that has dominated forest management since the nineteenth century and earlier has reached an impasse marked by conflict between a spectrum of stakeholders, and by questions about the biological or ecological sustainability of current harvesting and production practises. Community-based forest management will not in itself resolve these tensions and conflicts, but it does have the potential to play an important role in sustainable natural resources management strategies if there is a realignment of relations between households, community and government. The reviews, therefore, call for more emphasis on crafting inclusive, equitable and accountable mechanisms to articulate and mediate relations between partners from the national and even international level to the local."
Rights of Access to Upland Forest Resources in Southwest China
(1990) Menzies, Nicholas K.; Peluso, Nancy L.
"This paper looks at the ways in which changes in forest policy in China over the lst forty years have affected six villages in Songming County, Yunan Province. It emphasizes the importance of village and household research in understanding the ways which policies are implemented and their effects on patterns of development. Based on data gathering during an exercise in rural household surveys in Yunan, we suggest that an emphasis on controlling access to the resource may be less effective than providing incentives for communities to manage their resources, and that where incentives do exist, there is a real danger that bureaucratic procedures may stifle those incentives, a mounting to another set of controls."
Rights of Access to Upland Forest Resources in Southwest China
(1991) Menzies, Nicholas K.; Peluso, Nancy L.
"This paper looks at the ways in which changes in forest policy in China over the last forty years have affected six villages in Songming County, Yunnan Province. It emphasizes the importance of village and household research in understanding how policies are implemented and their effects on patterns of development. Based on data gathered during an exercise in rural household surveys in Yunnan, we suggest that an emphasis on controlling access to the resource may be less effective than providing incentives for communities to manage their resources, and that where incentives do exist, there is real danger that bureaucratic procedures may stifle those incentives, amounting to another set of controls."