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Asian-American Civic and Political Participation in Boston Enclaves: The Role of Resources and Community Organizing
(2004) Hung, Richard
"Asian Americans in the selected Boston enclaves are increasingly active in multiple modes of civic and political participation. But there is quite a distance for them to catch up with the rest of the population. Having more resources in the form of financial and human capital would enhance Asian American participation, as well as narrow the gap with the rest of the population. The pattern of Asian American community organizing varies with the needs of the individual enclaves. The more resourceful enclaves focus on cultural and spiritual enrichment alone, but they may provide significant leadership to other communities with fewer resources. The less resourceful enclaves balance the two with providing social services and a voice to help the community participate more fully in the economic and political affairs of the larger society. The lack of resources in community organizing can be offset by favorable public policies as in the case of Cambodian Americans in Lowell and Lynn. The case of the city of Boston demonstrates that active organizing at the collective community level may stimulate various forms of individual Asian American civic and political participation to a point far beyond the prediction based on the financial and human resources in the enclave."
Challenges for the Co-Management of Fisheries in the Brazilian Amazon
(2004) Oviedo, Antonio; Bursztyn, Marcel
"This paper examines the experience of the co- management of fisheries in the Brazilian Amazon. Here, while considerable progress has been made in setting up a functional co-management system, it suffers from serious problems that undermine its effectiveness and threaten its long-term sustainability. Unless communities are permitted to restrict access and charge user fees, it is unlikely that the co-management system will survive once funding for project implementation terminates. There are, however, legal precedents for making the necessary design changes, thereby increasing prospects for the long term institutional sustainability of the system."
Constitution Making and Legal Reform Process in Kenya
(2004) Nunow, Abdirizak
From Introduction: "...When Kenya became independent, the constitution was not made directly by the people. It was negotiated in London at Lancaster House between the British government and representatives of Kenya's political parties who were members of the Legislative Council. The people of Kenya were therefore not consulted in the making of the Constitution, and the British Parliament, not the Kenya legislature, adopted the constitution. Since independence several amendments to the constitution have been done and just like at independence, the people had neither direct say in these constitutional changes, nor given time to debate and discuss the changes. Based on the lessons learnt from the past, the Constitution of Kenya Review Act sought to place people at the centre of the review process and aimed at making the process comprehensive, participatory and inclusive. It is for this reason that it was popularly described as people-driven. Recognizing that a constitution is a compact among the people for the good governance of their society and affairs, the process, procedure and outcome of making the new constitution was intensely negotiated and its contents largely reflected the views of the majority involved in the process."
The Development of the Maine Lobster Co-Management Law
(2004) Acheson, James M.
"In fisheries management circles, there is growing realization that traditional ways of managing marine resources are not working and that new approaches to management need to be tried. One of the most promising of these new approaches is co-management, where authority for managing fish stocks is shared between the industry and government agencies. This paper discusses the implementation of the new co-management system in the Maine lobster industry, which was initiated in 1995. The law has clearly been successful, in that lobster fishermen have been able to generate rules to constrain their own exploitive effort, which the legislature was unable to do. At the same time, a number of problems have come to the fore, not the least of which was the fact that passage of one regulatory measure caused problems for certain groups of fishermen who demanded remedial legislation. Thus, the co-management effort in Maine has moved ahead by solving a sequence of problems. But the fact that these problems are being solved places Maine in the forefront of jurisdictions experimenting with new ways to manage fisheries."
Do Participatory Watershed Management Projects Guarantee Sufficient Attention to Pro-Poor Concerns? An Indian Case Study
(2004) Kurian, Mathew; Dietz, Ton
"In recent years decentralized development approaches have been encouraged to realize the goal of poverty reduction. In the agricultural sector Irrigation Management Transfer (IMT) and Joint Forest Management (JFM) projects have been promoted with a view to improve service provision in a watershed context. Improved service provision it is presumed would improve access of resource poor households to watershed services such as irrigation and Non Timber Forest Products (NTFP’s). Improved access to watershed services it is argued would reduce poverty through increases in agricultural productivity and farm incomes. This paper draws on evidence from a post-project evaluation of a Ford Foundation supported watershed management project in northern India to argue that participatory watershed management projects need not necessarily safeguard the interests of poorer rural households. We demonstrate that given a particular institutional contract as in Haryana, irrigation service provision by contractors proved to be more effective than provision by a community organization in ensuring that water allocation, collection of Irrigation Service Fees (ISF) and routine maintenance of irrigation infrastructure was undertaken. Our analysis of benefit distribution from successful irrigation service provision, however, shows that wealthier land holding households benefited more than poorer households. Cropping intensity rates, farm productivity, acreage under dam assisted irrigation and farm incomes tended to favour wealthier households. Interestingly, although non-farm incomes reduced levels of income inequality they did not alter distribution of total incomes which continued to favour wealthier households. Further, landless households were facing increasing competition for non-farm jobs from marginal land owning households. Women, another traditionally marginalized group in the region were suffering from an increased workload since improved access to irrigation led to doubling of agricultural yields. We also noted that when it came to collecting fuelwood from catchment areas women from resource poor households bore greater drudgery when compared to their counterparts from wealthier households. In conclusion this paper highlights three issues that merit attention from policy makers: choice between policy support for public irrigation systems or private tubewell expansion and its implications for farmer participation in watershed management, expansion of non-farm employment as a way towards reducing inequality in income distribution and removal of institutional biases so that women may benefit from a process of agricultural development."
Durability in Diversity: Survival Strategies in the Himalayan Country-Side
(2004) Chakravarty-Kaul, Minoti
"This paper maps changing patterns of communal forest control and management in the Punjab during the 19th and 20th century with a view to document how graziers and farmers mutually used the shamilat forests held jointly by communities of land-holders as buffers to stabilize and sustain their natural ecosystems. As against shamilat forests, Reserved and Protected forests were created and held categories of a forest department.Three case studies exemplify how state interactions beginning in the mid-19th century affected traditional communal resource use agreements and practices. The outcome has frequently been an erosion of confidence in local management capacities and conflict with the state. But the discussion concludes by observing how communities have survived in contemporary times by constantly integrating communal management traditions to emerging situation and policies such as those of joint forest management initiatives."
The Effects of Model Project of Self-Governing Coastal Fishery in Korea
(2004) Kim, In
"Recently, many scholars of public administration had a great concern with the government's role. They asserted that the work which we had thought government should do traditionally ought to be delegated to the private sector or to the self-governance system. This kind of discourse was reviewed seriously by the Department of Fishery Management, Ministry of Maritime Affairs & Fisheries, in Korea. Traditional government initiative management system of coastal fishery could not reflect the regional fishing characteristics. The system brought about the conflicts between fishers and officers in charge as well as among fishers. The Ministry of Maritime Affairs & Fisheries has enforced the Model Project of Self-governing Coastal Fishery in Korea since July 2001 to solve those problems, and to make fishers to participate positively in fostering their sustainable production base of fishery."
The Evolution of Self-Governance in Korean Irrigation System: With Reference to the Farmers' Self-Governing Model District Program
(2004) Kim, Kwanbo
"In 2001, KARICO launched the 1st Farmers’ Self-governing Model District Program (FSMDP). It is a kind of participatory irrigation management (PIM) through the new institutional arrangements. The paper evaluates the performance of the FSMDP based on the IAD framework. To do this, three research questions can be broadly raised: 1) what kinds of factors are needed for the sustainable self-governing irrigation systems? 2) how is the 1st Korean FSMDP designed for sustainable self-governing irrigation systems? 3) What is the performance or outcome of 62 Korean irrigation systems under the FSMDP? To answer these queries, research method and data collection were conducted by KORIS DB, farmers’ perception survey, and KARICO data. First of all, the 1st FSMDP has been designed with profound sustainable self-governing factors. In terms of physical, community, and institutional attributes, 18 variables are identified for the sustainable governing irrigation systems. Second, reflecting on the propositions and three attributes in the IAD framework, most of 62 irrigation systems satisfy positively the propositions (4 propositions in physical attributes, 6 propositions in community attributes, 8 propositions in institutional arrangements). In other words, three attributes (physical, community, institutional) for sustainable self-governing systems affect very positively the performance or outcomes of 62 irrigation systems under the 1st FSMDP. Also, design principles for sustainable resource are identified in the FSMDP, which produce the positive performance and outcomes of irrigation systems under the FSMDP. Finally, most of irrigation systems under the 1st FSMDP are being operated with de jure and de facto rules under greater sustainable self-governance. These results come from the indigenous and traditional cooperation of KARIO officials and farmers before the KARICO reform. Also, such outcomes are due to the traditional experience of organizing farmers’ self- organization. The limitation of this study does not provide the in-depth discussion of specific biophysical (i.e., regions of Korea, the impact of being hilly or not hilly) and community attributes of district irrigation systems beyond the table, which will be conducted in the future research."
Examining the Interaction Among CPR Governance Principles: Boundary Problems, Collective Choice and Conflict Resolution in Interstate Watersheds
(2004) Schlager, Edella; Heikkila, Tanya
"The goal of the project is to advance the institutional literature on the governance of common pool resources. It will explore the interactions among boundary definition, collective choice processes, and conflict resolution mechanisms and how those interactions affect the durability of common pool resource governing arrangements. In doing so, this study can bridge theoretical insights from a theory of common-pool resource management with Scharpfs (1997) institutional analysis framework to better understand the structure of institutional decision situations and how those structures address the resolution of collective resource management problems..."
Farmer Managed Irrigation Systems in the Chitwan Valley of Nepal
(2004) Regmi, Ashok
"Despite many valuable lessons that have been learnt regarding resource and resource user attributes there are some relationships that have yet to be understood. One such confounding issue has been the impact of heterogeneity among the users of a community-based natural resource. Traditional commons research has mostly assumed the prevalence of homogeneity among resource users, however, it is known that differences (e.g. in socio-economic attributes, natural resource endowments, physical circumstances etc) can be present. It is mostly under assumptions of homogeneity that researchers have been able to collect evidence that shows that groups have been able to successfully self-organize. What impact does heterogeneity have on collective action is an issue that is not yet fully understood and is the focus of much contemporary research in the common pool resource area. Similarly, the relationship between the nature of the resource and the ease with which users are able to organize around it is also not straightforward. This paper is an attempt to explore these issues with respect to Farmer Managed Irrigation Systems in the Chitwan Valley of Nepal."
How to Measure Decentralization: The Case Study from Central European Transitional Countries
(2004) Petak, Zdravko
"We start our short review article by citing the words written by Wallace Oates, one of the most prominent authors in the fiscal federalism field. He indicates that decentralization, in its various forms, became an all-pervasive phenomenon, like a globalization. After all, a strong connection between globalization and localization has been repeatedly elaborated in many studies. It has been considering that such a connection is the consenquence of the failure of national government to provide an efficient way for provision of public goods and services."
The Importance of Common Knowledge in Post-War Reconstruction
(2004) Coyne, Christopher J.
"This paper applies a game theoretic argument to the situation of postwar reconstruction. It is argued that widespread coordination characterizes successful postwar efforts. Critical to this outcome is common knowledge among citizens, which allows them to coordinate their activities on conjectures that align with the aims of reconstruction. Here, the nature of common knowledge in the postwar context and its importance in coordinating citizens on reconstruction efforts is analyzed. Historical evidence from German and Japanese cinema and media, effective mechanisms for transmitting common knowledge, serve to illuminate and support these claims. The main conclusion is that common knowledge generation is key to achieving a successful outcome in the postwar situation."
Institutional Challenges to Robustness of Flood Plain Agricultural Systems
(2004) Sandberg, Audun
"The farming of natural flood plains was in many parts of the world the cradle of civilization. The transformation of risky flood plain systems to socially controlled environments were the result of an intricate interplay between demography, religion, social organisation and technology of the time. In our days there are few natural flood plains left to study in the warm regions of the world. One such flood plain is the Rufiji Flood Plain in Tanzania. Here an artificial irrigation culture has not evolved, but a robust risk minimising flood plain agricultural system based on rice, maize, cotton and peas. Through the Arab, German and British colonization, attempts were made to 'modernise' this agricultural system, resulting in new crops and varieties incorporating into the system in a way that made it even more robust. This study also analyses challenges to this agricultural system during the last 30 years: the removal of the flood plain population to 'safe ujamaa villages', infrastructure development plans and institutional challenges like individualized tenure, 'land grabbing' and urban food marked expansion."
Institutional Evolution and Social-Ecological Resilience: A Study of Irriagation Institutions in Taiwan
(2004) Lam, Wai Fung
"Taiwan’s irrigation management has faced a series of challenges in the past decades. As the country’s economy developed, agriculture has ceased to be a viable economic activity; the decline of agriculture has in turn adversely affected the incentives of farmers and the government to engage in irrigation management. Despite these challenges, the evolution of Taiwan’s irrigation systems in the past decades has been characterized by a high degree of resilience. Although irrigation management is unlike that in the good old days when farmers actively engaged in meticulous management and were willing to contribute significant manual and monetary resources, farmers’ organizing abilities and social capital accumulated over the years have largely retained, and continued to sustain a vibrant management order. The general picture is that while the sector as a whole has been in flux and gone through many changes, the vibrancy of the system remains. Drawing upon the literature of complexity studies and conceptualizing an irrigation system as a social-ecological system (SES), this paper seeks to explain and understand the institutional vibrancy and resilience of Taiwanese irrigation. The major argument is that the design of Taiwan’s irrigation institutions, as a result of years of trial and error, has been able to cope with the dynamics inherent in the SES. The institutions allow various actors and organizations at different levels to engage in continuous learning and adaptation. I shall examine how disturbances of different types have impact the structure and dynamics of the Taiwanese system, how individuals and organizations at different levels have responded to the disturbances, and how these responses have constituted the systemic response to the changing environment."
An Institutional Grammar of Mores
(2004) Crawford, Susan P.
"Theories and results in various subfields of politics point to the importance of norms in political behavior. Attention to norms and the impact of norms on political behavior emerges in institutional analysis work in the Workshop tradition, in advocacy coalition theories of policy choice, in evidence for commitment theory in interest groups, in regime theory in international relations, in work on social capital, and in formal analysis of behavior in collective choice situations, to name just a few. Tocqueville considered 'mores' to be key to the success of the American experiment with democracy and recognized the influence of religion on these mores. This paper applies the grammar of institutions to analyze a few ways in which norms and religious institutions currently influence political choice and social change."
Modernization and Reform of Dutch Waterboards: Resilience or Change?
(2004) Toonen, Theo A. J.; Dijkstra, Gerrit S. A.; van der Meer, F. M.
"Given its geographical conditions water management has always been a vital precondition of life in the Netherlands. This in particular pertains to the issues of water quantity (waterkwantiteit), water quality (waterkwaliteit) and water containment(waterkering). Water and water management in all its manifestations certainly in the Netherlands may be considered as 'Commons' in more than one way. Commons consists of natural (water, fisheries, and nature areas) or cultural (man-made) resources (dykes; polders, markets; institutional designs, institutions; safety, protection, trust). Specific institutional arrangements – sometimes ‘commons’ in themselves - are needed to guarantee the durability and sustainability of the use of these resources."
Nested Institutions and the Creation of Demand for Redistribution
(2004) Tao, Jill L.
"Redistributive policies at the local level of government have been labelled a losing proposition for some time. The reasons for this labelling, however, have been largely based upon the hypothesis that local government officials and local business officials have similar incentives, none of which represent the interests of the poor. One response to this supposition has been to posit that when the ranks of the poor increase, or when the gap between rich and poor becomes unsupportable, the demand for redistribution will also increase. However, much recent work at the national and nation-state level has called such suppositions into question, providing little empirical support for a theory of demand-driven redistribution. What such studies fail to provide, however, is an adequate accounting for why such demand appears to be absent. This study examines two potential explanations for a lack of demand from the poor: 1) a lack of sufficient political representation; and 2) the endogenous structuring of policy preferences for policymakers. This is accomplished by examining office holders and their policy behavior at the local level of government in areas where demand for redistributive policies should be present. Preliminary findings indicate the structuring of policy preferences by the state is important in determining how policymakers respond to the needs of the electorate, but that the issue of representation plays a far more important role, thus providing evidence that as long as political barriers to entry remain in place, the assumption of self- interested demand driving policy remains far-fetched."
Picking among the Ruins: Which Way Forward in Managing the Bluff Oyster Fishery?
(2004) Knight, Peter
"The town of Bluff on the Foveaux Strait in southern New Zealand is the centre of the world's richest and last remaining wild oyster fishery. For over 150 years many generation of oyster fishers have engaged in a vibrant economy that has sustained the town and established a unique relationship of people to land. But today the fishery is in ruins from overfishing and disease. Dredges have mined the seafloor of Foveaux Strait until very little remains of the original seafloor benthos from which the oyster beds developed. The oyster-killing disease bonamia is rampant, and the productivity of the fishery is only a small fraction of what it once was. The demise of the Bluff oysters is matched by a social breakdown of the oyster fishing culture of Bluff. The introduction of individual transferable quotas to the fishery resulted in the dispossession of many oyster fishers. A number of conservationminded fishermen with long histories in managing the fishery are presently excluded from an official role, excluding with them an important diversity of opinion. "Management of the Bluff oyster fishery has historically taken place within a framework of interactions between the national and the local level. This framework changed dramatically in the mid-nineties with the introduction of the Quota Management System (QMS). Together with the institution of individual transferable quotas, the QMS has led to a perception in the community that the fishery has been captured by the quota-owners, who, operating under a commercial paradigm, fail to acknowledge the extent of the environmental crisis that has been caused by the history of exploitation in the fishery. The quota-owners are organized under the umbrella of an industrial consortium know as the Bluff Oyster Management Company (BOMC). The BOMC derives its power from the Ministry of Fisheries (MFish), whose policy it is to devolve management power to quota owners."
Polycentric Governance as a Means to Limit Corruption
(2004) du Pisanie, Johann
"In September 1996, the president of the World Bank, James D Wolfensohn, committed the Bank to 'fight the cancer of corruption'. This drive helped catalyze a global response to the problem of corruption, which is endemic in many countries. Since Wolfensohn’s announcement, the literature on corruption has mushroomed. This literature covers many aspects of the phenomenon, such as its nature, its costs and benefits, its optimal quantity and the possible means of limiting corruption. Numerous anticorruption measures are mentioned and discussed, from writing anticorruption laws and establishing anticorruption units to revamping systems of governance. In respect of the latter, some attention has been paid to the transformation of totalitarian to democratic systems to governance. However, as far as could be established, little attention has been paid to different kinds of democracy and, in particular, polycentric versus unicentric democratic governance as a means of limiting corruption. This paper aims to stimulate discussion on the latter topic."
Robustness and Large-Scale Change in Social-Ecological Systems: The Hohokam of the Phoenix Basin
(2004) Anderies, John M.
"Societies frequently generate public infrastructure and institutional arrangements in order to mediate short-term environmental fluctuations. However, the social and ecological consequences of activities directed at dealing with short-term disturbances may increase the vulnerability of the system to infrequent events or to long-term change in patterns of short-term variability. Exploring this possibility requires the study of long-term, transformational change. The archaeological record provides many examples of long-term change, such as the Hohokam of the Phoenix Basin. The Hohokam occupied the Phoenix Basin for over a thousand years and developed a complex irrigation society. In the 14th century, Hohokam society experienced a reduction in complexity and scale possibly associated with regional climatic events. A framework for exploring robustness in coupled social-ecological systems is briefly presented and applied to the Hohokam Cultural Sequence. The possibility that the success of the Hohokam irrigation system and associated social structure may have increased their vulnerability to rare climactic shocks such as those that occurred in the 14th century will be explored."
The Robustness of Montane Irrigation Systems of Thailand in a Dynamic Human-Water Resources Interface
(2004) Shivakoti, Ganesh P.; Bastakoti, Ram Chandra
"As an initial effort to understand the Asian irrigation systems dynamism and their robustness overtime, this paper examines two irrigation systems of Kok river system within Mekong river basin in Northern Thailand in the context of changing governance mechanisms and evolution of technological and market forces. Since the processes involved in first starting collective action are different than those of maintaining them overtime, the paper examines dynamism over three stages; initial, medium and long-term. During the initial stage of starting an irrigation system various attributes of the users including the benefits they could obtain from starting an organization to the skill of public entrepreneurs of bringing them together affecting trust have been examined. The medium stage of irrigation systems development inquiry includes the process of development of rules, and the level of autonomy to develop their own rules over time. The long term stage focuses its analysis of external factors affecting the sustenance of these irrigation systems with special reference to the impact of changes in economic prices and labor mobility on the one hand and changes in the authority over irrigation and the availability of funding for irrigation on the other. The analysis is based on the framework developed by Ostrom, Anderies and Janssen (2003) in the linkages and relationship between the five elements, namely: resource, resource users, public infrastructure, public infrastructure providers and external disturbances. Thus, the paper evaluates the dynamism and robustness of irrigation systems overtime at operational and collective choice levels of analysis."
Social Capital, Survival Strategies, and Their Implications for Post-Conflict Governance in Liberia
(2004) Sawyer, Amos
"This paper investigates how people created, adapted and used social capital for survival and conflict resolution during more than a decade of violent conflict in Liberia and the potential of such capital to contribute to post-conflict peace-building and self-governance."
Tiebout Sorting in Metropolitan Areas: Is it Services and Taxes, Race and Ethnicity, or Something Else?
(2004) Bickers, Kenneth N.; Engstrom, Richard
From Introduction: "...In this paper, we tackle the issue of sorting at the metropolitan area by utilizing an alternative methodological approach that permits us to avoid problems plaguing earlier studies. For this analysis, we take two metropolitan areas as our test cases: the Houston MSA and the Atlanta MSA. For each metropolitan area, we employ Monte Carlo computer simulations to randomly create a large number (approximately 500) of metropolitan 'jurisdictional' groupings subject to three constraints: first, using census tracts as our basic building blocks we randomly group tracts together such that our hypothetical jurisdictions equal in number the existing number of general purpose jurisdictions in each MSA; second, the tracts are grouped so that each hypothetical jurisdiction is fully contiguous (i.e., no census tracts fail to touch at least one other tract in the jurisdiction; and third, the populations of each jurisdiction are within five percentage points (plus or minus) of existing jurisdictions within the metropolitan area."
Tocquevillian Analytics: A Tool For Understanding Democracy in Africa and the Non-Western World
(2004) Gellar, Sheldon
"Most social scientists see Tocqueville as a brilliant commentator on American political institutions and culture who captured the essence of American democracy. Others who know his writings on France, England, Ireland, Germany, and Switzerland appreciate his interdisciplinary talents in history, sociology, comparative politics, and normative political theory. They see Democracy in America as an effort to understand the processes of democratization and its future in the western world. Although social scientists and democratic theorists often refer to the work of Alexis Tocqueville (1805-1859) in their analyses of American and European societies, they rarely apply his methodology and insights to the study of democracy in the non-western world. This paper argues that Tocqueville analytics as reflected in Tocqueville’s multilayered concept of democracy and the issues and concerns he raised are particularly important for understanding the movement towards democracy and the prospects for sustaining it in Africa and the non-western world."
Towards Design Principals for Nesting in Australian Watershed Management
(2004) Marshall, Graham R.
"Despite the complexity of watershed management, policy-makers in Australia and other countries have given little systematic attention to the challenge of learning how to organise it effectively. Meanwhile, evidence has emerged that community-based organisational systems with enduring success in addressing complex problems of natural resource management are likely to consist of ‘multiple layers of nested enterprises’. This paper considers the contribution that organisational nesting of this kind could make to improving the performance of watershed management programs, particularly in Australia. After reviewing the theoretical advantages of the organisational nesting concept for complex problems, the focus of the paper shifts to identifying on the basis of a literature review a set of preliminary design principles that, after an appropriate process of ‘ground-truthing’ and refinement, might be used to guide application of the concept to watershed management, at least in Australia. The set identified contains 24 preliminary design principles. This includes 10 structure-related principles organised under four headings (i.e., base-level units, boundaries, rules, and subsidiarity) and 14 process-related principles organised under 12 headings (i.e., catalysing voluntary cooperation, formalising organisational processes, pacing organisational growth, purposefulness, recruiting leadership, learning, participation in decision-making, monitoring and enforcement, conflict resolution, government recognition, deliberative decision-making, and leading by example). The value of this set for actual watershed management programs in Australia is to be explored over the next few years through case studies of three such programs."
The Travesty of a Common: The Management and Use of a Common in Changing Flanders (18th-19th Century)
(2004) De Moor, Tine
"The problems accompanying-–but not necessarily caused by--the common use of goods have been the object of social and scientific debates since Antiquity. Commons have played a central role in the search for the optimal way in dealing with such problems. This is not surprising: until the middle of the nineteenth century the common use–mainly for agriculture- and management of land was a current practice in Europe. Common land was in most Western European countries eliminated during the 19th century 'liberalisation wave' that swept through Europe. Until then, commons had provided an important contribution to the mixed agriculture system as a whole: the cattle on the common provided fertilisation essential for the arable fields, the fuel (peat, cuttings of wood), building materials, heath and so on. With the increased external inputs (fertilisation, seeds) and the increasing specialisation and commercialisation of agriculture the necessity of the commons gradually disappeared. Notwithstanding the assumed importance of commons in history, the number of historical studies on the subject is rather limited, except for the UK-–where the privatisation (enclosures) of the commons is supposed to have had far-reaching social consequences for the users. In their study, historians have mainly focused on two aspects: the disappearance of the commons and the consequences of this for the commoners' social welfare, whereby the commoners were almost always studied as groups, not as individuals with different strategies towards the use of the commons. Researchers from the non-historical social sciences have however concentrated primarily on the effects of individual behaviour on the functioning of the common as a system of resource management and on the optimisation of management and use of common pool resources, a theme that historians have only recently discovered."
Understanding the Development of Co-Management in a Modern Fishery: Rock Lobster Management in New Zealand
(2004) Yandle, Tracy
"Key issues in self-governance are why co-management organizations develop, and how the characteristics of the organization influence their success. Traditionally, it is argued that co-management regimes grow from long-lived community based regimes. Closely linked are the concepts of social capital and civic engagement which Putnam (1993) identifies as key to the development of democratic self-governing societies. However, it is also argued that the co-management can develop out of strong property rights regimes that provide incentives to take on co-management or self-management responsibilities. By examining a recent case where co- management has developed from a regime that included elements of bureaucracy-based regulation and of market-based regulation (ITQs), it is possible to tease out which of these variables drives the development of co- management in a setting similar to those that many industrialized fisheries face."
Watershed Institutions and Collaborative Environmental Management: Linking Self- Governance to Existing Governmental Institutions (A Research Proposal)
(2004) Koontz, Tomas
"A rich body of theoretical and empirical knowledge has been building about common pool resource management. From the work of Olson and Hardin providing models of collective action, we have moved to empirically-grounded theories from Ostrom and others. Much of this emphasis has been on the question of self-governance, and on the local scale. But increasingly scholarship aims to develop understanding of larger scale issues, including those with many resource users whose livelihood may not depend significantly on the resource in question. Moreover, self-governance by an isolated community is often less prevalent than is interconnected, multi-jurisdictional decision making for managing common pool resources. In the proposed research I am interested in the interface between stakeholders and government officials with jurisdiction over common pool resource management. In particular, my focus is on watershed management, which typically crosses multiple jurisdictional boundaries and involves a wide range of stakeholders with varying levels of concern about the resource."
What Kind of Social Scientist Was Tocqueville?: A Reply to Gary Wills
(2004) Craiutu, Aurelian
"Tocqueville has become, so to speak, the 'unsurpassable horizon' of our times. How can we account for the current fascination with Tocqueville? As Cheryl Welch argued, we love to converse with Tocqueville because his work 'seems to retain a greater measure of normative and exploratory power—and intellectual provocation—than that of many other nineteenth-century thinkers' (Welch 2000, 1). Tocqueville, who aspired to create a new science of politics, has manifested a unique power to bring certain political anxieties into sharper focus. His writings have been creatively appropriated by thinkers on both the left and the right, who admire him either for his insights into democratic citizenship and the art of association or for his defense of decentralization and self-government and his skepticism toward big government."

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