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Acesso à Agua Para Consumo Humano e Aspectos de Saúde Pública na Amazônia Legal
(2012) Giatti, Leandro Luiz; Cutolo, Silvana Audrá
"A região da Amazônia Legal no Brasil apresenta desafios quanto ao acesso à água para sua população, mesmo com grande abundância de recursos hídricos. Este estudo tem como objetivo explorar condicionantes de acesso à água para consumo humano, considerando aspectos ambientais, socioculturais e de infraestrutura. Para isso, analisam-se: a precária cobertura por saneamento básico na região, por meio de macroindicadores; e estudos de caso em distintas escalas espaciais: comunidade indígena; cidade de pequeno porte, comunidades ribeirinhas, e uma cidade de grande porte, Manaus, maior centro urbano da Amazônia Pan-Amazônica. Por fim, empreende-se uma discussão interdisciplinar sobre as dificuldades de acesso a água no âmbito da saúde pública, explorando a importância de aspectos que se manifestam de modo evidente nas escalas espaciais."
Analysing Access to Tropical Forests: Analytical Implications of Critical Realism for Community Forestry Management Research
(2008) Weigelt, Jes
"This paper argues that much of the literature on community forestry management does not pay sufficient attention to societal structures that impinge on access to tropical forests. It suggests that the philosophical school of Critical Realism has a lot to offer as a basis for research on societal structures. First, it builds on a dialectical understanding of structure and agency. Critical Realism suggests that the interplay of structure and agency is separable over time. This allows embedding the actor in the structures that impinge on his or her access. Second, the ontology of Critical Realism offers a methodological basis to map structures. Given the strategic selectivity of structures that discriminate against poor people's access, this is a substantial contribution to institutional analyses of forest access."
Aral Sea Basin Heads for a Brighter Future
(2003) Falkenmark, Malin
"A recent Unesco study observed that the Aral Sea basin has everything necessary for a bright future. Water availability is not a limiting factor for reaching the socio-economic development objectives in terms of health, nutrition and wealth. This article examines why."
Balance and Imbalances in Village Economy: Acces to Water and Livelihoods in Three Villages of Central Thailand
(2002) Molle, François; Srijantr, Thippawal; Latham, Lionel
"Village economies in Asia are undergoing a growing process of integration to the national and wider cultural and economic spheres. Factor endowments, transportation facilities and other socioeconomic and human factors account for differentiated responses. In the Chao Phraya Delta, Thailand, access to water is a crucial factor governing agricultural diversification and intensification. This paper compares the household structure, the land resources, the means of livelihood, sources of income and their distribution among households in three villages with contrasting levels of water control. It is shown that while there is a huge gap in land productivity among the three villages, economic diversification, both agricultural and non-agricultural, operates a rebalancing of household incomes, without however totally bridging the gap. The implications for planning of water resource development are discussed."
Better Land Access for the Rural Poor: Lessons from Experience and Challenges Ahead
(International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), 2006) Cotula, Lorenzo; Toulmin, Camilla; Quan, Julian
"This study highlights lessons from recent policy, law and practice to improve and secure access to rural land for poorer groups. It focuses on Africa, Latin America and Asia, while also referring to experience from Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States. The study examines the links between land access and poverty reduction, shifting approaches to land reform, different means to secure land rights and to achieve more equitable land distribution, the particular vulnerability of certain groups to losing their land rights, and the role of addressing land rights within conflict resolution and peace building. It concludes with broad recommendations for protecting land rights of poorer and more vulnerable groups."
Biting the Bullet: How to Secure Access to Drylands Resources for Multiple Users
(2006) Mwangi, Esther; Dohrn, Stephan
Close to one billion people worldwide depend directly upon the drylands for their livelihoods. Because of their climatic conditions and political and economic marginalization drylands also have some of the highest incidents of poverty. Pastoral and sedentary production systems coexist in these areas and both very often use common property arrangements to manage access and use of natural resources. Despite their history of complementary interactions, pastoralists and sedentary farmers are increasingly faced with conflicting claims over land and other natural resources. Past policy interventions and existing regulatory frameworks have not been able to offer lasting solutions to the problems related to land tenure and resource access; problems between the multiple and differentiated drylands resource users, as part of broader concerns over resource degradation and the political and economic marginalization of the drylands. This paper discusses enduring tension in efforts to secure rights in drylands. On the one hand are researchers and practitioners who advocate for statutory law as the most effective guarantor of rights, especially of group rights. On the other side are those who underscore the complexity of customary rights and the need to account for dynamism and flexibility in drylands environments in particular. It explores innovative examples of dealing with secure access to resources and comes to the conclusion that process, rather than content, should be the focus of policy makers. Any attempt to secure access for multiple users in variable drylands environments should identify frameworks for conflict resolution, in a negotiated manner, crafting rules from the ground upwards, in addition to a more generalized or generic identification of rights. Elite capture and exclusion of women and young people continue to pose significant challenges in such decentralized processes. For rights to be meaningfully secured there is need to identify the nature and sources of threats that create insecurities.
Challenges of Namibian Administrative Structure to Implement the Access to Genetic Resources and Benefit Sharing Legislation
(2015) Watanabe, Shigeo; Farrell, Katharine N.
"Starting in the 1980s discussion regarding how to manage and govern transactions of genetic resources and related traditional knowledge has been increasing. With the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (UN-CBD) and later the Nagoya Protocol, institutions have been developed in this area intended to regulate access to genetic resources and the sharing of associated benefits (ABS). The basic idea of ABS is to create the missing governance structure that can regulate the allocation of these valuable resources and the associated transaction flows of biotrade such that transferred benefits serve as incentives for ensuring that local communities can continue in-situ resource conservation. ABS was conceptualized as the third objective of the UN-CBD and formalised as an international agreement in the Nagoya Protocol, which mandates signatories to enforce it through national legislation. The present text addresses the case of Namibia, a lead country in ABS negotiations, considering the mechanisms by which its ABS legislation has been implemented. This study depicts the Namibian administrative context within which ABS governance policies are implemented, using the analytical framework of Hagedorn’s Institutions of Sustainability, which is based on transaction cost theory and the concept of bounded rationality drawn from Simon. We explore ABS legislation implementation as a problem of administrative resource allocation, related to rules concerning how the administrative work that is characteristics of bureaucracies is assigned and shared, including how power and resources are distributed and how this impacts actor motivations. Following Charmaz, a methodology of grounded theory with abduction was employed to collect qualitative used in the study. We find that the administrative scope and functions of the ABS legislation are regulated by numerous ministries, with the Ministry of Environment and Tourism holding asymmetric power advantages, and designed institutional performance, including the formation of multi-stakeholder administrative body, entailing problems associated with information allocation, distribution of rights and mandates, and in the allocation and distribution of human resources across ministries. Our study suggests that power asymmetries between actors, in terms of jurisdiction, control of financial resources, information, and enforcement rights, associated with different rationalities, appear to play an important role in constraining implementation. We anticipate that co-administration of a meta-agency would be the lowest cost implementation option and suggest that the mechanisms of the implementation problem encountered in Namibia can be logically explained through reference to the concepts of Hagedorn’s IoS and addressed by giving closer attention to the mechanisms involved."
Common Property Resource System in a Fishery of the Sao Francisco River, Minas Gerais, Brazil
(2004) Tho, Ana Paula Glinfskoi; Nordi, Nivaldo
"Studies of local natural resource management institutions have contributed to many co-management agreements around the world and also have demonstrated how communities interact with their environment through their culture and social organization. Common Property Systems (CPS) which define duties and rights in the use of natural resources are examples of these interactions. But as Ostrom (1990: 14) notes: 'getting institutions right...is a process that requires reliable information about time and place variables, as well as a broad repertoire of culturally acceptable rules.' One of the potential benefits of co-management institutions is the inclusion of a variety of information systems and knowledge bases. With extensive environmental resources, it is difficult for either the state or local user groups to have a complete understanding of the condition of the entire system. Local users have intensive knowledge and understanding about day to day local uses and conditions, while national governments and international NGOs have financial and administrative resources to tackle large-scale scientific research. "In this paper we examine the role of local ecological knowledge in the management of one common pool resource, the artisanal fishery at Buritizeiro, Minas Gerais state, Brazil. The research, which focused on the formation of local institutions and the factors which contributed to the development of these institutions, was carried out between 1999 and 2001 with 7 field trips of 15 days each. Open and structured interviews were conducted, complemented by direct observation of the fishing activity. During three field trips, the fishery yield was recorded for 175 fishery shifts. "Approximately 30 fishermen share the rights to access and use of four principal fishing spots in the rapids. In addition to operational rules, decision-making rules related to management, and exclusion and alienation rights have been developed. Local ecological knowledge helps the fishermen identify most productive fishing spots, has been instrumental in determining the limits of the CPS area, maintains fishery yield (average: 7.29kg/fisherman/day), and has provided the basis for institutional rules regulating the spatial and temporal limitations for each user. As the number of resource users has increased over the years due to the lack of other job opportunities in the region, this CPS has demonstrated flexibility in the rights to access and use, avoiding conflicts among the users and ensuring its longevity. The success of this CPS can help in the development of appropriate policy for fishery co-management plans in this area."
Commonisation and Decommonisation: Understanding the Processes of Change in the Chilika Lagoon, India
(2011) Nayak, Prateep Kumar; Berkes, Fikret
"This article examines the processes of change in a large lagoon system, and its implications for how commons can be managed as commons in the long run. We use two related concepts in our analysis of change: commonisation and decommonisation; 'commonisation' is understood as a process through which a resource gets converted into a jointly used resource under commons institutions that deal with excludability and subtractability, and 'decommonisation' refers to a process through which a jointly used resource under commons institutions loses these essential characteristics. We analyse various contributing issues and dynamics associated with the processes of commonisation and decommonisation. We consider evidence collected through household and village level surveys, combined with a host of qualitative and quantitative research methods in the Chilika Lagoon, the largest lagoon in India, and one of the largest lagoons in Asia. We suggest that in order to keep the Chilika commons as commons will require, as a starting point, a policy environment in which legal rights and customary livelihoods are respected. With international prawn markets stabilised and the 'pink gold rush' over, the timing may be good for a policy change in order to create a political space for negotiation and to reverse the processes causing decommonisation. Fishers need to be empowered to re-connect to their environment and re-invent traditions of stewardship, without which there will be no resources left to fight over."
Community Mapping in the Philippines: A Case Study on the Ancestral Domain Claim of the Higa-onons in Impasug-ong, Bukidnon
(2004) Abeto, Randy; Calilung, Zeff; Talubo, Joan Pauline; Cumatang, Benny
"In the Philippines, the battle of indigenous communities for their rights to their domains has been, and remains to be a hard-fought struggle."
Community Mapping, Natural Resources and Indigenous People Movement in Indonesia
(2004) Kurniawan, Idham; Hanafi, Imam
"Community right of the land and its natural resources is one of inheritance rights gotten from a long social process, often named as A Prima Facie. The right is not given by state, so that to accommodate the rights, state requires to confess the Community right of the land and its natural resources. The biggest problem relating to this Community right in Indonesia this time is, that there is too much constraint must be faced to accomplish the rights. It’s caused by the overlap of the government regulation and immeasurable understanding to the Community right of the land and its natural resources. For instance: Regulation No. 5/1960 about the specifics of agrarian and its under related regulations, embracing the existence of the Indigenous people/community right of land as private domain. However, the forestry regulation embraces the Indigenous people/community rights as public domain (under power of state). In 1980 National Agrarian Agency (BPN) and Department of Forestry met an administrative agreement that Agrarian Regulation (UUPA) with all of its sub regulations have arrangement jurisdiction outside forest area, while Forestry Regulation with all of its sub regulations scope state forest area. But claim for 'state forest area', covering more than 60% continent, is also questioned for its accuracy since until now only 10% of state forest area has succeeded to be confirmed. On the other side, collision to the existing regulation and arbitrary is still a serious problem of administration. To mention the recent real fact is where government has given mining/exploitation right in the protected forest areas to more less the 22 mining companies, against Forestry Regulation No. 41/1999. That’s why land and natural resource conflicts appear progressively. As a networking organization, in this paper, we would like to view broader case study. We would not address to a specific community, but pointing to national problem and its solution recommendation taken by JKPP."
Contested Grounds: The Battle over Forest Resources in Nepal in a Time of Maoist Uprising
(2004) Chaudhury, Moushumi
From the Introduction: "...The issue of how access to natural resources is being affected by civil war in Nepal is a new area of research. This paper will make a rudimentary attempt to demonstrate how such a political movement has the potential to change the lives of migratory collectors of medicinal plants in the early stages of the commodity chain relating to harvesting (see Annex 1 for Commodity Chain of Medicinal Plants in Nepal). This paper will reveal how access to forests has evolved through different tenure regimes over time. It will show that overlapping forest tenure systems of common, state, and open property rights that the state and collectors maintained, never completely limited access to forests for the collectors, until the Maoist insurgency, which started in 1996. The current Maoist movement, through extortion and fear, may seriously threaten access to forests, and therefore, the ability of collectors, who are most dependent on the medicinal plant trade, to harvest them for their income. This is likely to take place in Eastern Nepal where preliminary research on the affect of Maoists on natural resources was conducted. In order to fully understand this situation, the relationship between major players such as the state, Maoists, and collectors of medicinal plants, will be analysed through a political ecology and 'bundle of rights' approach. The paper will also provide a synopsis of the ways in which the medicinal plant trade is being promoted in Nepal and a discussion about the extent to which migrant collectors within a national park context may continue to benefit from this trade by perhaps overriding the challenges the Maoist situation has created in Nepal."
Does the Sea Divide or Unite Indonesians? Ethnicity and Regionalism from a Maritime Perspective
(2003) Adhuri, Dedi Supriadi
"The Indonesian Government argues that the sea bridges the many islands and different peoples of Indonesia. Politically, this might be appropriate as a means of encouraging people to think that wherever and whoever there are, they are united as Indonesians. However, when this ideology is used for maritime resource management, it creates problems. One issue derives from the fact that people do not think that the Indonesian sea is 'free for all' Indonesians. I will argue that people, however vaguely, talk about 'we' and 'they' in defining who has the right to a particular fishing ground and who should be excluded. By analyzing conflicts that have taken part in different places in Indonesia, I will demonstrate that ethnicity and regionalism have been used as the defining factor of 'We' and 'They.' In particular contexts, ethnicity and regionalism define whether fishermen can access marine resources. Thus, at the practical level the sea does not unite Indonesians, and it is in fact, ethnicity and regionalism that divides the Indonesian seas."
Enabling Access to Research Data in Developing Countries: Designing Policy and Practice Framework for Malaysia's Public Research Universities
(2012) Fitzgerald, Anne; Hashim, Haswira Nor Mohamad
"Members of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) are obliged to implement the Agreement on Trade-related Intellectual Property Rights1994 (TRIPS) which establishes minimum standards for the protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights. Almost two decades after TRIPS was adopted at the conclusion of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations, it is widely accepted that intellectual property systems in developing and least-developed countries must be consistent with, and serve, their development needs and objectives. In adopting the Development Agenda in 2007, the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) emphasised the importance to developing and least-developed countries of being able to obtain access to knowledge and technology and to participate in collaborations and exchanges with research and scientific institutions in other countries. Access to knowledge, information and technology is crucial if creativity and innovation is to be fostered in developing and least-developed countries. It is particularly important that developing and least-developed countries give effect to their TRIPS obligations by implementing intellectual property systems and adopting intellectual property management practices that enable them to benefit from knowledge flows and support their engagement in international research and science collaborations. However, developing and least-developed countries did not participate in the deliberations leading to the adoption in 2004 by Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member countries of the Ministerial Declaration on Access to Research Data from Public Funding, nor have they formulated policies on access to publicly funded research outputs such as those developed by the National Institutes of Health in the United States, the United Kingdom Research Councils or the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council. These issues are considered from the viewpoint of Malaysia, a developing country whose economy has grown strongly in recent years. Lacking an established policy covering access to the outputs of publicly funded research, data sharing and licensing practices continue to be fragmented. Obtaining access to research data requires arrangements to be negotiated with individual data owners and custodians. Given the potential for restrictions on access to impact negatively on scientific progress and development in Malaysia, measures are required to ensure that access to knowledge and research results is facilitated. This paper proposes a policy framework for Malaysias public research universities that recognises intellectual property rights while enabling the open access to research data that is essential for innovation and development. It also considers how intellectual property rights in research data can be managed in order to give effect to the policys open access objectives."
Establishing Solar Water Disinfection as a Water Treatment Method at Household Level
(2006) Meierhofer, Regula
"1.1 billion People worldwide do not have access to safe drinking water and therefore are exposed to a high risk for diarrhoeal diseases. As a consequence, about 6,000 children die each day of dehydration due to diarrhoea. Adequate water treatment methods and safe storage of drinking water, combined with hygiene promotion, are required to prevent the population without access to safe drinking water from illness and death. Solar water disinfection (SODIS) is a new water treatment to be applied at household level with a great potential to reduce diarrhoea incidence of users. The method is very simple and the only resources required for its application are transparent PET plastic bottles (or glass bottles) and sufficient sunlight:microbiologically contaminated water is filled into the bottles and exposed to the full sunlight for 6 hours. During solar expo- sure, the diarrhoea causing pathogens are killed by the UV-A radiation of the sunlight. At present, SODIS is used by about 2 Million users in more than 20 countries of the South. Diarrhoea incidence of users significantly has been reduced by 30 to 70 %. A careful and long-term community education process that involves creating awareness on the importance of treating drinking water and initiates behaviour change is required to establish the sustainable practice of SODIS at community level. In Madagascar, more than 160 children younger than 5 years die each day from malaria, diarrhoea and acute respiratory illnesses. The application of household water treatment methods such as SODIS significantly could contribute to improve their health."
Examining Institutional Change: Social Conflict in Nepal's Leasehold Forestry Programme
(2005) Nagendra, Harini; Karna, Birendra; Karmacharya, Mukunda
"Among developing countries, Nepal has been an enthusiastic leader in experimenting with participatory systems of forest governance. This article evaluates the state-initiated implementation of the leasehold forestry programme in Nepal, aimed at providing better livelihoods to the poorest sections of society by leasing patches of degraded forest land for a 40-year period. Using case studies in the middle hills, we studied the interaction between leasehold forestry users and forest dependent communities that were excluded from the programme. Our evaluation of local institutions and forest condition before and after implementation of the programme revealed that there is a high degree of social conflict between users and non-users, with an increase in forest degradation. Nevertheless, in some situations, user groups have developed innovative approaches to conflict resolution, leading to significant improvements in forest biodiversity and biomass levels. We conclude that it is not enough to simply change existing legislation and put a new institution in place. The degree to which such institutions can survive and succeed in achieving their objectives will depend crucially on how well they interface with existing institutions, and the manner in which this interface evolves over time in response to the needs and expectations of local communities."
Filling the Gap: From Early International Legal Agreements Pertaining to Global Science to New Implementation Perspectives in the Context of the Nagoya Protocol
(2012) Broggiato, Arianna; Dedeurwaerdere, Tom; Manou, Dimitra
"In the first part the paper will analyze which tools and perspectives within these international instruments can foster and promote global scientific research and access to materials, as needed by the research community, in a balanced way with other interests at stake: intellectual property rights and the right of States to regulate access to natural resources and to benefit from the use of them. In the second part this paper explores the practices and models for global sharing of basic knowledge assets for scientific research. Two major institutional models dominate this debate, the first one envisioning contractual negotiations and exclusive ownership rights and the second one favouring public domain--like conditions and non--exclusive property right regimes. The paper compares these models in the case study of microbiology research, concluding that public-domain like conditions for access to basic knowledge assets and abroad interpretation of the notion of non-commercial use are both possible within the framework of the Nagoya Protocol and necessary for the pursuit of global scientific research. In the third part the paper will discuss some of the implementation concerns of the Nagoya Protocol, drawing inspiration from the other international agreements analyzed and the outcomes of the case study on microbiology research, for filling the implementation gaps in the Protocol related to specific needs of the scientific research community."
Fishers Access to the Common Property Waterbodies in the Northern Region of Bangladesh
(2015) Hossain, Amzad; Das, Mousumi; Alam, Shahonoor; Haque, Enamul
"The study was designed to explore the status of fishers’ access to the common property waterbodies (CPW) and associated problems of using CPW. Three upazillas (administrative units) of the Northern region of Bangladesh were selected for the empirical study. Data were collected from fishers, non-fishers and other stakeholders through structured interview schedules, physical observation, and participatory rural appraisal (PRA). The access of poor fishers group to the CPW was very limited in the study area. The government policy of revenue collection through leasing system badly affected the fishers group as they do not have required level of capital, unity, leadership and education. A revenue oriented fisheries management system with short lease periods was found to encourage over-fishing and destructive fishing by lessees, where the lessees were noted to sweep away all the fish stock as soon as their contract ended without considering the sustainable use of resource and biodiversity. Consequently, the productivity of the CPW is declining gradually. To ensure the effective access of fishers’ group to CPW and their sustainable use, an advised long-term community based management (CBM) plan needs to be developed with the effective participation of the fishers’ groups and other stakeholders."
Flagging Rights, Realizing Responsibilities
(2008) Mathew, Sebastian; Koshy, Neena
"The recent Zanzibar Workshop on coastal and fisheries management in eastern and southern Africa sought to flag the concerns of small-scale fishers."
Forest Access Rights and Legal Complexities in Africa
(2008) Marfo, Emmanuel
"Experiences from many African countries with regards to community access to forests seem to indicate a complexity that needs systematic scrutiny. In many situations, access rights are defined and controlled by the State through legislations and regulations in forest management plans. However, there is increasing recognition that, in practice, these State rules are contested, renegotiated and reconstructed at the national-local interface. Thus, whiles the State may have de jure control over access to forest resources, de facto, communities have substantial control in daily struggles for access. In spite of this observation, the subject has not been very well investigated and discussed. In particularly, there has not been much effort to gather the empirical experiences of struggles related to forest-access rights across the continent. Whiles recognising that substantial information on the empirical definition and practice of access rights could be available, scholars and professionals in the continent has not fully benefited from this stock of knowledge. There is the need to gather these experiences to inform policy interventions. The present paper proposes the establishment of a panel of experts across the continent to discuss the legal context of access rights, both from theoretical to empirical points of views. "In the paper, the analytical framework which can be adopted for assessment is the notion of legal pluralism, which can be defined as the coexistence and application of different legal norms in specific situations. Here, the social practice of law is observed, taking a departure that legal norms are broader than the State law. The framework admits other norms and socially accepted practices based on customs, traditions, religion etc that govern and rule the conduct of people in a given setting as also legal. This framework is particularly useful in the African context since customary laws governed access rights to forests in almost all African countries prior to colonial rule and nationalisation of forest assets. Further more, since many African countries are still weak States, in terms of capability to enforce State laws, it is useful to assess how customary and other non-State rules still influence social action and to what extent the State law has been subordinated or otherwise."
Free the Beach! Public Access, Equal Justice, and the California Coast
(2005) Garcia, Robert; Baltodano, Erica Flores
"The struggle to preserve public access to the beach is spreading across the nation from California to Connecticut and from Florida to the Great Lakes and Washington State. California’s beaches belong to all the people. In this Article, we examine the social, policy, legal, and environmental facets of the struggle to ensure public access, coastal protection, and equal justice for all along the California Coast."
From Supply to Demand Driven Water Governance: Challenging Pathways to Safe Water Access in Rural Uganda
(2012) Naiga, Resty; Penker, Marianne; Hogl, Karl
"Since 1990, Uganda has experienced a major policy shift from a supply-driven to a demand-driven approach in rural water provision. This paper looks into the critical aspects of safe water access in rural areas of Uganda within the changing policy frameworks. The qualitative text analysis of document and problem centered interviews with key informants at national, district and community levels is based on the ‘Social-ecological systems’ framework. Since the implementation of the demand-driven approach in the early 1990s, rural safe water coverage has slightly improved but maintenance of water sources still poses a great challenge. Operation and maintenance seem to be the critical challenge to sustained access to safe water in rural Uganda. The incomplete policy change and competing signals from old and new policies created uncertainty and ambiguity about responsibilities, rules and incentives. This result in a viscous circle of lack in user fees collected for maintenance and repair, unreliable water supply and missing control and sanctions resulting in further reluctance to contribute to community services. The analysis shows the importance of taking into account context and path-dependencies and points out some aspects not fully covered by the SES-framework."
Fuelling Exclusion? The Biofuels Boom and Poor People's Access to Land
(International Institute for Environment and Development, 2008) Cotula, Lorenzo; Dyer, Nat; Vermeulen, Sonja
"This study aims to open up discussion of the way in which biofuels are likely to impact on access to land. Many observers and activists have raised concerns that the spread of biofuels may result in loss of land access for poorer rural people in localities that produce biofuel crops. However, since liquid biofuels are a relatively new phenomenon in most countries (with exceptions such as Brazil and Zimbabwe), there is as yet little empirical evidence. This study aims to pave the way for future empirical research on how the biofuels boom affects land access, by raising key issues, presenting a basic conceptual framework and presenting a suite of (primarily anecdotal) evidence from around the world."
Gene Regimes
(2012) Deibel, Eric
"This chapter describes a tragedy that is analogous to how Crusoe survives decades left to himself after his shipwreck by getting involved in breeding and brewing until the day he finds a footstep in the sand. It is only a footstep, as he puts it, that took the edge off his inventions. He repeats several times that it is on the account of the Print of a Mans foot that he leaves behind his earlier designs. Henceforth it is not innovation for his own convenience but his own Preservation that preoccupies him, which is to say that he abandons his efforts and instead works on his defenses against the savages that might come to his island. The novel describes in detail how Crusoe begins to plant rings of trees in hedges that become so thick and strong that they are like walls of fortifications wherein he could hide himself and enclose himself, his cattle and his crops -- as if no Accident could intervene. He admits to himself that this Wall I was many a weary Month a finishing, and yet never thought my self safe till it was done."
Getting Transboundary Water Right: Theory and Practice for Effective Cooperation
(2009) Jägerskog, Anders; Zeitoun, Mark; Berntell, Anders
"Water energises all sectors of society. Nearly half of the global available surface water is found in 263 international river basins, and groundwater resources, which account for more than one hundred times the amount of surface water, cross under at least 273 international borders. National boundaries make water issues political and so much more complex. This report challenges those in the international water community to grapple with some of the latest conceptual thinking and most recent lessons learned from around the world. The four chapters in the volume present real-world experience of cooperation at the international and community levels and innovative approaches to overcome political obstacles to cooperation."
Governing the Management and Use of Pooled Microbial Genetic Resources: Lessons from the Global Crop Commons
(2010) Halewood, Michael
"The paper highlights lessons learned over the last 30 years establishing a governance structure for the global crop commons that are of relevance to current champions of the microbial commons. It argues that the political, legal and biophysical situation in which microbial genetic resources (and their users) are located today is similar to the situation of plant genetic resources in the mid-1990s, before the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources was negotiated. Consequently, the paper suggests that it may be useful to look to the model of global network of ex situ plant genetic resources collections as a precedent to follow – even if only loosely – in developing an intergovernmentally endorsed legal substructure and governance framework for the microbial commons."
Holistic Hygiene for Human Health
(2007) Bloomfield, Sally F.; van der Voorden, Carolien
"For decades, access to water and sanitation has been seen as the essential step in reducing the preventable disease burden in developing countries. There is now a belief that a key mistake in the past has been to undertake water and sanitation programmes in isolation, and that reducing the burden of disease is best achieved by programmes that also integrate hygiene promotion."
How Locally Designed Access and Use Controls Can Prevent the Tragedy of the Commons in a Mexican Small-Scale Fishing Community
(2005) Basurto, Xavier
"The Seri people, a self-governed community of small-scale fishermen in the Gulf of California, Mexico, have ownership rights to fishing grounds where they harvest highly valuable commercial species of bivalves. Outsiders are eager to gain access, and the community has devised a set of rules to allow them in. Because Seri government officials keep all the economic benefits generated from granting this access for themselves, community members create alternative entry mechanisms to divert those benefits to themselves. Under Hardin's model of the Tragedy of the Commons this situation would eventually lead to the overexploitation of the fishery. The Seri people, however, are able to simultaneously maintain access and use controls for the continuing sustainability of their fishing grounds. Using insights from common-pool resources theory, I discuss how Seri community characteristics help mediate the conflict between collective action dilemmas and access and use controls."
How to Keep Commons as Commons in the Long Run: Formation and Distortions of Property Regimes in Chilika Lagoon, India
(2008) Nayak, Prateep Kumar; Berkes, Fikret
"The paper tries to understand how a regime of de jure ownership of customary fishers is gradually changing into a state of de facto control of non-fishers and outsiders in the Chilika lagoon, a Ramsar site on the eastern coast of India. The paper brings into analysis the historical and current distortions in the access regime of the lagoon. The focus of this analysis is on two processes: one, the shift from a position of legal rights and entitlements to denial of access for customary fishers, and two, from a state of no or thin access to claim of legal rights by the non-fishers. While tracking this changing nature of property regimes in Chilika Lagoon the paper makes two important conclusions. One, commons is not fixed in its own distinct category; rather there often remains a threat that commons can change into other types of property regimes. Two, the immediate challenge is to identify drivers that may cause these changes and even the bigger challenge is how to keep commons as commons in the long run."
Imaging a Traditional Knowledge Commons: A Community Approach to Ensuring the Local Integrity of Environmental Law and Policy
(2011) Bavikatte, Kabir Sanjay; Cocchiaro, Gino; Abrell, Elan; von Braun, Johanna
"Under the Convention on Biological Diversity, international negotiators are currently developing an International Regime on Access and Benefit Sharing (IRABS). While this inchoate international legal framework primarily addresses commercial research on traditional knowledge, many questions remain about how this framework will affect non-commercial research agreements. This paper therefore presents a possible model for a Traditional Knowledge Commons designed to address some of these questions, such as how one differentiates non-commercial from commercial use of TK and how one defines benefits. The proposed model is formulated to provide a middle ground where traditional knowledge can be promoted and circulated without having to place it either into the public domain or deny access to it entirely. This Traditional Knowledge Commons would provide a platform for knowledge-sharing under conditions created by indigenous communities themselves and protected by a set of online user licenses requiring compliance with customary laws that govern the use of traditional knowledge. In addition to outlining how the model would be structured and how its online licensing system would function, this paper will examine the potential benefits of the model functioning as a system through which innovations developed through the use of traditional knowledge could be returned to the Traditional Knowledge Commons, further expanding this collective pool of knowledge and increasing the potential benefits that may be derived from it. Although the model would ultimately need to rely on the compliance mechanisms provided by the finalized IRABS, this paper also assesses the potential enforcement problems with which the Traditional Knowledge Commons may have to contend. Finally, it concludes with an analysis of the model’s potential for strengthening the self-determination of indigenous communities as well as the protection of biological diversity to which their traditional knowledge is inextricably linked."
Information Societies and Digital Divides: An Introduction
(Polimetrica, 2008) Sorj, Bernardo
"The topic of this book, the digital divide, refers to the unequal distribution of resources associated with information and communication technologies, between countries and within societies. The case of access to information technologies, provides an excellent opportunity to study the way that one technology-based product, in this case the Internet, can favor both economic and social development, greater freedom and circulation of information and social participation while it also possesses the capacity to deepen social inequality and create new forms of power concentration."
Intersecting Productivity and Poverty: Lessons from the Ganga Basin
(2011) Clement, Floriane; Haileslassie, Amare; Ishaq, Saba
"Increasing water productivity appears at the top of most agricultural water policy agendas around the world. It is usually assumed that gains in water productivity will always directly or indirectly improve livelihoods and reduce poverty through increased water availability, higher food security and agricultural incomes. Whereas many economics studies have established a strong correlation between agricultural growth and poverty, numerous activists in India and elsewhere have increasingly questioned the productivity paradigm. This paper adopts a qualitative approach to investigate some of the links between productivity and poverty through an institutional analysis of livestock water productivity interventions across three districts of the Ganga Basin, North India. We do not pretend giving a comprehensive review of the water productivity/poverty nexus but rather discuss a few prominent issues: the differentiated forms of capitals required to access to water, equity and democratic decentralisation."
Investing in the Future: Water’s Role in Achieving the Millennium Development Goals
(2004) Swedish Water House
From page 3: "This brief will show how: • poverty, hunger, environmental problems and diseases would be directly combated and significantly scaled back if fought with water access as a primary goal; • child and maternal mortality rates would drop; and • other important issues, including education and gender equality, would indirectly benefit from achievement of the safe drinking water and basic sanitation targets identified within the MDGs."
Land Conflicts: A Practical Guide to Dealing with Land Disputes
(Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit, 2008) Wehrmann, Babette
"Land conflicts often have extensive negative effects on economic, social, spatial and ecological development. This is especially true in developing countries and countries in transition, where land market institutions are weak, opportunities for economic gain by illegal action are widespread and many poor people lack access to land. Land conflicts can have disastrous effects on individuals as well as on groups and even entire nations. Many conflicts that are perceived to be clashes between different cultures are actually conflicts over land and related natural resources. In the past, Germany has actively supported international declarations and action plans which explicitly demand secured access to land--especially for disadvantaged groups--such as the Habitat II Conference in Istanbul 1996, World Bank Land Research Conferences from 2001 to 2007, EU Second Forum on Sustainable Rural Development in Africa 2007 etc. This guide has been written for all those working in the land sector, in natural resource management and in urban and rural development. It aims to broaden the understanding of the complexity of causes that lead to land conflicts in order to provide for better-targeted ways of addressing such conflicts. It also provides a number of tools with which to analyse land conflicts. Successful analysis of land conflicts is seen as a vital step towards their eventual settlement. Finally, this guidebook discusses a wide variety of options for settling ongoing land conflicts and for preventing new ones. In addition, the guide provides useful training material for educators and lecturers in courses in land administration and land management."
Linking Hunter Knowledge with Forest Change to Understand Changing Deer Harvest Opportunities in Intensively Logged Landscapes
(2009) Brinkman, Todd J.; Chapin, Terry; Kufinas, Gary; Person, David K.
"The effects of landscape changes caused by intensive logging on the availability of wild game are important when the harvest of wild game is a critical cultural practice, food source, and recreational activity. We assessed the influence of extensive industrial logging on the availability of wild game by drawing on local knowledge and ecological science to evaluate the relationship between forest change and opportunities to harvest Sitka black-tailed deer (Odocoileus hemionus sitkensis) on Prince of Wales Island, Alaska. We used data collected through interviews with local deer hunters and GIS analysis of land cover to determine relationships among landscape change, hunter access, and habitat for deer hunting over the last 50 yr. We then used these relationships to predict how harvest opportunities may change in the future. Intensive logging from 1950 into the 1990s provided better access to deer and habitat that facilitated deer hunting. However, successional changes in intensively logged forests in combination with a decline in current logging activity have reduced access to deer and increased undesirable habitat for deer hunting. In this new landscape, harvest opportunities in previously logged landscapes have declined, and hunters identify second-growth forest as one of the least popular habitats for hunting. Given the current state of the logging industry in Alaska, it is unlikely that the logging of the remaining old-growth forests or intensive management of second-growth forests will cause hunter opportunities to rebound to historic levels. Instead, hunter opportunities may continue to decline for at least another human generation, even if the long-term impacts of logging activity and deer harvest on deer numbers are minimal. Adapting hunting strategies to focus on naturally open habitats such as alpine and muskeg that are less influenced by external market forces may require considerably more hunting effort but provide the best option for sustaining deer hunting as a local tradition over the long run. We speculate that managing deer habitat in accessible areas may be more important than managing the overall health of deer populations on a regional scale. We further suggest that the level of access to preferred hunting habitat may be just as important as deer densities in determining hunter efficiency."
Networking Collections to Provide Facilitated and Legislation Compliant Access to Microbial Resources
(2012) Smith, David
"The Global Biological Resource Centre Network (GBRCN) Demonstration Project emanates from an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Working Party on Biotechnology initiative and the Task Force on Biological Resource Centres (BRC). Discussions began at a workshop in Tokyo in 1999 which was followed by a report in 2001 (OECD 2001) recommending efforts to address sustainability of BRCs and their better involvement in biotechnology. Subsequent activity culminated in the publication of the best practice guidelines for BRCs (OECD 2007). The final OECD BRC workshop recommended a demonstration project as a proof of concept for the establishment of the GBRCN. A small central Secretariat was supported by the German Ministry of Research and Education (BMBF) to co-ordinate activities to deliver the tools that could establish this global network. The project was established at the end of 2008 and funding ran to the end of November 2011. The Secretariat continues its operations for the moment without BMBF funding through commitments made by CABI and the Leibniz-Institut DSMZ - Deutsche Sammlung von Mikroorganismen und Zellkulturen GmbH. The overall goal of the GBRCN is to provide improved resources for the life sciences to facilitate innovative solutions to global problems. This requires access to high quality biological materials and associated information. It operates on the premise that no one single entity can provide the necessary coverage of organisms and data, therefore the enormous task of maintaining biodiversity must be shared."
On the Verge of a New Water Scarcity: A Call for Good Governance and Human Ingenuity
(2007) Falkenmark, Malin; Berntell, Anders; Jägerskog, Anders; Lundqvist, Jan; Matz, Manfred; Tropp, Håkan
From p. 3: "The 2006 Human Development Report, 'Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Crisis,' (United Nations Development Programme 2006) considered water scarcity from two points of view: (1) as a crisis arising from a lack of services that provide safe water and (2) as a crisis caused by scarce water resources. It concluded that the world’s water crisis is not related to the physical availability of water, but to unbalanced power relations, poverty and related inequalities. The focus now being placed on the importance of governance makes clear the importance of issues such as unfair power structures, and weakly defined roles, rights and responsibilities. These, it is felt, exacerbate natural water scarcity. This way of thinking has been useful in that it has increased our understanding of the need to manage demand as well as to increase supply. However, while governance remains a key challenge, we also need to better understand the issue of 'water crowding' – as increasing pressure is being placed on finite, erratically available and vulnerable water resources. Recognising this is the key to proper policy formulation. Rather than addressing management/governance problems, many countries still instinctively reach for supply-side solutions such as desalination or the use of reservoirs and other large-scale infrastructure. Such an approach is often the most politically feasible option within the context of a country or region’s water problems."
Open Access Scholarly Communication in South Africa: Current Status, Significance, and the Role for National Information Policy in the National System of Innovation
(2005) De Beer, Jennifer Anne
"The aims of this study were two-fold: to assess levels of awareness of and investment in Open Access modes of scholarly communication within defined scholarly communities; and to create a benchmark document of South Africa’s involvement to date in various Open Access initiatives. The argument is made for the openness of scholarly systems, and furthermore that the disparate and uncoordinated nature of Open Access in South Africa needs a policy intervention. The policy intervention so identified would exist within an enabling policy environment and would be minimally disruptive to the South African science system. Said policy intervention would constitute a National Information Policy since it would address the storage, dissemination, and retrieval of scholarly research output. This thesis recommends the amendment of the current statutory reporting mechanism - used by scholars to report and obtain publication rate subsidies – which would require that scholars make their research available via an Open Access mode of scholarly communication, and moreover, would require scholars to report on having done so."
The Privilege to Fish
(2012) Lam, Mimi E.; Campbell, Meaghan E. Calcari
"Fisheries management has failed to stop overfishing. Private individuals and enterprises that use public fishery resources are subject to legal obligations and harvest rules, though these regulations are often poorly enforced. The privilege to fish is commonly perceived as a right to fish, which has serious consequences for the sustainability of target fish species and conservation of marine resources. To mitigate the collective human impact on marine ecosystems, global society must reconcile the ecological, economic, social, cultural, political, legal, and ethical ramifications of competing human demands on scarce natural resources. This Special Feature is the product of an American Association for the Advancement of Science symposium organized by the guest editors. In the collection of papers that follow, biologists, resource managers, policy analysts, economists, lawyers, tribal leaders, and conservationists tackle pressing issues in marine resource management and governance, such as, 'Who is responsible for managing and protecting fishery resources? What governance mechanisms can resolve local and global fishery resource conflicts over shared access rights? How can competitive globalized markets and the visible hand of subsidies be reined in to end the race for fish, and instead, support local communities and global society?' The diverse perspectives captured in this Special Feature reflect the complexity of these issues."
Restoration of Commons through Peoples Institutions: Study on the Process and Impact of the Attappady Wasteland Comprehensive Environmental Conservation Project in Kerala, India
(2006) Annamalai, V.
"In India Watershed and Joint Forest Management programmes created participatory local institutions for regeneration of natural resources like land, water and forest. The local institutions are involved in the implementation of the projects under these programmes and made arrangements for utilisation and sharing of benefits accrued out of natural regeneration. Similarly 'Attappady Wasteland Comprehensive Environmental Conservation project' in Kerala state of India has created what is called people's institutions as local organizations to implement the project and manage the commons. In the process, it has evolved new rules and regulations and access rights and sharing of resources thereby affecting the existing formal and informal arrangements. The project area of Attappady block in Kerala State is characterised by acute poverty and degradation of natural resources. The purpose of the paper is to understand and analyse how the project evolved new institutional arrangements at village level for regeneration, development and management of natural resources and its impact on the existing access rights to commons and present and future benefits for different sections of the society from commons."
The Right (?) of Access (?) to Water Supply and Sanitation (?): A Polemic about Mixing Issues
(2006) Matz, Manfred
"Twenty-five years of on-the-ground experience in water policy advisory service has taught SIWI’s Manfred Matz a lot. One lesson he has learned is that, not surprisingly, water professionals may say one thing but mean another. In this article, Mr. Matz describes how something as simple as terminology can cause confusion for those inside and outside of the water sector."
Ring of Fire
(2009) Damanik, M. Riza
"If it is not substantially changed, Indonesia’s Law No. 27 of 2007 will only lead to the commercialization of coastal fishing rights in the archipelago."
Sharing Benefits or Enclosure of the Commons? Investigating the Compatibility of Global, National and Local Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) Mechanisms in Peru
(2008) Taylor, Emily
"The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) declared that genetic resources, considered for centuries to be the common heritage of mankind, would become the property of the sovereign state in which they are contained. The Convention also contained a special provision expressing respect for the rights of indigenous communities over their traditional knowledge. In 2002 Peru (a signatory of the CBD) became the first country in the world to enact a national law for Protection of Traditional Knowledge. Prior to this legal regime, customary governance mechanisms of Andean communities have been the primary means of governing the conservation, use and sharing of genetic resources and traditional knowledge. The objective of this research project is to understand from the perspective of policy makers involved in the development of this law, as well as from the perspective of community members and a small grassroots NGO, how this law creates both opportunities and constraints for local governance mechanisms."
Shifting Policies, Access, and the Tragedy of Enclosures in Ecuadorian Mangrove Fisheries: Towards a Political Ecology of the Commons
(2012) Beitl, Christine
"After decades of mangrove deforestation for the development of shrimp farming, the Ecuadorian state began to officially recognize the ancestral rights of traditional users of coastal mangrove resources in the late 1990s. This article traces the trajectory of coastal policy change and the transformation of mangrove tenure regimes from an implicit preference for shrimp aquaculture to a focus on conservation and sustainable development with greater community participation through the establishment of community-managed mangrove areas called custodias. I argue that while the custodias have empowered local communities in their struggle to defend their livelihoods and environment against the marginalizing forces of global shrimp aquaculture, the implementation of common property arrangements for mangrove fishery management has changed the nature of property rights, the distribution of resources, and social relations among collectors of mangrove cockles (Anadara tuberculosa and A. similis). I suggest a need to develop a political ecology of the commons, an analytical approach applied here to examine the fundamental shift in the nature of the struggle over mangrove resources, from artisanal fishers versus shrimp farmers to a struggle between compañeros: members of associations versus independent cockle collectors. Such a shift in the struggle over resources threatens to undermine the sustainability of the fishery. I conclude that shifting access may be an important underlying factor contributing to a tragedy of enclosures in Ecuador’s mangrove cockle fishery."
Solutions to Securing Mobility by Securing the Commons: The WISP Land Rights Study - First Results
(2008) Biber-Klemm, Susette; Rass, N.
"This paper presents the first results of a WISP knowledge management project on Pastoralists organisation to defend and secure their land rights. The project encompassed the development of 23 case studies from 18 different countries describing positive examples how pastoralists organisations succeeded to defend and secure their land rights. The global analyses of these cases studies aims to describe the common characteristics of pastoral land tenure and related concepts of property rights and to identify factors of success for defending and asserting pastoralists right to their land. "The paper is divided into three major parts. The first part gives a general introduction to the theme and describes the method of the study, defines concepts and terminology applied by the study and explains the rationale for investment and protection of pastoralists land rights. The specifics of pastoral land tenure arrangements are presented and discussed and the related challenges to defending pastoral land are brought out. The second part gives an exemplary selection of abstracts of some of the case studies. In the following commonalities and differences of the situation and the characteristics of land rights and land tenure are discussed. The third part has its focus on the process of getting organized to defend and assert land rights and it describes the steps and methods taken to reach to successful results."
Struggles Over Access and Authority in the Governance of New Water Resources: Evidence from Mali and Zambia
(2011) Cold-Ravnkilde, S. M.; Funder, M.
"Research on water scarcity in the South has often focused on the impacts of limited water resources for the rural poor, prompted most recently by the climate change debate. Less attention has been drawn to the social and institutional processes surrounding the emergence of new collective water resources, and how this affects authority, access rights and social exclusion in local water governance. The paper addresses this issue through a study of local competition over access to new common-pool water resources in isolated rural areas of Zambia and Mali. In Mali, climate change has led to the sporadic emergence of new natural lakes and ponds in some locations. In Zambia, the development of boreholes has provided access to water resources that were not previously available to local communities. The paper explores how local actors and organizations have sought to assert control over and rights of access to the new water resources. It shows the ways in which this has furthered both conflict and cooperation between the involved actors, and how new rules of access and associated institutional domains have developed. At the same time, however, it also shows how the struggles over access and authority have tended to marginalize the poorest and other user groups from access to the new water resources, by seeking either to monopolize access rights or developing explicit and implicit mechanisms of exclusion. The paper concludes by discussing the implications for water policy and research in terms of the way we understand the development of new water resources in the current context of inequality, water scarcity and climate change."
Tenure and Access Rights as Constraints to Community Watershed Development in Orissa, India
(2004) Kumar, Kundan; Kerr, John; Choudhury, Pranab
From introduction: "This paper examines the performance of watershed projects in hilly areas of Orissa, India, characterized by conflicts over land rights primarily between the Forest Department and local tribal communities. The study area is notable for the governments attempted use of mechanisms to reward land users in upper watersheds for adopting perennial vegetation that would provide various environmental services; this approach is virtually unknown in the rest of India. However, the approach has met limited success due to conflicts surrounding the status of Forest Department land and failure to appreciate existing systems of customary land tenure. The paper demonstrates the perverse outcomes that result when project interventions fail to appreciate these issues and discusses some approaches to resolve the problem."
Territorialisation and the Politics of Highland Landscapes in Vietnam: Negotiating Property Relations in Policy, Meaning and Practice
(2004) Sowerwine, Jennifer C.
"This article examines the making of post-socialist forest property relations in highland Vietnam in policy, meaning and practice, and the resultant implications for patterns of resource use, local power relations, and forest biodiversity and cover. It utilises the framework of political ecology to explore how macro-level institutions and ideologies intersect with local understandings and practices to regulate resource access, use and control. Specifically, this article examines changes in farmers'de facto and de jure rights in land and land-based capital in response to institutional and market changes, and the micro-processes through which those relations are constituted and contested. It explores how forest lands are imagined by the state and made legible through various mechanisms of surveying, classifying, mapping and registering forest land parcels, a set of processes defined as territorialisation. It extends the analysis beyond the nation-state, demonstrating the role of international environmental capital in facilitating those processes. State territoriality, however, has not resulted in the uniform transformation of forest property arrangements into private control. Rather, existing social structures, land use practices and social(ist) networks may in fact alter or subvert forestry reforms in ways not envisaged by the state. This article explores the particularities and unintended consequences of forest reforms through a comparison of two highland Dao villages in northern Vietnam at the turn of the millennium."
Towards a Global System for Access and Benefit Sharing of Pathogen Materials
(2012) Castro Bernieri, Rosa J.
"A global debate has flourished on the interface between patent protection and access to biomedical technologies. Recent research suggests that an expansive trend in patent law might impede access to basic research; restrict access to medicines for low-income countries and also threaten the equitable exploitation of genetic resources by their countries of origin. The interface between access to patents and materials is particularly complex in the biomedical area, since many biotechnologies can be used either as research tools for biomedical research or as end-products; and also since the economic effects of patents are difficult to determine empirically, are spread over a long time span and are often unevenly distributed among countries. This paper looks at the problem of access and sharing of genetic resources (including those regulated by the Convention on Biological Diversity) and specifically examines the case of access and sharing of pathogen materials exemplified by the controversy on access to influenza viruses samples, which originated in Indonesia during the H5N1 influenza in 2007. The paper focuses on the global governance of pathogens access/sharing as a case that creates important concerns for global health. The paper examines global rules and institutions, which are regulating the issue in parallel, in particular the IPR system as embedded in the TRIPS Agreement, the access and benefit sharing system established in the CBD and the recently agreed Pandemic Influenza Preparedness (PIP) framework of the WHO, aiming to address access to virus samples and sharing of vaccines and other benefits."
Towards Hydrosolidarity: Ample Opportunities for Human Ingenuity
(2005) Falkenmark, Malin
"Water was one of five priority issues at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. It is recognised increasingly as an essential component in the dynamics of poverty; poor water management can indeed create and perpetuate poverty. Not only is secured access to water essential for poverty alleviation, but water development is closely linked to food production and hunger alleviation, and to energy development."
Towards Tenure Security in Customary Land in Malawi: What do we know about Matrilineal Society?
(2008) Kambewa, Daimon
"This paper challenges simplistic assumptions in the land policy in Malawi that land belongs to all members of the household. The study, carried out in two districts of Chiradzulu and Phalombe in the Southern Region of Malawi used qualitative methods to examine the local histories and practices to identify the social and power relations between male and female children in households and families, and the roles of chiefs, families and traditional practices in access to and control over customary land. The study reveals how the status quo in customary lands has been maintained whereby access and control is unequal among male and female members. Arguably, not all children in the household are children of the household; not all people in the family are people of the family. The pending land policy assumes that unequal access, control, and conflicts over customary land result from self interest, and population and economic pressures. The policy advocates simplistic solutions such as clarifying the processes of access and control, land redistribution and relocation. The policy does not recognize that patterns of access and control are historical in nature, and that the patterns are closely intertwined and embedded in social ties and power relations. Failure to understand the relations leads to a situation where inequalities are repeated and enhanced. It is argued in this paper that unless the inequalities are recognized and the perpetuators are transformed, some members will always have insecure tenure rights and that land tenure security debate will remain rhetoric."
Water and the Millennium Development Goals: Meeting the Needs of People and Ecosystems
(2003) Molden, David; Falkenmark, Malin
"When viewed in terms of water, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) targeting poverty and hunger seem to be in direct conflict with the goal on environmental sustainability. It is becoming increasingly clear that ensuring people access to water for growing food and earning a living will be necessary to end extreme poverty and hunger in rural areas."
Water Management and the Poor: Organizing to (Re)Gain Access to Water in the Nicaraguan Hillsides
(2004) Munk Ravnborg, Helle
"Many rural areas increasingly constitute the arena for increased competition for water, not only between different users within the locality, but also between internal versus external users. In hillside areas, water is important not only for household consumption but also for productive purposes. Even where formal irrigation systems do not exist, the ability to water crops significantly improves peoples livelihoods. Evidence from many parts of the world, however, suggests that the poor are gradually losing their access to water. Based on research conducted in the Nicaraguan hillsides, this paper illustrates the processes through which access to water is lost by some while gained by others as well as some of the issues involved in water management. The paper shows how everyday water management takes place in the context of complex and often conflictive social relations at multiple and often overlapping levels. Combined, these two features make it hard to imagine that efforts to design a single river basin or watershed institution charged with representing and negotiating different interests relating to water management can succeed and become effective. The examples from the Nicaraguan hillsides, however, elude us to a possible alternative. In their attempts to gain and secure access to water, new organizational practices are emerging which transcend the local as well as the static, and increasingly seek to involve and engage district and national authorities in supporting their claims and adopting a stronger, but negotiated, role in regulation and arbitration. Therefore, instead of focusing on the crafting of neatly nested water management institutions, this paper argues in favour of supporting the development of an enabling institutional environment which focuses upon making relevant hydrological assessments widely available; broad-based and inclusive public hearing processes; enhancing the legal capacity, particularly among the poor; and last, but not least upon making dispute resolution mechanisms, such as a water ombudsman, widely available and accessible, also to the poor, to provide help in settling conflicts caused by competing water management claims as well as by conflicting claims of users and water management institutions."
Winners and Losers: Privatising the Commons in Botswana
(2005) Cullis, Adrian; Watson, Cathy
"This paper reviews Botswana’s experience with the privatisation of the commons, drawing on available literature. While several studies were carried out in the 1990s, there is very little up-to- date information on this issue. Therefore, after having reviewed available data and evidence, we will identify key issues for further research on the ground. The paper is likely to be of interest not only for the citizens of Botswana, but also for those grappling with rangeland policy issues in Africa and elsewhere."

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