Building Resilience in Local Institution for Natural Resource Management: Local Resource Rights and Management Institutions

Abstract

"Natural resources are best governed by local community. Community processes are woven around such resources and built upon long drawn practices. In India the criticality of commons with respect to social, ecological and economic perspective is immense. Institutions around commons have travelled a long distance from a feudalistic setting to a democratic setting passing through various approaches and stages of development. Various challenges were thrown to these institutions to deal with at different approaches and stages of development. Today the challenges for the local institutions are many fold exerting from the rapid globalisation and industrialisation process with constant flow of information, money, objects, ideologies and people.

"In a subsistence agrarian economy where people largely depend on agriculture and forests for their livelihood requirements and a trend of transition setting in, the problem is all the more critical. Hence it is critical for the institutions alive and resilient to the increased externalities and complexities arise from the nexus of such flows and dynamics.

"The paper examines the institutional challenges and various social factors that influence the process of resilience building in an institution. The factors are like, Institutional structure, ownership, rule system, adaptive mechanisms, broadbased decision making, mechanisms for accountability and transparency, resource-user interactions. The paper analyses the dynamics of socio-political environment, the ongoing struggle of local institutions to internalize the externalities from within and outside. The institution building approach and processes of both the crafted and traditional institutions have been analyzed for drawing strategies towards building social resilience in the local institution.

"This paper is a result of an on going search for institutional interventions around common property resources in Orissa, one of the eastern states of India."