Resource-Users Institutions: Under-Utilised Social Capital?

Abstract

"In recent years both governments hierarchical resource management regimes and marked-based regimes for utilising natural resources have been increasingly attacked for lack of efficiency, lack of legitimacy, lack of control and lack of sustainability. Against this has been advocated a 'third way' - the self-governed group of resource users that exercise self-discipline and self-control and thereby guarantee sustainable use of their 'common property resource'. Intensive research around the world shows that several thousands of such selfgoverned regimes in forestry, ground water, fisheries, sea-birds' eggs, irrigation, grazing, gathering, etc. are efficient ways of managing peoples utilisation of resources without depleting them. Research has also shown that in order to work properly, the institutional rules of such regimes have to be fairly complex and the amount of preexisting social capital has to be substantial. Further it is shown that more often than not it is government tampering with such self-evolved institutions and erosion of the invested social capital that produce outcomes labelled as 'tragedies of the commons'. This report examines some of the preconditions in the modern world for such self-governed resource utilisation groups - or purposely designed institutions based on such principles - to function and to take over management tasks from state buraucracies. It is also raises questions about three aspects of the relationship between the common property regime and the society at large - basic questions that tend to be overlooked in the common property debate: --What kinds of authority need to be transferred from government to self-governed groups of resource users for them to be able to utilise their accumulated social capital? --How can the border problems, i.e. marginalisation, exclusion and inclusion, be handled without depleting the resource and eroding the social capital? --How are such groups able to handle the symbolic value that property rights to resources have to the larger group of society members?"