Collective Action, Property Rights, and Devolution in Forest and Protected Area Management

Abstract

"This paper aims to accomplish two tasks: One, it presents a framework to help analyze the devolution of the use, management, and governance of resources. It does so by bringing together several strands of work on institutional analysis and property rights, and building on theories of collective action. These writings are highly relevant to our understanding of governance and devolution, but their relationship to devolution and governance requires closer examination than it has previously received. Two, the paper provides empirical evidence from two cases on devolution of forest use from India and Nepal to illustrate and examine the offered framework. The devolution of forest use in Kumaon in India and efforts to involve local population in the management of protected areas in the Terai of Nepal form the two contrasting studies of the origins and implementation of devolution. Studying these contrasting cases enables us to examine the propositions we advance about the relationships between characteristics of devolutionary initiatives, the likelihood of an initiative being implemented successfully,and resource-related outcomes."