Institutional analysis to assess inclusive decision-making in community resource management: A diagnostic review of barriers and interventions in participatory processes.

Abstract

Scholars and practitioners frequently cite participatory governance arrangements as critical for successful resource management. While recognizing the rights of local and indigenous communities in their own development and resource management is fundamental for sustainability, centering communal decision-making in resource management does not guarantee that said decisions will be democratic, inclusive, or equitable. A critical question for community leaders and practitioners alike, is not whether communities should have rights to manage their resource systems, but rather, how to identify and support communal decision-making processes that are inclusive of diverse voices, transparent, and just.

Here, we tackle one piece of this question by using the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework to diagnose how communal governance characteristics shape inclusion in local decision-making process, namely who and how distinct community members participate in resource management decision-making forums. While the IAD framework has frequently been applied to assess how local rule-making rights are linked to successful resource management outcomes, relatively few studies have used the IAD framework to diagnose participation within communal decision-making arrangements.

The objectives of our paper are to identify relatively malleable local governance elements that can be tweaked to facilitate more inclusive collective decision-making in community resource management. To do so, we apply the IAD framework in conjunction with Agarwal’s participation typology to a systematic review of 59 case studies to map out the barriers to, and interventions to support, participatory decision-making in community resource management (forests, water, fisheries). Our study focuses specifically on how local governance factors influence who participates (e.g., individual attributes based on socioeconomic status; gender, race, ethnicity) and how they participate (leadership roles, voice, and influence). In our analysis, we pay particular attention to how local governance conditions (e.g., decision-making rules, leader attributes, organization) and external interventions serve to thwart or support inclusion in communal decision-making processes. In mapping out the barriers and interventions along the IAD framework, our analysis points to the need to pay more attention to how local rules arrangements shape participation, and in turn, offers specific entry points to promote more inclusive decision-making processes.