Rethinking Key Assumptions in Natural Resources Management: Drawing Lessons from the Case of Water

Abstract

"There are several challenges confronting natural resources management in the early Twenty-First century. Some of them include how local people cope with and respond to rapid technologies, dynamic ecosystems, capital flows and competing forms of governance. In an increasingly globalised world, these factors link rural livelihoods with economic, political and environmental regimes constructed across multiple sites. They also increase the uncertainty confronting local people as they make and sustain their livelihoods.

"In this paper, I argue that uncertainty is emerging as central to issues concerning natural resources management to which local institutions constantly respond. However, mainstream theoretical and policy perspectives in natural resources management have not adequately understood the nexus between institutions and uncertainty. They have instead based their assumptions on the notion of a predictable world with knowable calculus. Institutions and local communities have been conceived in static ways, leading to a lack of appreciation of how theory and policy might be better equipped to capture how institutional arrangements deal with the various uncertainties impinging on rural livelihoods. By drawing on lessons from the water sector, the paper demonstrates why it is important to take uncertainty seriously and what failure to do so could lead to. The paper begins by exploring three different types of uncertainties and their accompanying institutional settings (Section 2). Section 3 then goes on to discuss the challenges that these new perspectives throw up for natural resources management. The uncertainty framework is then illustrated by drawing lessons from the case of water in Section 4 where specific reference is made to ethnographic material on water in Kutch, western India. Section 5 explores how different theoretical approaches handle the institutions and uncertainty nexus. I distinguish between mainstream and emerging views. The former refers to those theoretical approaches which have been very influential on policy, namely New Institutional Economics (NIE) and Common Property Theory (CPT). The latter refers to a diverse range of perspectives from the social and natural sciences, including sociology, anthropology, new ecology and legal pluralism. The paper ends with implications for policy and practice."