Providing Incentives for Sustainability: Rationality Beyond Economic Considerations

Abstract

"For achieving sustainability through collective management of forest and other natural resources, the incentives should be attractive enough that communities feel motivated to regulate the use of resources. When people have rights over the resources, they can derive benefits from products flowing from the resources. If benefits are not significant, additional incentives can be provided to communities through development investments. With this consideration, many government and non-government agencies, implementing the participatory resource management programmes, emphasize on providing additional incentives in various forms to local communities. This paper examines the effectiveness of such provision of incentives in motivating local communities for sustainable management of resources. The analysis is based on some case studies from Rajasthan, where different forms of additional incentives have been provided by implementing agencies, in addition to the benefits flowing from the resources managed. This revealed that it is not merely the economic incentives, which always motivate communities. Rather it is the emotional attachment of people and feeling of belongingness to resources, which drive people’s action, specially if they are sensitised around this issue. The rights, benefits, additional incentives in terms of development investments and emotional attachment make a combination which needs to be considered in totality. This implies that even if the potential benefits from collective protection and regulation are significant, unless the community members become emotionally sensitised and take over the responsibility, sustainable forest management may not be achieved. However, generally this understanding is hardly applied in the programmes being implemented, and as a result sustainable collective action is often not achieved despite several efforts and considerable investments. Based on this analysis, this paper outlines key considerations of a strategy for achieving sustainable collective action."