NGO-Driven Community-Based Natural Resource Management in South Asia: A Critical Reflection

Abstract

"Community-based development in general and community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) in particular have received renewed attention over the last couple of decades in developing countries. Governments across south and south-east Asia, Africa and Latin America have adopted and implemented CBNRM in various ways, viz., through sectoral programmes such as forestry, irrigation or wildlife management, multisectoral programmes such as watershed development and rural livelihoods development, and efforts towards political devolution. In this process of 'mainstreaming' community-based development and CBNRM, the role of NGOs is almost ubiquitous. Not only are NGOs themselves implementing CBNRM but many state-driven initiatives are operating through NGOs as well.

"The expansion of NGOs in the 1970s and 1980s throughout much of the world was seen as an opportunity for civil society to offer 'alternative' forms of development and as a means to help democratize the state. However, the mushrooming of NGOs thereafter has not only resulted in a significant diversity of NGOs in terms of their type and priorities, but also, some argue, in the content of their alternative discourses of development and their interest in concerns of social justice and structural change being watered down. It is this mainstreaming of NGO-driven development that forms the context of our study of CBNRM.

"The paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we discuss the various discourses that had supported the idea CBNRM and the subsequent mainstreaming of CBNRM initiatives. We then briefly examine the critiques of CBNRM and of NGO-led development in general that have emerged and locate our study in this critical literature. In the following section, we outline the questions, methods and normative lens through which this study was conducted. We then go on to provide a brief description of the six cases that we took up for our study and describe their outcomes in terms of livelihood, sustainability, equity and democratic decentralization. Finally, we try to understand these outcomes keeping in mind the vision of, and strategies employed by the intervening agencies, and how if at all state policies encourage or constrain these initiatives."