Special Districts: An Institutional Tool for Improved Common Pool Resource Management

Abstract

"This paper explores benefits that rural and urban populations might derive from greater reliance on special purpose or special district governments in solving common pool resource problems. It focuses on West African countries that, for historical reasons, now utilize variants of French institutional arrangements. Many of the points made here may apply as well to countries utilizing British-inspired institutional arrangements.

"While special districts occur most frequently in the American context, they do share some characteristics with an important class of French institutional arrangements known collectively as 'intercommunality.' In fact in 1996 France, with some 36,500 communes, counted 19,000 inter-communal institutions (Bernard-Gelabert et Labia: 9). Of these 19,000 institutions, designed to facilitate inter-communal cooperation, a substantial majority (14,551) are single-purpose public enterprises (syndicats intercommunaux a vocation unique SIVU:) (Bernard-Gelabert et Labia: 10). While not autonomous political jurisdictions, as are special districts, SIVUs are closely linked with the local governments that create them.

"Provided that special districts prove useful in such settings, precedents thus exist for experimentation in this regard within the institutional tradition that most French tradition West African countries share. Moreover, some French and francophone African applied researchers specializing in economic and institutional aspects of renewable resources have long argued that devolution of renewables governance and management authority from the state to village communities provides an indispensable key to improved performance in the sector (e.g., Bertrand; Diallo; Diallo and Winter; Djibo et al.).

"The paper first reviews the rationale underlying current policies promoting the devolution movement in the French tradition group of countries. These policies uniformly limit the extent of devolution to district level, general purpose governments. The paper then reviews an alternative institutional approach, the special purpose district. Four case studies follow, all drawing on applied research on popular efforts at renewable natural resources governance and management (RNRGM) in Niger, Mali and Senegal. Several highlight the importance of state- created enabling frameworks, but also underline the fragility of those frameworks, and implications of fragility for users strategies concerning renewable natural resources. The paper concludes with observations about the potential utility of special districts in French-tradition West African states."