The Institutional Dynamics of Community-Based Natural Resource Management: An Entitlements Approach

Abstract

Authors' Introduction:

"For all the emphasis given to community-based approaches within recent environment and development policy debates, results in practice have often been disappointing. Among many possible reasons, this paper highlights shortcomings in implicit theoretical assumptions about 'community', 'environment', and the relationships between them. Malthusian perspectives dominate conventional debate, and tend to frame problems in terms of an imbalance between social needs and aggregate resource availability. An alternative perspective starts from the politics of resource access and control among diverse social actors, and regards processes of environmental change as the outcome of negotiation or contestation between social actors who may have very different priorities in natural resource use and management. The notion of 'environmental entitlements' encapsulates this shift in perspective. In turn, specifying the natural-resource endowments and entitlements of differentiated groups of people, and the ways they are shaped by diverse institutions, offers operational clues for the practice of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM)."