The Role of Tenurial Shells in Ecological Sustainability: Property Rights and Natural Resource Management in Mexico

Abstract

"In this paper, we posit that tenurial systems function as 'shells' in the sense that they provide the superstructure, or inner environment, within which activities are developed and operate. We assess the hypothesis that local tenurial shells play a critical role for enabling local subsystems to persist and participate in local renewal cycles within the larger global system. The tenurial shell is a constraining and enabling stricture with particular characteristics linked in very specific ways to the larger 'operating system' in which the shell is embedded. The shell responds to local, cultural, ecological and social factors, including those arising from externally generated stresses or opportunities. External recognition (especially with legal protection) of local property rights regimes strengthens shells so they also function as a protective border around a system that could not remain viable in the larger, outer environment if left unprotected. We explore how management systems adapted to local ecosystems have developed and flourished within the protective enabling shells of community based tenurial systems. We also stress that the strength of those local shells, and the resource management systems with them, depends on active, intercommunity organizations and institutions that adhere to community-based ethical values and confront the resource-seeking institutions and organizations of the outer milieu that dominate the larger global system. We suggest that subsystems depend on interactions with other subsystems in order to survive today's world, while at the same time local, dynamic subsystems are essential for sustainability of the larger global system."