Community Management of the Commons: Re-empowerment Process and the Gaps

Abstract

From Pages 1 and 3:

"Common Property Resources (CPRs) are broadly defined as those resources in which a group of people have co- equal use rights, specially rights that exclude the use of those resources by other people. However, looking at CPRs from 'rights' perspective may disguise the more important 'obligation or responsibility' aspects as well as the basic driving forces that help in shaping and enforcing these obligations and rights. In rural areas these rights, obligations, and enforcement mechanisms, as the society's institutional arrangements, are a product of community's collective concerns, norms and action for common good, which in turn are manifestations of what is described as 'social capital'. The latter though a social and cultural phenomenon, is a product of society's prolonged processes of adaptation to its natural resource base. The institution of CPRs or rather rights and obligation towards CPRs are a part of the adaptation process. This is more visible in fragile resource zones such as mountains and dry tropics focussed by this paper.

"The key conclusion of our discussion is that effective community management of CPRs is not simply a matter of according legal rights and autonomy to the communities but an integrated process where collective stake in CPRs, culture of group action (or social capital), people's functional knowledge and adaptation to biophysical features of CPRs, and explicitly identifiable economic gains from CPRs play important role. The devolution planners, therefore, should give more attention to what makes community management of CPRs effective and structure devolution accordingly. Some possibilities to address the imperatives aforementioned factors are discussed in the paper."