Globalisation, Culture and Common Property Resource Management

Abstract

"Traditional environmental knowledge is an important culture resource that guides and sustains the operation of management systems, especially community tenure systems. When applied to the Kenyan sector of Lake Victoria, it is postulated that understanding such knowledge is an inseparable part of both research on common property resources and of management designs on them. It has now been well established that for common property resource management to gain sustainability and inter-generational equity, traditional and technical knowledge in the sciences are of great importance.

"To develop and implement effective management systems, it is necessary to understand the information types and sources required. In this paper I make observations from other related studies but specifically use the case of Kenyan sector of Lake Victoria to illustrate the relevance of both traditional and modern sector in resource management designs. The paper also identifies conservation (sustainability) of resources as a common theme (global culture) and specifies the global efforts in common property resource management. It concludes that traditional knowledge, though important in resource management, does not always mean valuable and therefore the need to complement with scientific knowledge."