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Maps, Metaphors, and Meanings: Boundary Struggles and Village Forest Use on Private and State Land in Malawi
(2000) Walker, Peter A.; Peters, Pauline E.
"Recent studies have begun to closely examine social and cultural perceptions of spatial relationships, with particular attention to contests over boundaries. Counter mapping has emerged as a technique to represent local claims, but this approach creates tension between efforts to empower social groups and recognition that Western cartographic methods may inadequately represent complex socio-spatial ideas among non-Western peoples. Specifically, whereas recent studies emphasize contests over the legitimacy or location of boundaries, this paper presents case studies from Malawi illustrating equally important non -territorial contests over the meanings , the de facto rules and practices of boundaries. Complex strategies, embedded in local history and culture, have emerged involving efforts to untie resource rights from territorial claims. These strategies, which effectively seek to create a kind of de facto commons for specific resources on private and state land, would be poorly represented or even obscured by mapping efforts focused on (re-)drawing linear boundaries. This suggests a need for critical examination of the use of mapping and map metaphors in social analysis and practice."
Rehabilitation of CPRs Through Re-Crafting of Village Institutions: A Comparative Study from Ethiopia and India
(2000) Wisborg, Poul; Shylendra, H. S.; Gebrehiwot, Kindeya; Shanker, Ravi; Tilahun, Yibabie; Nagothu, Udaya Sekhar; Tewoldeberhan, Sarah; Bose, Purabi
"The study examines approaches and experiences of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working with social and ecological rehabilitation of common pool resources (CPR), specifically the Joint Forest Management (JFM) programme in India and the 'area enclosures' programme in Tigray, Ethiopia. The paper is based on comparative field-research in the marginal, semi-arid project areas of N. M. Sadguru Water and Development Foundation (SWDF), Dahod District, Gujarat, India and the Relief Society of Tigray (REST), Wori Leke Woreda, Tigray, Ethiopia. A multidisciplinary team of practitioners and researchers carried out field observations, mapping and interviews with households and key informants in two villages from each of the project areas. "Similarities were observed in histories of resource depletion through increasing economic pressures and institutional break-down, as well as present-day community-initiatives to revert negative trends. In both India and Ethiopia the government claims ownership to the village commons, and in both situations people refer to lack of or unclear property rights and short-sighted CPR policies as the explanation for resource depletion. However, within similar institutional frameworks, local specific histories and empowerment processes shape contrasting outcomes. "The comparison of the two study villages in India showed a considerable achievement, but also vast untapped potential, for regeneration of commons. Major reasons for the depletion of forest resources and absence of appropriate institutions appeared to be the lack of long-term resource security through CPR ownership or well-defined and substantial user rights. People favoured the re-framing of rules, practices and remuneration patterns which the JFM framework provides. JFM appears to be the major avenue for the NGO to support management of CPRs. Yet, in spite of the formal instruments, conflicting interests and uneven motivation among government officials continue to create hurdles, uncertainty and conflict. "The area enclosures in Tigray, Ethiopia evolved through a grass-root process. Local people support it as a positive initiative for soil and water conservation, and it has had a clear bio-physical impact on large parts of the degraded commons. The local government institution (the baito) is empowered to control the management of commons, unlike in India where the formal local government body (Gram Panchayat) is not involved in CPR management under the JFM. "Differences in the empowerment of local institutions is interpreted as one of the main factors responsible for the varying processes and outcomes observed in the two study areas. "The political and institutional contexts of the two countries present NGOs with contrasting rules and opportunities, creating a need for a thorough, local-specific understanding of the processes of CPR management. The present South-South research cooperation has documented and analysed similarities and differences, and will further pursue their context-specific implications for NGO strategy, advocacy and policy. The study confirmed that partners gain from joint learning and experience sharing on CPR approaches, but also showed that institutional, cultural and economic differences make transfer of models and practices challenging."
Negotiated Autonomy: Transforming Self-Governing Institutions for Local Common-Pool Resources in Two Tribal Villages in Taiwan
(2000) Tang, Ching-Ping; Tang, Shui-Yan
"The current literature on common-pool resources suggests that appropriators autonomy in determining access and harvesting rules is a pre-condition for successful local self-governance. Yet few studies have been done to examine how local communities that are faced with outside intrusion can regain such autonomy. This paper examines this issue by studying how two mountain tribal villages in Taiwan have attempted to rebuild their indigenous rules governing the use of their local stream fisheries. One village, Shan-Mei, has been more successful than another village, Li-Chia, in restoring its indigenous rules and fishery, because villagers in Shan-Mei were able to attain a negotiated autonomy by developing mutually beneficial relationships with external stakeholders."
People, Place and Season: Reflections on Gwich'in Ordering of Access to Resources in an Arctic Landscape
(2000) Johnson, Leslie Main; Andre, Daniel
"It is a tenet of common property theory that local groups of people tend to evolve institutions to allocate common pool resources among community members in ways which are economically and ecologically sustainable. We are interested in the applicability of this type of analysis to subsistence systems of non-agricultural indigenous peoples. This paper is a preliminary examination of informal institutions of the Gwich'in of the Northwest Territories in Canada and how they contribute to ordering access to resources through the seasons by Gwich'in. This analysis is based on conversations by Johnson with Gwich'in and other people who have worked with Gwich'in people, and her fieldwork with Gwich'in from Fort McPherson and Tsiigehtchic in 1999 and 2000, and the insights and experiences of Andre regarding Gwich'in seasonal use of land and resources. This paper considers the resource use of the people of Fort McPherson and Tsiigehtchic. It does not deal with the mixed Gwich'in-Inuvialuit-non-Indigenous communities of Aklavik and Inuvik, which are historically more complex. We will consider three principal areas in this analysis: fishing, trapping, and caribou. "It must be emphasized that this discussion uses an analytic framework which differs in important ways from the usual perspective of Gwich'in people. The conceptualization of diverse elements of traditional subsistence as 'resources,' for example, and the discussion of these as things separate from a seasonal flow of life is not an indigenous perspective. Nonetheless, this approach can reveal aspects of Gwich'in life that allow us to compare aspects of the Gwich'in way of living on their land with that of other peoples in diverse areas of the world."
Dayak NGO Responses to National Legal and Policy Frameworks Affecting Adat Governance in Indonesia
(2000) Masiun, Stephanus
"Current national legal frameworks do not support traditional local adat governance and threaten ecological and social resilience in Indonesia. This paper describes the range of traditional Dayak adat governance structures, the Indonesian states' governance structure, the national laws and policies that threaten Dayak adat governance, and Dayak NGOs' responses to these frameworks. Specific laws affecting adat governance include: Agrarian Basic Law No. 5, 1960; Basic Forestry Law No. 5, 1967; Village Governing Law No. 5, 1979; Spatial Law No. 24, 1992; Ministry of Internal Affairs Regulation No. 3, 1997; Anti-subversion Law No. 11, 1963, and Mines Law No. 11, 1968. Dayaks have formed NGOs to raise awareness of the problematic laws, revitalize adat governance, and provide legal empowerment. They also work for legal reform through networks and alliances."
Adaptive Management, Organizations and Common Property Management: Perspectives from the Community Forests of Quintana Roo, Mexico
(2000) Bray, David Barton
"For over 15 years an unusual experiment in community-based management of common property resources, particularly forest resources, has been underway in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo. Mexico's ejido system gave communities permanent and secure access to common pool forest resources under defined common property management regimes in two stages, 1) When the ejido land grant was originally given as far back as the 1920s, and 2) when communities won the right to exploit the timber on their forest lands in the early 1980s. It is a system of common property management which was almost entirely induced from the outside, a 'donor-initiated common pool resource institution,' although in some cases it clearly was able to draw on indigenous cultural forms and practices. Thus, it is not 'self-organized' although in the best of the cases it now has a significant degree of self-governance. It involves the organized industrial production of timber for commercial markets, an economic activity which occurs in few other common property regimes in the world outside of Mexico. It involves not just sets of rules in use, or 'institutions' but formal community organizations, indeed, market-oriented 'community enterprises' dedicated to commercial forest exploitation. These formal organizations occur not only at the community or ejido level, but also participate in and depend upon second-level organizations at the state level and third-level organizations at the national level in a 'nested' fashion. "These and other factors to be discussed in this paper make community forest management in Quintana Roo an exceptional but still little described case within the common property literature. I will be attempting a synthetic analysis of the history of these organizations, the social and ecological conditions which forged their emergence, and how they have transformed over time within a turbulent policy and political environment and in interaction with the constraints and possibilities of the ecosystem. Some of the key conceptual elements I will use in the discussion include adaptive management and organizational learning, the linking of social and ecological systems, common property theory, social capital, and community-based conservation. The adaptive management approach is a framework that allows us to look at the Quintana Roo organizations as actively adapting and reacting to a typically complex social and ecological environment, as organizations that 'learn.' A practical implication is that it calls for the elimination of the barrier between research and management. In this approach, resource management policies, and resource-directed actions should be treated as 'experiments' from which land managers and 'stakeholders' at all levels of a social system can learn. It takes the assumption of 'trial and error' in the evolution of self-organized CPR systems, and attempts to place it on a more formal foundation of scientific research and adaptive organizational strategies."
Misali Island, Tanzania: An Open Access Resource Redefined
(2000) Abdullah, Ali; Hamad, Ali Said; Ali, Ali Mbarouk; Wild, Robert G.
"As with many of post-colonial East Africa's valuable natural resource areas, the fishery of Misali Island, off the West Coast of Pemba, Tanzania, could, until recently, have been defined as open access common property due to the government's inability to effectively enforce the official system of state ownership. Moves by local community members, government sympathisers and external agents have led to the establishment of a legally recognised communal property resource, centrally managed by a heterogeneous stakeholder group that both coordinates control mechanisms inside the area and advocates for the rights of users to higher-level organisations. "Towards the beginning of the decade the traditional users of Misali (an estimated 1640 fishermen from 29 different coastal communities around Pemba) were threatened with exclusion from their livelihood resource through the possible lease of the island to tourism investors. This prompted extensive lobbying of the government of Zanzibar, who agreed that the island would be proposed as a community-managed eco-tourism site in which sustainable, controlled off-take would be allowed to continue. "Stakeholder workshops and advocacy by government and foreign agencies led, in May 1998, to the designation of Misali Island and its surrounding reefs as a protected conservation area. This allowed for the enforcement of controls on extraction by a central Management Committee, made up of resource users, government and NGO representatives. The development of an eco-tourism industry to the island will, through new visitor charges, provide immediate benefits to fishers communities to offset revenues lost during the move towards sustainable resource use and provide the funds needed for long term protected area management. MICA (Misali Island Conservation Association), an NGO made up primarily of fishermen, has been formed as the organisation responsible for management of the resource, monitoring use of the resource by outsiders such as fishermen from Kenya and the neighbouring island of Unguja as well as distributing tourism revenue to member villages. "Many of the issues raised in the Misali project are of relevance to contemporary questions in common property studies: (1) What has been the trajectory of involvement of higher-level organisations (for example MICA, Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Natural Resources) in the management of the resource? How has the involvement of these organisations affected the cooperation between direct resource users? How has advocacy by these organisations changed the management of the resources on the ground?; (2)Does the degree of dependence of the different user groups on the resource affect their commitment to cooperation?; (3) What are the interactions between different user groups (Kenyan/Ungujan/Pemban fishers/tourists)?; (4) Are the user group boundaries becoming redefined as the property regime of the island develops? "This paper traces the evolution of the management regime on Misali Island. It examines some of the questions outlined above, their relevance to other case studies and considers the future management of the resources and its effects on the livelihoods of the users."
Who Needs Formal Regulations to Manage the Commons? The Rural Charters in Northern Italy
(2000) Casari, Marco
"According to the Folk theorems, a tragedy of the commons outcome can be avoided provided that the users are sufficiently patient and that their interaction is infinitely repeated. That seems to have been the situation of the villages on the Italian side of the Alps (Trentino), which held forests and pastures in common for centuries (1200-1800). "Instead of relying on informal regulations, however, the users created formal institutions to limit the over-exploitation of the resources through written legal documents called rural Charters (Carte di Regola ). Was the choice inefficient or were informal regulations not able to support full cooperation? "Some degree of formal regulations was necessary to ensure that basic requirements of the Folk theorem, such as repeated interaction and protection from outsiders, were met. Through the rural Charters the local communities obtained from the political authorities some legislative power to self-regulate and locally enforce formal institutions. For instance, the long-term relationship within a community was ensured by a specific property rights arrangement on the land that locked the insiders in. "Since the resource users could only imperfectly monitor one other, the outcome of informal institutions was in general sub-optimal. I adopt the Green-Porter model to interpret the historical situation. The alternative of a legal sanctioning system entailed explicit costs to be set up and maintained, but might have provided a better arrangement also, because it avoided the deadweight losses associated with punishment actions of informal regulations. "In conclusion, it is well possible that formal regulations could have performed better on an efficiency ground than informal regulations."
Natural Resources and Decentralization: Local Institutions' Role in Co-Management and Local Conflict Resolution in the Mopti Region
(2000) Ba, Boubacar
"Since the socio-political changes of 1991, Mali has chosen an institutional development strategy closer to local institutions and the rising collectivities. In order to lead efficiently this ambitious program and measure the real stakes, these local institutions, having been enduring till now many economic, political and social mutations, want to integrate more and more the institutional domain of the society on the way of democracy. This has been noticeable for some years with the starting of decentralization (constitution of GREM Regional Group of Surveys and Mobilization, team for territorial boundaries setting, village arrangements for territorial boundaries settings, communal elections). "In the dynamics of this process evolution, the Delta region of Mopti with its problems and its ecological specificity, presents a rich field of experience in practice. For three decades, we have been aware of local institutions work crisis and disorganization towards other actors and we noticed the supremacy exerted by the State through the system of administration known hitherto. "The basic question is to know whether the local institutions for natural resources management can face the new responsibilities because, till now, these structures have lived in the shadow of the State administrations thought and domination through the chiefs of village who exert a hybrid power. They are the local administration representatives and sometimes activities coordinators of local resources management or members of traditional institutions. "Facing the stakes and directing of decentralization, emergent local institutions wish in this way to have a position and they are favourable to an intellectual assimilation of the theoretical and practical tools for the process in order to play the role of real actors on the field. The different thoughts going on lead to a good identification of these emergent local institutions for the creation of a new synergic vision in the new development space that is the rise of communes. This is the reason why the association 'Eveil', being a private operator for development, gave itself up to support institutions emergence with an efficient pedagogic approach giving a value to human resources (in French Méthode VRH) and reinforcing a convergence of the civil society. This experience of Eveil is in consistency with the institutional process begun since 1991 and it deserves to be better known as a real basis for the civil society in the new communes development."
Res Publica: A South African Perspective
(2000) Mbodla, Ntusi
"This paper is in four parts. First, I examine the role of the apartheid law in disfiguring the common law notion of res publica. Secondly, I look at the perceived conflict between public property and land restitution in terms Restitution of Land Rights Act 22 of 1994, as amended. Thirdly, I look at specific issues such as whether indigenous/rural communities subsistence needs should be recognised, and more specifically, whether they should have a place within the National Parks. Last, but by no means the least, a possible solution is determined. It should be noted that this paper will begin as a broad theme on res publica but in the course of the presentation attention will be bestowed upon National Parks i.e. a kind of res publica."

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