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Conference Paper Representing Communities: The Case of a Community-Based Watershed Management Project in Rajasthan, India(1998) Ahluwalia, Meenakshi"In the Indian development policy context there is increasing concern about why community-based natural resource management projects fail to achieve their expected levels of equity or sustainability (Saint, 1995; Kerr, 1996). Such community-based approaches are themselves a departure from earlier policies which tended to be based solely on state priorities, treating natural resource management as a technical and administrative issue, rather than a socio-economic and political one (Pretty and Shah, 1996), and focusing on large-scale projects such as large dams, reservoirs and canal systems (CSE, 1985). The high social and environmental costs of such schemes, now well- documented, have been an important stimulus in a shift evident since the 1980's towards small-scale community based projects. "In this context, donors, governmental and non-governmental organisations (NGO's) are currently investing heavily in participatory watershed development. Widely cited project examples include the Sukhmajri project (Chopra, 1990) and the Relagaon Sindhi Project (Deshpande and Reddy, 1991). NWDPRA is a well-funded endeavour undertaken by central and the state governments with the objective of involving people in project planning, implementation and maintenance, over 99 districts in 16 states. World Bank-funded integrated watershed development projects have also been launched, covering 94 watersheds. "Emerging critiques of such projects highlight how, for instance, farmers are used as labourers for construction or the interests of the weaker sections of society are overlooked so that they bear the labour burden of the projects for little benefit (Sharma, 1995). Some schemes have floundered in the face of local resource conflicts. In other cases, farmers accept otherwise unsuitable programmes because they offer a short-term source of income and access to subsidies, but resource management efforts are not sustained beyond the departure of the implementing agency (Sanghi, 1987; Pretty and Shah, 1996). Many of these problems can be traced to the misleading assumptions about 'community' and 'participation' informing these approaches. Certain commentators are now urging the need for greater attention to local ecological specificity, social organisation and institutions in natural resource management in the Indian context (e.g. Mosse, 1997). "This paper focuses on a community-based watershed project in Rajasthan to provide a better understanding of how social, institutional and ecological dynamics affect practical efforts to achieve community-based sustainable development. The paper applies the tools of environmental entitlements analysis in a project evaluation mode to explore how people's different endowments and entitlements to natural resources, as influenced by institutions, affect their experience of watershed development interventions. The paper also considers whether social actors' differential abilities to overcome the transaction costs that they face make it viable for them to invest in institutions and environmental management in the ways expected by the project."Conference Paper Pastoral Development and Grazing Resource Management in Nigerian Savannah Areas(1998) Olomola, Ade S."In Africa, policy interventions to increase livestock productivity centre around the sedentarization of the herdsmen. However, the encouragement of the transition from a nomadic pastoral economy to a sedentary one often entails serious ecological and economic risks. Nonetheless, evidence has shown that the limited potential of available natural resources can possibly be used wisely and flexibly under difficult and varying ecological conditions based on local technical knowledge and management systems of most pastoral communities. Such management usually involves elaborate rules, regulations and sanctions. With the local management system it has been possible not only to minimize production loss but also to resolve social conflicts. In general, however, results concerning the effectiveness of local management systems have been mixed. Whereas the systems have worked in many places, failures have been recorded in several others. This underscores the need to investigate existing systems with due regard to their peculiarities and ascertain the conditions under which successful management can be accomplished."Conference Paper National and Sub-national Consequences of a Regional River Basin Agreement: The Case of the Mekong River Agreement(1998) Ojendal, Joakim; Torell, Elim"This paper concerns itself with the risk for malevolent change in development cum exploitation of natural resources in international watersheds. More concretely, it focuses on the Lower Mekong River Basin and on water as an indispensable and valuable asset. It scrutinizes the risk for ecologically damaging interventions and the absence of public participation in the process. It assesses, finally, and in the light of the above, what difference the 1995 MRC-Agreement has made in this regard for the two core countries in the Lower Mekong River Basin, Laos and Cambodia."Conference Paper The Driving Forces Behind Collective Action in a Community in the Lower Amazon (Santarem, state of Para, Brazil)(1998) Futemma, Celia; de Castro, Fábio; Silva-Forsberg, Maria Clara"Studies on local management of common-pool resources (CPRs) usually emphasize analysis at the community level. However, empirical data have shown that the fact of considering community as a homogenous social group overlooks important social dynamics among actors which may lead to different outcomes (Schlager and Blomquist 1998). The analysis of local and external factors which affect individual's incentives may uncover such heterogeneities within a community. Edwards and Steins (1998) argue that such contextual factors are crucial to reveal 'hidden' factors that may affect collective decisions. Factors such as governmental policy (at the regional level), and household structure and ecological features (at the local level) may affect the opportunities and constraints to use a given resource. "Perhaps the main difficulty in identifying the primary driving forces to join a collective action is because most studies of successful collective action have focused on groups who organized themselves at a time substantially prior to the fieldwork conducted by the researcher (Bromley et al. 1992; McCay and Acheson 1990; Netting 1973; Ostrom 1992a; Wade 1988). In this regard, the analysis of a collective action in formation may provide information which better reveals the driving forces behind individuals' decisions concerning natural resources. It may, for example, reveal if the reason of a collective action is conservation, or if it is embedded in a 'hidden' agenda that is not directly related to the managed system (Steins 1997). Likewise, it may explain why some individuals are more prone to participate than others (Gibson and Koontz 1997). "The study analyzes a collective action that recently took place in a traditional riparian community in the Lower Amazon. The settlement is located between the floodplain and upland ecosystems, but only one-third of the residents joined a common property of the floodplain area. This paper tries to answer two questions: 1) why have only one-third of the households initiated collective action in the floodplain forest? and 2) how is the collective action in the floodplain related to the upland ecosystem?"Conference Paper Gendered Water and Land Rights in Construction: Rice Valley Improvement in Burkina Faso(1998) Van Koppen, Barbara"It is widely assumed that local gender and class hierarchies are the major obstacles for achieving equity. However, skewed expropriation and vesting of new rights exclusively in the local male elite or male heads of households may result from how an agency structures local forums and determines title criteria. This chapter analyzes negotiations on water and land rights under externally supported construction of water infrastructure in southwest Burkina Faso, West Africa. "The project used the concept of the unitary household to legitimize expropriation of women's rights to rice land. Initially the local forum was dominated by the male elite and paid male construction workers. At later sites, allocation became producer-based. At the initiative of local male leaders, forums expanded to include women, who farmed almost all the rice land. Decision-making on title criteria was based on productivity considerations and on respect for former rights, which were registered before construction started. These locally invented practices crystallized into a standard procedure for expropriation and reallocation, which was time-efficient and in which productivity considerations prevailed over short-term construction interests."Conference Paper Biodiversity Management: Intellectual Property Rights and Farmers' Rights(1998) Trommeter, MichelFrom the Author's Paper: "Traditional plant varieties and wild species are disappearing irreversibly, and this process has resulted in the disappearance of farming know-how and the genetic information it entailed. These varieties have been replaced by modern ones, which are economically more efficient but which have only a low degree of genetic diversity. What will happen if, for example, these modern varieties turn out to be ill-adapted, or if a pathogen appears? Given the reduction of biodiversity and the risks involved, it is necessary to preserve: preservation for the present generations, in private banks where the preserved material is, or will be, used in plant breeding programming (the economic aspect of preservation); preservation for future generations, by developing an analysis in social terms of the intergenerational models and of sustainable development. "...In this paper there are two goals: to evaluate the benefits or advantages of a project integrating sustainable management of biodiversity at each level of intervention in the decision (local, national, global) and to define property rights on the genetic resources."Conference Paper From Conflicting to Shared Visions for a Commons: Stakeholder's Visions for Integrated Watershed Management in Thailand's Highlands(1998) Ayudhaya, Prathuang Narintarangkool na; Ross, Helen"Our research is part of an interdisciplinary program to develop a framework for integrated water resources assessment and management. It includes participatory research to elicit, compare, and hopefully to help to integrate the different visions for development of particular highland watersheds held by local people (ethnic minority groups and lowland Thai farmers), government departments, NGOs and business interests. It also acknowledges the effects of highland practice on downstream water users. Other stages of the research include resource assessment, and the development and evaluation of options for the sustainable development of the highlands (Jakeman, Ross and Wong 1997; Ross, Narintarangkool and Wong 1997). "This paper describes the visions of stakeholders in two of the four sub-catchments we are studying in the Mae Chaem watershed: Mae Pan, in the middle reaches of the system, and Mae Lu, in the lower reaches. The Mae Chaem is a tributary of the Ping River, and lies to the west of the well-known northern town of Chiangmai adjoining the Burmese border. The visions are compared using conflict mapping techniques, with a focus on underlying needs as well as the stated aims of each stakeholder. Our interest is in exploring the capacity to improve stakeholders' understanding of one another's situations and needs, identifying the potential for stakeholders to develop shared visions for the development of these catchments, and for them to enter into participatory process of local policy- making and environment management. Are there prospects for some forms of co-management of these watersheds, and if so in what form? This paper is based on work in progress, since not all stakeholders have been interviewed yet...."Conference Paper The City as Commons: Creating a Deliberate Place Through Land Use Planning(1998) Burton, Mike"Twenty five years ago, Oregon adopted the first state-wide land use laws in the United States. The program was designed to protect natural resources and make wise use of the land in both urban and rural areas. Due to the coordinated approach to land use planning in cities and counties throughout the state, today, Oregon is the closest thing America has to a deliberate place."Conference Paper Environmental Policy as an Institution of Collective Ownership: Water Pollution Control Policy in the United States, 1850-1980(1998) Paavola, Jouni"My paper argues that the contemporary research in common property opens up an interesting avenue for economic analysis of environmental policies. It facilitates the conceptualization of environmental policies as institutions for the ownership and management of environmental resources that may have been established, formulated, maintained, and/or changed in part to forward values other than economic efficiency and welfare. Research in common property also offers a structural model of institutions for ownership and resource management that enables a more detailed analysis of these complex institutional arrangements than environmental economics and law and economics have been able to accomplish. Law and economics can in turn offer tools to examine how the formulation of institutions affects their enforceability, consequences, and viability. In what follows, the first section of my paper discusses in greater detail how research in common property can be extended to the analysis of environmental policies. "The subsequent parts of my paper aim at demonstrating that research in common property can fruitfully inform the analysis of environmental policies by examining water pollution control policies in the United States from the middle of the 19th century until the environmental decade of the 1970s. The second section will examine how riparian law governed the polluting use of watercourses by early industrial establishments in the 19th century. I will discuss how, in part to facilitate economic growth and development, riparian law constituted a use of water as a transferable asset and established market allocation of water quality. The third section will examine how early water pollution control statutes enacted in many states after the turn of the century established collective ownership and political allocation of water resources to protect public health. The fourth section will discuss how federal water pollution control legislation responded to the larger scale and broader range of water pollution problems in the postwar era and protected the quality of water also for recreational purposes and for their own sake. I will also discuss in each section to what degree institutions succeeded in forwarding these objectives. "My conclusions summarize my observation on the structure, functioning, performance, and evolution of water pollution control policies in the United States. I will also indicate the implications of common property research for the analysis of environmental policies and vice versa."Conference Paper The Role of Contextual Factors in Common Pool Resource Analysis(1998) Edwards, Victoria M.; Steins, Nathalie A.Authors' Introduction: "It is recognised that well-established rules are a necessary, but not sufficient condition of successful collective action (see Barrett, 1991; Eyborsson, 1995; Steins, 1995). Successful co-operation depends largely on the response of individual actors, influenced by incentives derived from both inside and outside the management regime. Contextual factors are one set of such factors and include dynamic forces based locally and remote from the resource management regime: they are constituted in the user groups' social, cultural, economic, political, technological and institutional environment and can have an important part to play in establishing the choice sets from which common property users can select strategies (Edwards & Steins, 1996; Steins, 1997). In this respect, they are important in determining the evolution of decision-making arrangements for managing common pool resources (CPRs). "Contextual factors define (i) what is physically, legally, economically and socially feasible in terms of the supply of products and services from a resource and (ii) what is economically, socially and culturally desirable, by establishing the demand factor. As a result, the choice sets related to use of the resource system are expanded in terms of (i) the number and types of users; and (ii) the type and extent of use. In addition, contextual factors often redefine choice sets related to revision of the decision-making arrangements governing the resource (see Feeny, 1988; Edwards, 1996; Barrett, 1991). Lack of knowledge of contextual factors can lead analysts to make simplified judgments about the state of management of the resource. The paper advises researchers to focus on the choice sets available to individual users of the resource, in terms of (i) products and services demanded of the resource, (ii) the different decision-making arrangements possible and (III) different action strategies, and tracing back the derivation of these choice sets to contextual factors. This has particular relevance in multiple-use CPRs, where there is more than one type of user group and analysis must address expected differentials in the adoption of individual strategies according to use of the CPR."