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Now showing 1 - 10 of 181
  • Conference Paper
    Discussant's Comments: Governance Stream
    (1998) Ostrom, Elinor
    (From the text): "From the set of governance panels at this conference, we carry away some important insights related both to some of the key questions with which we started the conference and the problems and puzzles addressed within the governance panels. *Fikret Berkes warned us that it was easier to predict failure than success. *Jim Scott stressed that creating uniform languages frequently created substantial benefits while at the same time increasing the capabilities of large- scale governmental and corporate control over all of our lives. *Evelyn Pinkerton urged us all to think about how issues of scale affect the design principles we can use in governing diverse commons. "A question on one of the hallway posters related to the continuum of meanings that individuals in different disciplines bring to the study of common property and asked how can we draw on and relate to these multiple languages and approaches...."
  • Conference Paper
    Particpatory Forestry: Indian Experience in Community Forestry and Joint Forest Management
    (1998) Ravindranath, N. H.; Sudha, P.; Indu, K. M.
    From the Introduction: "In India, forests and village commons are subjected to degradation and loss with adverse impacts on biodiversity, natural regeneration and biomass production. The degradation is caused by conversion of forests and village commons to other uses as well as from non-sustainable extraction of biomass. To conserve the forests and to meet the growing biomass demands, a number of policies such as Forest Conservation Act, 1980 and programs e.g. social forestry and farm forestry, promotion of efficient cooking devices, and participatory management of degraded and regenerating forests have been initiated in India. "India is experimenting with diverse management systems for protection, regeneration and biomass production in forests, village commons and degraded lands. Apart from Forest Department (FD) managed systems, Joint Forest Management (JFM), industry promoted forestry, community forestry, and farm forestry are promoted and practised. Land reclamation, forest regeneration and afforestation programmes are being implemented at an unprecedented scale. A large diversity of community initiated forest management systems has evolved recently in response to severe degradation of forests and grazing land and biomass shortages. Thus, there is a need to understand and learn from the diversity of community forest management systems along with the emerging JFM system and generate information for policy makers, FDs, NGOs and local communities."
  • Conference Paper
    The Legal and the Political in Modern Common Property Management: Re-making Communal Property in Sub-Saharan Africa with Special Reference to Forest Commons in Tanzania
    (1998) Wily, Liz Alden
    "The argument of this paper is that the outstanding challenge facing community property management is to find institutional frameworks which both secure community tenure of those resources into the next century, and provide a workable, and forward-looking operational basis for their management. Without this success, individualising and centralising strategies which have so successfully undermined communal property over the last century will gain yet more, and final, ground. "The findings of this paper are hopeful. The author identifies two forces in modern sub-Saharan Africa which are, intentionally or otherwise, prompting the very kind of institutional development that is necessary to encompass and sustain local common property. The way in which one sub-Saharan state, Tanzania, is making progress in this regard, is explored. The author posits that this success is possible largely because a statutorily-defined institutional framework for common property management is already well-established at the community level and able to be brought into play. Ultimately, other sub-Saharan states will need to develop comparable socio-legal institutions to support working common property into the next century."
  • Conference Paper
    Who Owns the Animals? Sustainable Commercial Use of Wildlife and Indigenous Rights in Australia
    (1998) Davies, Jocelyn
    "The questions I pose in the title to this paper sits somewhat ill at ease with conventional conceptions of indigenous relationships to natural resources. Customary indigenous law is usually characterized as not prescribing ownership rights, but rather rights and responsibilities to use and sustain natural resources such as wild animals. In Australia, these 'soft' conceptions of property rights are now pitted against two different forces. On the one hand is a trend to sustainable use of wildlife through commercial use, which is beginning to lead, for the first time, to the allocation of private property rights in native animals. On the other hand are the practical difficulties that indigenous people have in realising native title rights to hunt native animals. The question of 'who owns the animals' is increasingly pertinent. "Australia's native animals, particularly its mammals, are icons of the continent's status as one of the planet's regions of biodiversity. Indigenous peoples have close cultural and economic relationships with this fauna and their land management practices are commonly held to be responsible for sustaining it over thousands of years. While commercial exploitation of virtually all of Australia's other natural resources is well established, with little provision for benefit to return to indigenous peoples, commercialsation of this fauna (and of native plants) is at an early stage. The animals represent something of a last frontier in natural resource development in Australia. Indigenous rights to this fauna, including 'ownership' of real and/or intellectual property in it and customary rights to use it, may potentially provide some bargaining power for indigenous people to share equitable in the benefits of sustainable management, such as through negotiated co-management regimes. "The question of who owns this fauna is not one for which I can confidently present any answers--either on the basis of exhaustive legal analysis or from extensive empirical research into indigenous viewpoints. In both cases there is little relevant research to draw on. However, some analysis of both sources of information is provided here together with an exploration of current issues in wildlife management that makes the question relevant. From this basis, the paper addresses what might be done in Australian policy to reconcile different answers to this question in a way that promotes social justice for indigenous people. "This paper first looks at some indigenous viewpoints on 'who own the animals'. It then examines government frameworks for wildlife ownership and the implications of the recognition of native title for these. Moves to privatise wildlife resources are examined through the case of the commercial kangaroo industry in South Australia. The paper concludes by outlining some measures that would promote indigenous equity in commercial wildlife industries." (Author's Conclusion) "Indigenous people have significant rights and interests in Australian wildlife. Some characterise these rights as 'ownership' although they may not readily fit non-indigenous conceptions of property. At present recognition of indigenous peoples' native title rights to subsistence harvest of wildlife is problematic and the prospects of indigenous people being recognised as having native title rights to commercial harvest seem remote. In pursuing their strong interest in development of commercial wildlife industries, indigenous people will be subject to the same rules as apply to non-indigenous operators. They are likely to play, at best, a marginal role in industry development due to lack of capital and of experience and skills in commercial enterprise. In addition, opportunities for direct economic benefit from commercial use of wildlife will be inevitably distributed between indigenous groups in an inequitable way, because of the spatial imbalance between indigenous populations and harvestable wildlife resources. "Recent moves to allocate private property rights in the wildlife 'commons' to landowners have not taken account of indigenous rights and interests. There are opportunities for promoting sustainable use of wildlife in a way that also enhances social and economic aspects of sustainability, through the development of co-management structures at various local, regional and national scales. However there is currently a lack of awareness of these opportunities, related to a lack of previous research into indigenous relationships with wildlife and of investigation into native title rights to animals. This adds to the obstacles for negotiating co-management that are presented by the current climate of antagonism from governments and rural industry towards the recognition of indigenous rights in Australia."
  • Conference Paper
    Challenges for Building Environmental Information Management Capacities: Socio-Economies in Transition
    (1998) Hiob, Evi
    From Introduction: "The process of institutional change in FSU (the former Soviet Union) countries penetrates to the very roots of their social order. The governments of FSU are pushing shift from central planning to market-based economy and the whole system of economic and social institution is under reforming. Developing participatory model for democracy including free flow of relevant information and decentralization of decision making processes are the most challenging tasks to manage to internalize externalities into schemes and accept that protecting wildlife and human habitat is an essential element of life quality. "The risk of future crises can be reduced under two conditions: first, there must be full information about national economies in relation to management of their natural resources, and people must be willing to look at and consider that information; and second, once assuring that as much information is available as possible, there must be incentives to act in a sustainable manner on what is known. This is important to understand that building environmental management capacities and environmental managerial cultures may require a variety of innovational institutional paths. Bureaucracy offers organizations a way of standardizing complex tasks and procedures. On the other hand, organizations that become too bureaucratized and have too many and complex rules, regulations, policies and procedures can be non-adaptive, self-defeating, and self-devastating. Institutional issues deserve much greater attention whenever disciplines and sectors try new alternatives by breaking up strong traditional organizational frameworks. "In this paper the author argues that past police state institutional environments may have a remarkable influence in the transition process from the power and role-oriented to task organizational cultures. Since the FSU countries are in the midst of their continuing reforms, public participation in the decision making on environmental management matters depends on the success of interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral collaborations, breaking down old rigid institutional frameworks and establishing flexible, common goal-oriented task cultures. The key issues which historically are likely to have a negative effect on Russian and Soviet organizational ability for innovations and participatory decision-making are: (1) bureaucratic centralism and fully staffed bureaucracies; (2) the prevailing mechanistical-bureaucratic model of organization; (3) lack of capacity to distinguish private from governmental property rights; (4) corruption not an abberation but a part of administration and a way of life; (5) justice as an institutionalized part of administration; (6) identifying the bureaucracy with the crown (party leaders, state); (7) failure to discriminate among the types of legal acts; (8) failure to discriminate among the various branches of the law; (9) laws need not make public to go into effect; (10) laws too general and judicial procedures poorly developed; (11) the main function of law to maintain order, not to enforce justice; (12) partimonic attitude of the central state bureaucracy; (13) symbiotic identification of church (ideology) and state; (14) objectivity gap between natural (technical) and social (political) education and science."
  • Conference Paper
    The Chimalapas Ecological Campesino Reserve: The Golden Gourd of Conflict and Its Role in Protected Area Management
    (1998) Russell, Vance; Lassoie, James P.
    "This study explored the links between conflicts and effective management of the CCER (Chimalapas Ecological Campesino Reserve) and documented conflict and conflict management mechanisms in Chimalapas. This was accomplished by developing a conflict typology, stakeholder analysis and a stepwise management model. More specifically, we hypothesized that effective conflict resolution mechanisms facilitate improved management outcomes for protected areas. Utilizing negative case analysis, the original hypothesis was revised so that all known cases from the field study were included. The revised hypothesis was management of conflicts is a prerequisite to any type of management of the CCER."
  • Conference Paper
    Judicial Allocation of Fishery Resources in Northern Wisconsin
    (1998) Spangler, George
    "This paper examines the fishery management consequences of litigation between Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Indians et al. and the State of Wisconsin in the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin (hereafter, Lac Courte Oreilles et al. vs State of Wisconsin, or, LCO). The case is important as a study in co-management because the court explicity rejected the notion of 'dual management authority,' yet the management provisions accepted by the court require nothing less than intensive discourse and cooperation between tribal entities and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR). Also of interest is the court's final allocation of 50 percent of the harvestable resources to Indians and 50 percent to non-Indians, in spite of its earlier determination that the Chippewa were entitled to utilize the resources up to a level that would provide a "modest or moderate standard of living." The court-sanctioned procedures for assessing the status of fishery resources and the rules applied to subsequently allocate harvestable fish to tribal and non-Indian fishers overshadow in control and complexity and other freshwater fishery management in the country. In spite of this complexity, it is clear from the latest decade of experience in Wisconsin that tribal participants in the fishery harvest only a small fraction of the fish to which they are entitled."
  • 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."