Cadastral Politics: The Making of Community‐Based Resource Management in Zimbabwe and Mozambique

Projects promoting community‐based management of natural resources frequently encourage local smallholders to share flora, fauna, or land forms with state agencies and/or private companies. Ideals of common property and moral economy have inspired this agenda and helped spread it globally. In Southern Africa, however, the general model of shared landscapes has collided with a bitter history of white colonization and land grabbing. This article recounts the rise and fall of one CAMPFIRE (Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources) project in eastern Zimbabwe. There, cadastral politics — struggles over the bounding and control of land — overwhelmed negotiations for joint management and eco‐tourism. Across the border, in Mozambique, community‐based resource management has engaged with cadastral politics in a more fruitful fashion. In the midst of latter‐day Afrikaner colonization, this project mapped smallholders’ claims to land. Thus, the Zimbabwean project ignored territorial conflict and ultimately succumbed to it. The Mozambican project jumped into the fray, with some success. On past or current settler frontiers, community‐based management may learn from this lesson: dispense with an ideology of sharing and join the rough‐and‐tumble of cadastral politics.     

Community‐Based Resource Management in Turkey: ‘Je Participe,Tu Participes,Il Participe… Ils Profitent’1

The current discourse and practice of natural resource management rest on the assumption that participatory decision‐making mechanisms offer efficient and equitable policy solutions. There is increasing recognition, however, that such mechanisms might fail in ensuring effective participation of all stakeholders and, consequently, be prone to (re)producing inequalities and remaining ineffective in environmental protection. Taking this observation as a backdrop, this study addresses the under‐investigated implications of state–society relationships on the operation of participatory processes. By employing a unique combination of data provided by focus groups, in‐depth interviews, and a survey administered to 377 individuals, it analyses the ‘failure’ of participatory decision making within the context of an internationally‐funded environmental conservation project in Sultan Sazl???, Turkey. The article argues that the specific manifestations of state–society relationships and the political economy dynamics at the local level account for this failure. It shows that local materializations of state behaviour, interacting with local inequalities and perceptions of the decision‐making process, impinge on effective participation. In emphasizing that the capability of different groups to participate is shaped by the state in important ways, this article calls for more research on the political economy of state–society relationships and community‐based resource management.     

Communities in Catchments: Implications for Natural Resource Management

Economic and social considerations in natural resource management include the need for community participation and a greater appreciation of social and economic processes in understanding environmental problems. It is anticipated that new frameworks will guide these inclusions and redirect planning and management activities to achieve environmental sustainability. This paper examines issues of participation and the nature of ‘community’ through an analysis of relevant natural resource management policy documents and a case study of a public drinking water supply catchment in Western Australia. The findings indicate that if NRM strategies are to be successful, then a much wider and more inclusive view of community is needed, one that fully captures the different stakeholder groups beyond farmers, such as town residents, indigenous people, and those involved in other land uses. We need strategies that can accommodate differences within and between communities.     

Monitoring Elite Capture in Community‐Driven Development

Recently, a lot of attention has been paid to improving ways of assessing the effectiveness of development interventions. This is to be welcomed, especially with regard to community‐based or participatory aid projects, since considerable resources are currently being earmarked for these by almost all types of donor agencies, including large international organizations. Such projects are vulnerable to elite capture at local level, and this problem must be mitigated if most of the aid funds thus disbursed are to reach the intended beneficiaries. This article discusses several methods available to achieve that objective. In particular, it argues that the sequential and conditional release of aid funds may not be sufficient to keep elite capture well under control, making it necessary to resort to co‐ordination mechanisms among aid agencies, such as multilateral reputation mechanisms. Even these are not going to be effective enough, however. In the end, an active role will have to be played by the ultimate purveyors of aid money, whether the taxpayers or the contributors in fund‐raising campaigns.     

The Double‐Edged Sword of Public‐Resource Dependence: The Impact of Public Resources on Autonomy and Legitimacy in Korean Cultural Nonprofit Organizations

As governments and nonprofit organizations build close partnerships for the provision of public services, they become interdependent in many ways. In particular, nonprofits' public‐resource dependence has significant implications for their behavior and decisions. By examining Korean cultural nonprofit organizations (CNPOs), this article posits a theoretical framework for the impact of public‐resource dependence on nonprofits' organizational autonomy and legitimacy. The empirical results of national survey data of Korean cultural nonprofits suggest that public‐resource dependence has a dual effect, reducing managerial autonomy while enhancing institutional legitimacy. Korean CNPOs seem to be constrained by public funding granted by both local governments and the central government, particularly in goal setting, resource allocations, and program choices. However, public funding also helps nonprofits earn institutional legitimacy through its reputation and recognition effects.     

Social Capital and Post‐Conflict Reconstruction in Burundi: The Limits of Community‐based Reconstruction

Using an examination of three NGO interventions in post‐conflict Burundi, this article questions community‐based reconstruction as a mechanism to rebuild social capital after conflicts, particularly when direct livelihood support is provided. The authors demonstrate a general shortcoming of the methodology employed in community‐based development (CBD), namely its focus on ‘technical procedural design’, which results in what may be termed ‘supply‐driven demand‐driven’ reconstruction. The findings suggest the need for a political economy perspective on social capital, which acknowledges that the effects on social capital are determined by the type of economic resource CBD gives access to. Through the use of a resource typology, the case studies show that the CBD methodology and the potential effects on social capital differ when applied to public and non‐strategic versus private and strategic resources. This has particular consequences for post‐conflict situations. A generalized application of CBD methodology to post‐conflict reconstruction programmes fails to take adequate account of the nature of the interventions and the challenges posed by the particular post‐conflict setting. The article therefore questions the current popular ‘social engineering’ approach to post‐conflict reconstruction.     

Partitioned Nature,Privileged Knowledge: Community‐based Conservation in Tanzania

Community Based Conservation (CBC) has become the catch–all solution to the social and ecological problems plaguing traditional top–down, protectionist conservation approaches. CBC has been particularly popular throughout Africa as a way to gain local support for wildlife conservation measures that have previously excluded local people and their development needs. This article shows that, despite the rhetoric of devolution and participation associated with new CBC models, conservation planning in Tanzania remains a top–down endeavour, with communities and their specialized socio–ecological knowledge delegated to the margins. In addition to the difficulties associated with the transfer of power from state to community hands, CBC also poses complex challenges to the culture or institution of conservation. Using the example of the Tarangire–Manyara ecosystem, the author shows how local knowledge and the complexities of ecological processes challenge the conventional zone–based conservation models, and argues that the insights of local Maasai knowledge claims could better reflect the ecological and social goals of the new CBC rhetoric.     

Subverting Regulatory Protection of ‘Natural Commodities’: The Prunus Africana in Madagascar

This article explores the contradictions that have emerged along the commodity chain of the endangered medicinal tree Prunus africana in Madagascar. The study provides a unique opportunity to build on theories of access, highlighting in particular the themes of social relations, culture and power in mediating access to natural resources and benefits that derive from commercialization. Commodity chain analysis is employed to illustrate that property rights, based solely on formal rights, legal claims or customary rights to ‘natural commodities’ are insufficient to measure who is able to gain and maintain access to the species. The results show that power, regulation and exclusion have a much greater impact on who is able to tap into the benefits of P. africana commercialization. This article illustrates how extraction firms in Madagascar have over the years finessed their way, through ‘green conditionalities’ or conservation concessions, into continued extraction of P. africana — all in the face of widespread regulation.     

Data Integration Issues in Research Supporting Sustainable Natural Resource Management

Current decision‐making in natural resource use and management aims at delivering ecologically‐sustainable development to achieve conservation and economic benefits. The process of guiding natural resource use requires the integration of social, economic and biophysical information on which to base management decisions. This paper discusses the integration of socio‐economic information for natural resource management (NRM) planning and decision‐making in the Australian context. A comprehensive resource of socio‐economic data is the Census, which is undertaken every five years by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) for the whole of Australia. Unfortunately there are qualitative and quantitative issues stemming from the use of ABS census data maps for NRM decision‐making, as they are at a different scale to and the boundaries do not coincide with biophysical information. These issues include the variable shape of collection districts, the use of enumerated data for population‐based statistics, the large size of collection districts in low populated areas, and the averaging of socio‐economic information over the collection districts. Examples highlight these issues and show a way forwards in improving data integration, which includes simple spatial overlay methods and regression modelling.     

Maintaining Centralized Control in Community‐based Forestry: Policy Construction in the Philippines

Community‐based forestry management is emerging as an important component of forest policies in the developing world. Using the Philippines as a case‐study, this article critically examines the way in which community‐based forestry is constructed and understood among government policy makers. The author suggests that the new policy discourse of community‐based forestry policy in the Philippines is still shaped by efforts to maintain centralized control over forest management and a political economy orientated towards commercial timber production using the principles of ‘scientific management’. While timber production and the technical aspects of forest management are emphasized, social and environmental considerations remain neglected.     

Network Dynamics in Natural Resource Governance: A Case Study of Swiss Landscape Management

Structural characteristics of social networks have been recognized as important factors of effective natural resource governance. However, network analyses of natural resource governance most often remain static, even though governance is an inherently dynamic process. In this article, we investigate the evolution of a social network of organizational actors involved in the governance of natural resources in a regional nature park project in Switzerland. We ask how the maturation of a governance network affects bonding social capital and centralization in the network. Applying separable temporal exponential random graph modeling (STERGM), we test two hypotheses based on the risk hypothesis by Berardo and Scholz (2010) in a longitudinal setting. Results show that network dynamics clearly follow the expected trend toward generating bonding social capital but do not imply a shift toward less hierarchical and more decentralized structures over time. We investigate how these structural processes may contribute to network effectiveness over time.     

The Paradoxes of Community‐based Participation in Dar es Salaam

The current discourse and practice of international development rest on the assumption that community‐based participation is an essential component of efforts to facilitate change across the global South. Such participation is thought not only to ensure efficiency and sustainability, but also to accelerate broader structural transformation by empowering individuals to exercise agency in relation to development. This article seeks to contribute to critical participation studies by analysing the broader processes and structures that shape participatory opportunities in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The author argues that by promoting community‐based organizations (CBOs), national and transnational development actors have produced and legitimated a system of popular participation that, in contrast to their claims, disempowers local citizens. Paradoxically, these CBOs have further contributed to the exclusion of the majority of community actors.     

Genuine Community Engagement in Remote Dryland Regions: Natural Resource Management in Lake Eyre Basin

Remote dryland regions are characterised by sparse populations and socially marginalised voices which pose particular challenges to natural resource management. This paper considers the issue of how to achieve community engagement in regions with these characteristics. In doing so, the paper contributes to an expanding international research agenda focusing on the distinct characteristics of arid and semi‐arid regions under the heading of ‘dryland syndrome’. The paper draws on government liaison officer and local community perspectives of successful engagement in the case‐study region of Lake Eyre Basin, Australia. The results demonstrate that widely recognised characteristics of successful engagement are required but insufficient for genuine engagement in remote dryland regions. In addition to building trust through community ownership, being inclusive, effective communication, and adequate resources, genuine community engagement in drylands also requires respecting the extreme conditions and extraordinary variability of these areas. Residents of dryland regions seek genuine engagement yet engage opportunistically when seasons are conducive and when tangible outcomes are visible.     

History and the Duality of Power in Community‐based Forestry in Southeast Bolivia

This article discusses theories of power and economic articulation in the framework of a community‐based forestry project among the Chiquitano communities of southeastern Bolivia. The analysis focuses on the tensions that characterize indigenous development projects, and the problems that result from competing systems of control and power. Using Norman Whitten's concept of the duality in power, and Carol Smith's elaboration of historical economic analysis, the author examines the connections between historical, political and economic institutions and norms promoting redistribution of resources and goods in Chiquitano culture, and the unique Chiquitano response to the opportunities and challenges of international development. He contends that the distribution of development funds and resources in the form of small gifts and loans by Chiquitano leaders to neighbours and kin follows economic and political models established in Jesuit missions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The article also argues that patterns of resistance and adaptation in Chiquitano political leadership follow patterns established under rubber and ranching patrons in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.     

Working Towards Regional Agreements: Recent Developments in Co‐operative Resource Management in Canada's British Columbia

Canada's experience with ‘regional agreements’ has attracted considerable attention in Australia as a means by which Indigenous people can secure their native title rights to land and sea and ensure they can participate in the development and management of their homeland territories. However, regional agreements implemented in Canada thus far have often taken years to negotiate. To provide a degree of certainty for resource management and decision‐making while the native title claims process is underway, Canadian governments have proceeded to establish interim resource use and management agreements with Indigenous communities. While both governments and Indigenous people stress that interim arrangements do not replace or limit the scope for future claim settlements, it is recognised that the development of such co‐operative relationships will make long‐lasting formal agreements easier to achieve. This paper draws on several recent examples of interim agreements that have been negotiated for the salmon fishery resource in the Skeena River catchment, and considers how these local experiences offer useful approaches for resource management and native title issues in Australia. These examples demonstrate the importance of building shared understandings of resource values and management approaches prior to cementing co‐management partnerships in formal settlements. They also show some of the problems and prospects facing Indigenous peoples in their efforts to benefit from such co‐management agreements.     

Co‐opting Conservation: Migrant Resource Control and Access to National Park Management in the Philippine Uplands

The history of political and economic inequality in forest villages can shape how and why resource use conflicts arise during the evolution of national parks management. In the Philippine uplands, indigenous peoples and migrant settlers co‐exist, compete over land and forest resources, and shape how managers preserve forests through national parks. This article examines how migrants have claimed lands and changed production and exchange relations among the indigenous Tagbanua to build on and benefit from otherwise coercive park management on Palawan Island, the Philippines. Migrant control over productive resources has influenced who, within each group, could sustain agriculture in the face of the state's dominant conservation narrative — valorizing migrant paddy rice and criminalizing Tagbanua swiddens. Upon settling, migrant farmers used new political and economic strengths to tap into provincial political networks in order to be hired at a national park. As a result, they were able to steer management to support paddy rice at the expense of swidden cultivation. While state conservation policy shapes how national parks impact upon local resource access and use, older political economic inequalities in forest villages build on such policies to influence how management affects the livelihoods of poor households.     

Not Learning from the Past: Adaptive Governance Challenges for Australian Natural Resource Management

Australia's governance arrangements for natural resource management (NRM) have evolved considerably over the last 30 years. The impact of changes in governance on NRM planning and delivery requires assessment. We undertake a multi‐method programme evaluation using adaptive governance principles as an analytical frame and apply this to Queensland to assess the impacts of governance change on NRM planning and governance outcomes. Data to inform our analysis includes: (1) a systematic review of 16 audits/evaluations of Australian NRM over a 15‐year period; (2) a review of Queensland's first‐generation NRM plans; and (3) outputs from a Queensland workshop on NRM planning. NRM has progressed from a bottom‐up grassroots movement into a collaborative regional NRM model that has been centralised by the Australian government. We found that while some adaptive governance challenges have been addressed, others remained unresolved. Results show that collaboration and elements of multi‐level governance under the regional model were positive moves, but also that NRM arrangements contained structural deficiencies across multiple governance levels in relation to public involvement in decision‐making and knowledge production for problem responsiveness. These problems for adaptive governance have been exacerbated since 2008. We conclude that the adaptive governance framework for NRM needs urgent attention so that important environmental management problems can be addressed.     

The Promotion of Non-traditional Agricultural Exports in Honduras: Issues of Equity,Environment and Natural Resource Management

A recent trend in development in Central America is the promotion of non-traditional agricultural exports as a means of revitalizing economic growth and increasing income among the region's small producers. Using an approach which integrates environmental concerns into political-economic analysis, this article examines the impact of this strategy on regional inequality and environmental degradation. The article begins with a synopsis of efforts to further non-traditional exports in Central America since the Second World War. Then, in order to demonstrate the complex articulation among social, economic and environmental factors, the investigation focuses on the impact of non-traditional exports on southern Honduras. Analysis concentrates on the most important of several non-traditional exports being encouraged — shrimp mariculture in coastal areas along the Gulf of Fonseca. The study demonstrates the systemic interconnections among the dynamics of agricultural development, associated patterns of capitalist accumulation, rural impoverishment and serious problems of environmental degradation. The article illustrates how larger international and national forces affected people and the national environment and how local people, in turn, are attempting to affect those powers. Finally, the Honduran case is related to policy concerns regarding effective environmental management. First we were evicted from our land … now they are throwing us out of the sea. Where will we go? (Honduran peasant and artisanal fisherman, La Tribuna, 26 May 1988)