Arun Agrawal

Enchantment and Disenchantment: The Role of Community in Natural Resource Conservation

Summary. — The poor conservation outcomes that followed decades of intrusive resource management strategies and planned development have forced policy makers and scholars to reconsider the role of community in resource use and conservation. In a break from previous work on development which considered communities a hindrance to progressive social change, current writings champion the role of community in bringing about decentralization, meaningful participation, and conservation. But despite its recent popularity, the concept of community is rarely defined or carefully examined by those concerned with resource use and management. We seek to redress this omission by investigating ‘‘community’’ in work concerning resource conservation and management. We explore the conceptual origins of the community, and the ways the term has been deployed in writings on resource use. We then analyze those aspects of community most important to advocates for community’s role in resource management — community as a small spatial unit, as a homogeneous social structure, and as shared norms — and indicate the weaknesses of these approaches. Finally, we suggest a more political approach: community must be examined in the context of development and conservation by focusing on the multiple interests and actors within communities, on how these actors influence decision-making, and on the internal and external institutions that shape the decision-making process. A focus on institutions rather than ‘‘community’’ is likely to be more fruitful for those interested in community-based natural resource management. ” 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Common Property Institutions and Sustainable Governance of Resources

Abstract The literature on common property-based resource management comprises many important studies that seek to specify the conditions under which groups of users will self-organize and sustainably govern resources upon which they depend. Using three of the more comprehensive such studies, and with an extensive review of writings on the commons, this paper demonstrates that the enterprise of generating lists of conditions under which commons are governed sustainably is a flawed and impossibly costly research task. For a way out, the paper examines the relative merits of statistical, comparative, and case study approaches to studying the commons. It ends with a plea for careful research design and sample selection, construction of causal mechanisms, and a shift toward comparative and statistical rather than single-case analyses. Such steps are necessary for a coherent, empirically-relevant theory of the commons.

Collective Action, Property Rights, and Decentralization in Resource Use in India and Nepal

National governments in almost all developing countries have begun to decentralize policies and decision making related to development, public services, and the environment. Existing research on the subject has enhanced our understanding of the effects of decentralization and thereby has been an effective instrument in the advocacy of decentralization. But most analyses, especially where environmental resources are concerned, have been less attentive to the political coalitions that prompt decentralization and the role of property rights in facilitating the implementation of decentralized decision making. By comparing decentralization in four cases in South Asia—Forest Councils in Kumaon in India, Joint Forest Management in India, the Parks and People Program in Nepals Terai, and Community Forestry legislation in Nepal—this article provides answers to two questions: When do governments decentralize environmental decision making? and Which types of property rights must be devolved if decentralized decision making is to be effective?

Changing Governance of the World's Forests

Major features of contemporary forest governance include decentralization of forest management, logging concessions in publicly owned commercially valuable forests, and timber certification, primarily in temperate forests. Although a majority of forests continue to be owned formally by governments, the effectiveness of forest governance is increasingly independent of formal ownership. Growing and competing demands for food, biofuels, timber, and environmental services will pose severe challenges to effective forest governance in the future, especially in conjunction with the direct and indirect impacts of climate change. A greater role for community and market actors in forest governance and deeper attention to the factors that lead to effective governance, beyond ownership patterns, is necessary to address future forest governance challenges.

Does REDD+ Threaten to Recentralize Forest Governance?

A major new approach to emissions mitigation may interrupt a promising trend toward decentralized forest management. Over the past 25 years, developing countries have transitioned toward decentralized forest management that allows local actors increased rights and responsibilities (1–4), and has helped protect forests in many regions (5, 6). A new approach to mitigating terrestrial emissions associated with climate change, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+), is poised to interrupt this trend. Given the implications for tropical forest management, REDD+ governance links should be a research priority (7).

Trade-offs and synergies between carbon storage and livelihood benefits from forest commons

Forests provide multiple benefits at local to global scales. These include the global public good of carbon sequestration and local and national level contributions to livelihoods for more than half a billion users. Forest commons are a particularly important class of forests generating these multiple benefits. Institutional arrangements to govern forest commons are believed to substantially influence carbon storage and livelihood contributions, especially when they incorporate local knowledge and decentralized decision making. However, hypothesized relationships between institutional factors and multiple benefits have never been tested on data from multiple countries. By using original data on 80 forest commons in 10 countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, we show that larger forest size and greater rule-making autonomy at the local level are associated with high carbon storage and livelihood benefits; differences in ownership of forest commons are associated with trade-offs between livelihood benefits and carbon storage. We argue that local communities restrict their consumption of forest products when they own forest commons, thereby increasing carbon storage. In showing rule-making autonomy and ownership as distinct and important institutional influences on forest outcomes, our results are directly relevant to international climate change mitigation initiatives such as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) and avoided deforestation. Transfer of ownership over larger forest commons patches to local communities, coupled with payments for improved carbon storage can contribute to climate change mitigation without adversely affecting local livelihoods.

Social and Ecological Synergy: Local Rulemaking, Forest Livelihoods, and Biodiversity Conservation

Participation in tropical forest governance by local people results in positive outcomes for conservation and subsistence. Causal pathways to achieve social and ecological benefits from forests are unclear, because there are few systematic multicountry empirical analyses that identify important factors and their complex relationships with social and ecological outcomes. This study examines biodiversity conservation and forest-based livelihood outcomes using a data set on 84 sites from six countries in East Africa and South Asia. We find both positive and negative relationships, leading to joint wins, losses, and trade-offs depending on specific contextual factors; participation in forest governance institutions by local forest users is strongly associated with jointly positive outcomes for forests in our study.

The Role of Local Institutions in Adaptation to Climate Change

This paper examines the relationships between climate-related vulnerabilities, adaptation practices, institutions, and external interventions to show the role and importance of local institutions in climate change. The increasing attention to adaptation to climate change has not come with sufficient emphasis on the local nature of climate adaptation and on the role of local institutions and local governance in shaping adaptation practices. This paper presents two research projects on adaptation and institutions at the World Bank which aim to illuminate precisely these existing lacunae in theoretical and practical knowledge about adaptation. Focusing on the linkages between adaptation strategies and institutions, the first study shows the critical role institutions play in determining the nature and outcomes of adaptation strategies in a territorial development context and will try to demonstrate how past decentralized and area-based approaches on local development could be used to strengthen local adaptive capacity and resilience to climate change related risks. The second study focuses on an assessment of the relative costs and benefits of different adaptation responses related to a subset of climate hazards (particularly droughts and erratic rainfall), and the role of institutions in reducing the costs of adaptation.

Forest commons and local enforcement

This article examines the relationship between local enforcement and forests used as commons. It uses a unique multicountry dataset, created over the past 15 years by the International Forestry Resources and Institutions Research Program. Drawing on original enforcement and forest commons data from 9 countries, we find that higher levels of local enforcement have a strong and positive but complex relationship to the probability of forest regeneration. This relationship holds even when the influence of a number of other factors such as user group size, subsistence, and commercial importance of forests, size of forest, and collective action for forest improvement activities is taken into account. Although several of the above factors have a statistically significant relationship to changes in the condition of forest commons, differences in levels of local enforcement strongly moderate their link with forest commons outcomes. The research, using data from diverse political, social, and ecological contexts, shows both the importance of enforcement to forest commons and some of the limits of forest governance through commons arrangements.

Indigenous knowledge and the politics of classification

political science at Yale University, conducts research on institutional change, environmental politics, and development. His research has appeared in such journals as Comparative Political Studies, Development and Change, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Theoretical Politics, and World Development. His first book was Greener Pastures: Politics, Markets and Community among a Migrant Pastoral People (1999). He is now writing a book entitled Environmentality. Email: arun.agrawal@yale.edu Indigenous knowledge and the politics of classification*