Regina Birner

On the ‘Efficient Boundaries of the State’: The Contribution of Transaction-Costs Economics to the Analysis of Decentralization and Devolution in Natural Resource Management

Decentralization and devolution—also referred to as ‘rolling back the boundaries of the state’—are important policy trends in natural resource management. Drawing a parallel with the efficient-boundary problem in industrial organization, the authors show how transaction-costs economics can be applied to identify the efficient boundaries of the state in natural resource management. The following extensions of the transaction-cost framework are proposed: (1) introduction of care intensity and contest intensity as additional key attributes of transactions; (2) introduction of cooperative types of organization as a third governance structure besides market and hierarchies; and (3) introduction of natural resource characteristics, social capital, and state capability as contextual variables. The authors also discuss the possibilities for empirical application.

Relative importance and determinants of landowners' transaction costs in collaborative wildlife management in Kenya: an empirical analysis

Abstract Collaborative management of protected areas—which involves state agencies, local communities and other stakeholders—has been identified as a promising approach of organising nature conservation. However, as a complex governance structure, co-management can be expected to involve considerable transaction costs for the participating stakeholders. Empirical studies concerning the quantification of these costs are still scarce. Against this background, this paper empirically analyses the relative importance and the determinants of the landowners’ transaction costs arising from collaborative wildlife management, taking two wildlife sanctuaries in Kenya as examples. The empirical data presented in this paper was collected in the wildlife dispersal areas of Shimba Hills National Reserve and Amboseli National Park in Kenya. The results of this study show that—as compared to other cost categories—the landowners’ transaction costs incurred in wildlife co-management were relatively low. They also indicate that the magnitude of the transaction costs incurred by landowners is influenced by the attributes of transactions; bio-physical and ecological characteristics of the resource systems; landowners’ characteristics such as their human, social and financial forms of capital; losses resulting from human–wildlife conflicts; tenure security and benefits from conservation. Comparing the results of a two-stage least squares regression model of landowners’ characteristics of the two wildlife sanctuaries, it was found that the level of significance and the sign of most variables are not the same for both areas. This indicates that it is a specific combination of local factors that influences the transaction costs borne by the landowners.

Creating political capital to promote devolution in the forestry sector—a case study of the forest communities in Banyumas district, Central Java, Indonesia

In recent years, devolution of forest management to local communities has become a major policy trend in developing countries. The term devolution is used here to refer to the transfer of responsibility and authority over natural resources from the state to non-governmental bodies at the local level (Meinzen-Dick and Knox 2001, p. 42). Devolution policies aim to address institutional problems that have been identified as major reasons behind the degradation and misuse of forest resources in developing countries such as state property and centralized management of forest resources, corruption in the forestry administration, lack of effective monitoring, and enforcement and deficient incentives for the local communities (McCarthy 2000a; Ligon and Narain 1999; Wibowo and Byron 1999). Different mechanisms have been identified in the relevant literature on the subject by which devolution can lead to a more sustainable forest management in terms of equity, efficiency, and environmental sustainability: the creation of incentives by a fair and democratic distribution of benefits; the creation of accountability; the reduction of transaction costs; the mobilization of local knowledge; the strengthening of local institutions for sustainable resource management; and — in view of a low state capacity — the limitation of the role of the state to the provision of enabling frame conditions and the protection of public interests (compare Ribot 2002, Meinzen-Dick et al. 2001, Birner and Wittmer 2000; World Bank 1997). However, the empirical evidence on the effects of devolution in the forestry sector has been mixed (Banerjee 1997, Meinzen-Dick et al. 2001, Ribot 2002), which implies a need for more theoretical and empirical research on devolution.

ANALYZING THE EFFICIENCY OF COLLABORATIVE WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT: THE CASE OF TWO COMMUNITY WILDLIFE SANCTUARIES IN KENYA

ABSTRACT In nature conservation, interorganizational governance structures, which are typically referred to as collaborative management, have gained increasing importance in recent years. This paper deals with the assessment of the efficiency of such governance structures, taking wildlife conservation in Kenya as an example. The paper starts with theoretical considerations on allocative and organizational efficiency in nature conservation, and goes on to discuss the problems of calculating production and transaction costs and benefits in this field. Using empirical data from two wildlife community sanctuaries in Kenya, the paper then estimates the production and transaction costs of conservation and assesses the factors influencing their magnitude and distribution. To calculate interorganizational efficiency, a benefit–costs analysis of different collaborative governance structures is carried out, both from the landowners perspective (financial analysis) and from the societys perspective (economic analy...

Prospects and Challenges for Biodiversity Conservation in Guatemala

Located on the land bridge between North and South America, Guatemala is characterized by exceptionally diverse ecosystems, which make the country one of the foremost repositories of biodiversity in Latin America (Detlefsen et al. 1991). Guatemala has signed the Central American Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992 and the global Convention on Biological Diversity in 1995. To support the implementation of these conventions, a National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan was elaborated in 1998/99 (CONAMA 1999). Various categories of protected areas cover almost 30% of the country’s surface (CONAP 2002 : 14). Under an innovative model of co-administration, civil society plays an important role in biodiversity conservation. At the same time, Guatemala is one of the poorest countries in Latin America, which suffers from slow economic development, high levels of poverty, unequal land distribution, a highly segmented society, and the effects of more than three decades of civil war which only ended in 1996. High population increase as well as commercial interests in natural resource extraction cause considerable threats to biodiversity conservation. Thus, Guatemala represents a prime example of the potentials and challenges of biodiversity conservation in developing countries. The research on biodiversity conservation presented in the contributions to Part III was conducted at the national level and in the Department of Alta Verapaz.