Robin Mearns

Environmental Entitlements: Dynamics and Institutions in Community-Based Natural Resource Management

Abstract While community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) now attracts widespread international attention, its practical implementation frequently falls short of expectations. This paper contributes to emerging critiques by focusing on the implications of intracommunity dynamics and ecological heterogeneity. It builds a conceptual framework highlighting the central role of institutions — regularized patterns of behavior between individuals and groups in society — in mediating environment-society relationships. Grounded in an extended form of entitlements analysis, the framework explores how differently positioned social actors command environmental goods and services that are instrumental to their well-being. Further insights are drawn from analyses of social difference; “new”, dynamic ecology; new institutional economics; structuration theory, and landscape history. The theoretical argument is illustrated with case material from India, South Africa and Ghana.

Access to Land in Rural India

Access to land is deeply important in rural India, where the incidence of poverty is highly correlated with lack of access to land. The author provides a framework for assessing alternative approaches to improving access to land by Indias rural poor. He considers India`s record implementing land reform and identifies an approach that includes incremental reforms in public land administration to reduce transaction costs in land markets (thereby facilitating land transfers) and to increase transparency, making information accessible to the public to ensure that socially excluded groups benefit. Reducing constraints on access to land for the rural poor and socially excluded requires five key issues: restrictions on land-lease markets, the fragmentation of holdings, the widespread failure to translate womens legal rights into practice, poor access to (and encroachment on) the commons, and high transaction costs for land transfers. Among guidelines for policy reform the author suggests: -Selectively deregulate land-lease (rental) markets, because rental markets may be important in giving the poor access to land. -Reduce transaction costs in land markets, including both official costs and informal costs (such as bribes to expedite transactions), partly by improving systems for land registration and management of land records. -Critically reassess land administration agencies and find ways to improve incentive structures, to reduce rent-seeking and base promotions on performance. -Promote womens independent land rights through policy measures to increase womens bargaining power within the household and in society generally. -Improve transparency of land administration and public access to information, to reduce rent-seeking by land administration officers and to strengthen poor peoples land rights (and knowledge thereof). -Strengthen institutions in civil society to provide the awareness, monitoring, and pressure needed for successful reform and to provide checks and balances on inappropriate uses of state power. -In a companion paper (WPS 2124) the author addresses these issues at the level of a particular state - Orissa, one of Indias poorest states - in an empirical study, from a transaction costs perspective, of social exclusion and land administration. This paper - a product of the Rural Development Sector Unit, South Asia Region - is part of a larger effort in the region to promote access to land and to foster more demand-driven and socially inclusive institutions in rural development.

Decentralisation, rural livelihoods and pasture-land management in post-socialist Mongolia

Mongolias post-socialist transition since 1990 has included, among other changes, reforms toward democratic decentralisation. For natural resource governance, and pasture-land management in particular, decentralisation has been at best incomplete and at worst ‘empty’. It has created an institutional vacuum that herders and others have sought to fill with recourse to formal and informal, new and old arrangements. Herding households are also rapidly increasing against a background of economic hardship and vulnerability. The effects include an altered distribution of grazing pressure, with discernibly adverse impacts on the pastoral environment, and the acceleration of already rising inequality. Democratic decentralisation could help to restore environmental and social justice.

Social Exclusion and Land Administration in Orissa, India

The authors report on the first empirical study of its kind to examine - from the perspective of transaction costs - factors that constrain access to land for the rural poor and other socially excluded groups in India. They find that: a) Land reform has reduced large landholdings since the 1950s. Medium size farms have gained most. Formidable obstacles still prevent the poor from gaining access to land. b) The complexity of land revenue administration in Orissa is partly the legacy of distinctly different systems, which produced more or less complete and accurate land records. These not-so-distant historical records can be important in resolving contemporary land disputes. c) Orissa tried legally to abolish land-leasing. Concealed tenancy persisted, with tenants having little protection under the law. d) Womens access to and control over land, and their bargaining power with their husbands about land, may be enhanced through joint land titling, a principle yet to be realized in Orissa. e) Land administration is viewed as a burden on the state rather than a service, and land records and registration systems are not coordinated. Doing so will improve rights for the poor and reduce transaction costs - but only if the system is transparent and the powerful do not retain the leverage over settlement officers that has allowed land grabs. Land in Orissa may be purchased, inherited, rented (leased), or - in the case of public land and the commons - encroached upon. Each type of transaction - and the States response, through land law and administration - has implications for poor peoples access to land. The authors find that: 1) Land markets are thin and transaction costs are high, limiting the amount of agricultural land that changes hands. 2) The fragmentation of landholdings into tiny, scattered plots is a brake on agricultural productivity, but efforts to consolidate land may discriminate against the rural poor. Reducing transaction costs in land markets will help. 3) Protecting the rural poors rights of access to common land requires raising public awareness and access to information. 4) Liberalizing land-lease markets for the rural poor will help, but only if the poor are ensured access to institutional credit.

Appendix: Programme of IDS Environment Programme and Rural Group Autumn Seminar Series 1990: ‘Key Issues in Environment and Development’

Thurs 6 Dec Bill Adams (Department Geography, Cambridge) James Winpenny (Overseas Development Institute) David Satterthwaite (International Institute for Environment and Development) Gerald Leach (Stockholm Environment Institute) Anil Markandya (London Environmental Economics Centre) Paul Richards (University College London) Alyson Warhurst (Science Policy Research Unit. University of Sussex) Melissa Leach (IDS)