This balanced volume interrogates this unexamined acceptance of community-based conservation policies. Although the contributors to this volume generally advocate the inclusion of local people in decisions about their natural resources, they also offer a much-needed corrective to the prevailing view, and give a more nuanced and realistic assessment of both the contexts and outcomes of community-based policies. Covering a wide variety of natural resources in South Asian, African, and North American countries, the case studies in this volume focus especially on how the roles of ethnicity, gender, and the state can be pivotal to the success or failure of community-based conservation.

Order from Amazon.com

Reviews

For the last decade, scholars, policy makers, advocates, and social commentators across the political spectrum have applauded community-based resource management as a way of averting the polarization and gridlock associated with top-down environmental policy making. Proponents contend that communitybased approaches yield environmentally protective solutions that are more likely to be implemented successfully. Support for community-based approaches often rests on a notion of communities as small, homogeneous entities with widely shared values—qualities that are thought to facilitate collective decision making. As the authors of the edited volume Communities and Environment point out, however, this assumption is flawed; real communities are likely to be heterogeneous in ways that may impede their ability to conserve resources.

In their clearly written introduction, editors Arun Agrawal and Clark C. Gibson argue persuasively that in order to understand the propensity of a community to conserve resources one must investigate its internal attributes and decision-making processes as well as its relationships with outside institutions. They propose a framework that comprises the multiplicity of interests within communities, the processes by which those interests interact, and the institutions within which those interactions occur. In particular, they draw attention to gender and ethnic relations within communities and interactions between the market, the state, and the community.

The remaining chapters provide interesting descriptive detail about a variety of communities in the developed and developing worlds. Taken together, they suggest that communities often have deep internal divisions and may not adhere to norms of resource conservation. For instance, Melanie Hughes Mc- Dermott ?nds that many groups in Palawan, the Philippines, do not have longstanding ties to a particular place and have little interest in environmental protection. Because it mistakenly presupposes the existence of homogeneous, territorially-?xed indigenous communities with a strong conservation ethic, a government program aimed at creating community-based forest management fails to promote either social justice or environmental protection. On the other hand, as Sara Singleton’s discussion of salmon ?sheries management in the Paci ?c Northwest reveals, the region’s diverse Native-American tribes manage to settle distributional con�icts among themselves and act collectively in negotiating with the state to conserve salmon populations.

While informative, this book suffers from a problem that affects many edited volumes: several of the cases need to be linked much more explicitly to the framework laid out in the introduction. Most importantly, while each chapter explicates key attributes of a particular community, those qualities are not always explicitly related to the community’s ability or propensity to conserve resources. For example, in his chapter on irrigation management in Morocco’s Ziz Valley, Hsain Ilahiane provides a fascinating glimpse of how the Arab and Berber minorities control access to water for agriculture, yet the implications of this arrangement for water conservation are unclear. Furthermore, given the authors’ objective of policy relevance, it is particularly important that cases are written in clear, simple language; yet academic jargon occasionally impedes the reader’s progress.

Without question this volume accomplishes its primary goal: it thoroughly dispels the mythical concept of small, place-based, homogeneous communities that operate according to shared norms. The cases should give serious pause to policy makers interested in crafting community-based resource management schemes; they suggest that such approaches must be carefully designed to accommodate the characteristics—both internal and external—of particular communities. At the same time, the book does not wholly succeed in explaining the relevance of community attributes to resource conservation, thereby neglecting many readers’ main concern.

AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW 96 (2): 436-437 JUN 2002 [below]:

Within the property rights regime, rights can be assigned to an individual via private property rights, or to the state through the use of public lands, or to a collection of individuals, usually a “community,” through common property rights. However, the latter option has become problematic in the view of the editors and contributors of this edition, due to the treatment of community as homogeneous.

In a thought-provoking volume of case studies from the Global South, Arun Agrawal and Clark Gibson have delved into how governments have gone astray in decentralizing natural resource management. Knowingly or not, many policymakers have, in their bid to return control of a given area's resources back to the local inhabitants, shaped the results of the devolution policy by allowing outdated conceptualizations of “community” to inform the manner in which they distributed this political power.

The editors and their contributors have put forth, for the most part, a convincing argument backed up by the empirical data outlined in the six cases from Africa, South Asia, and North America for a more nuanced conceptualization of “community.” They posit that the outmoded definition of community “as a small spatial unit, social structure, and set of shared norms” stymies meaningful decentralization of political power vis-à-vis full participation of all members of the subgroups within a given “community” over a particular body of natural resources.

Calling for a shift in perspective to one that considers divergent interests of multiple actors as well as consideration of the processes through which these interests are expressed, along with analysis of the institutions that affect these political outcomes, the authors collectively set forth a new set of criteria for natural resource management devolution programs.

Additionally, in their cases the contributors call on policymakers to factor in the diversity within the populations, be it gender, ethnicity, religion, class, or other identifiable subgroup category, when structuring what such policies will look like “on the ground.” A particularly interesting chapter (chapter 2) analyzes the problematic nature of crafting policymaking with gender concerns in mind. Many of those approaches have been colored by shortcomings in resource management concerns such as how traditional norms frame gendered relations of land access and ownership, but also how contemporary analyses have too frequently overlooked subgroup differentiation as in the intricacies of how caste, class, and ethnicity affect how both women and men utilize natural resources.

Also illustrative of the need for rethinking of “community” is Bettina Ng'Weno's chapter on Kenyan natural resource conservation. Government efforts to conserve more than half of the nation's rare plants were cloaked in the “mythic indigenous preservation model” that fell short of the conservation plans given the multiple interpretations of the sacredness of the kaya (coastal forested areas) as well as the not so homogenous nature of the Mijikenda or the subgroup Muslim Digo peoples.

Other contributors examine how differing social structures and relationships within communities and government representatives can affect natural resource conservation in Morocco (chapter 3) and Indonesia (chapter 6), respectively. Hughes McDermott's examination of the Philippine government's conflicted definition of community in forest management programs in Palawan is well crafted. This case dramatizes how networks can offer indigenous peoples support in their efforts to overcome the legacies of colonial pasts and resource control of authoritarian elites.

Community control of natural resources can reveal class, ethnic, religious, or gender lines. Resources will be controlled by elites who dominate these communities if the state simply passes the resource management baton to the local governing structure and turns its attention back to the capital. The state's role in ensuring that natural resource conservation takes place requires a consciousness on the part of the state of the various subgroups in the community as well as the political, economic, and social hierarchies existent in a given locus. Neither the editors nor the contributors fully answer the question raised by this proposed multiactor conceptualization of community. If a state is cognizant of the various players and their particular characteristics and the social, political, and economic hierarchies that underpin a community's governance (thus shaping the distribution of natural resources), then how far should the state go in the facilitation of democratic or equalitarian distribution of the resources so that a cohesive plan of management can be enacted? A conclusion drawing together the lessons of these cases and outlining how states could update their conceptualization of community based on the oncerns raised would have strengthened this otherwise solid edition.

Nonetheless, Communities and the Environment takes the common pool resources literature as well as the practice of managing the commons in an important new direction, a locally informed multilayered one. This volume calls on academics and practitioners alike to recognize the various members and their identities, actions, and access to participating in the design and implementation of conservation policies. While the book does not broadly guide states into that new direction, it sets forth a significant challenge to government policymakers and practitioners to factor in the multiplicity of interests and potential participants in community-based conservation programs. Further, it helps us get at the underlying conflicts underpinning many decentralized resource conservation programs that have been designed to limit the powerless from seeking to expand their demands in contested areas of valuable resources, fertile land, irrigation access, and, most importantly, political and economic power.

AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURAL AND RESOURCE ECONOMICS 46 (3): 480-483 SEP 2002 [below]:

This book seeks to shift policy deliberations regarding community-based governance of natural resources beyond the suspension of reason that too often accompanies the mere mention of community. Enthusiasm among policy makers for community participation in natural resource management has followed closely in the footsteps of sustainable development. Indeed, the term ‘community’ has well and truly joined the required vocabulary of most development, resource and environmental economists. Widespread advocacy of community participation in governance has been especially bewildering for neoclassical economists. The idea of devolving important functions of governance to community, or common property systems of organisation tends to ring alarm bells when one’s logic predicts that such systems of shared responsibility will inevitably fail as community members succumb to the delights of a free ride.

Nevertheless, there is now an impressive body of common property scholarship consistent with the proposition that communities can, given supportive conditions, effectively perform certain governance functions. Much of this scholarship draws from the framework of rational choice theory underpinning the neoclassical model, albeit from new institutionalist versions of this framework that acknowledge the influence of culture, including community norms, on human reasoning. The most influential example of this work has probably been Elinor Ostrom’s (1990) book Governing the Commons. The book reviewed here is a response to concerns among common property scholars at how frequently their findings have been interpreted simplistically or opportunistically by governments and international agencies when justifying devolution of responsibilities to community-based regimes. Due to the loss of faith since the 1970s in the capacity of state agencies to achieve conservation goals, as well as widespread pressures to reduce government expenditures, the evidence that successful community-based conservation is sometimes possible has too often been misread as grounds for wholesale devolution of conservation responsibilities to communities. In her foreword to this book, Ostrom criticises this trend as yet another instance of too many wild chases after the chimera of the ideal way to achieve conservation. In their Introduction, the editors (both political scientists) explain that the aim of the book is to address these concerns by looking beyond the mythic notion of community as a unified, organic whole. They seek to persuade readers that each community needs to be understood as a complex entity containing individuals differentiated along various dimensions including status, power and intentions. They will find little disagreement from readers of this journal with their argument that: A more acute understanding of community in conservation can be founded only by understanding that actors within communities seek their own interests in conservation programs, and that these interests may change as new opportunities emerge. The remainder of the book consists of six chapters by different authors, each presenting insights from a case study, as well as a concluding chapter. The cases include: forest management in the Philippines; water management in South Asia; irrigation management in Morocco; management of land inheritance in Kenya; salmon fishery co-management by the state and American Indian tribes; and development of hillside agriculture in Sulawesi, Indonesia. The disciplinary backgrounds of the authors include anthropology, sociology, human ecology and political science.

Despite the absence of any economists among the authors, the material presented is often richly suggestive of hypotheses that might fruitfully be explored in economic analyses of community-based conservation programs. In Chapter 2, for instance, Ruth Meinzen-Dick and Margaret Zwarteveen explain low participation by women in village-level water management programs using a cost-benefit framework. They suggest that the opportunity costs of participation by women often exceed those for men because women’s workloads are already higher and because participation opportunities are often located and scheduled in ways that suit men better than women. Furthermore, it is reasoned that in many cases the benefits men perceive from participation will be greater to the extent that they value more highly the prestige coming from this role.

A key insight from earlier common property scholarship is that voluntary cooperation by individuals with a system of rules tends to increase the greater their trust that the system accounts fairly for their interests. Indeed, a common justification for devolving conservation responsibilities to communities is that this enables more inclusive participation of community members in the design and implementation of the rules affecting them, thus leading to broader acceptance of the rules as fair and, consequently, a more widespread propensity to comply with them voluntarily.

As the chapters in this book make clear, however, devolution does not necessarily result in community participation that is more inclusive. If rule-setting rights are simply devolved to existing community-based organisations (e.g., local water associations), it should come as no surprise that these rights will be used to consolidate the positions of the elites already represented by those organisations. Instead of leading a greater proportion of community members to perceive the rules affecting them as fair, therefore, Sara Singleton observes astutely in Chapter 5 (concerned with the Byzantine world of piscatorial politics) that the substantive content of the merging institutions is likely to favour the powerful …, while shirking, foot-dragging, and other ‘‘weapons of the weak’’ will be deployed by the less powerful in an effort to shape the process by which formal rules are deployed in local practice. A further useful contribution of the book is to challenge the myth that communities are naturally-evolved entities, and so remain uncontaminated by the flaws of the state. In Chapter 6, Tania Murray Li highlights how the state usually has had a strong hand in how communities are formed and maintained, for instance by fixing administrative boundaries. Through her case study, moreover, she illustrates how prospective gains or losses from state interventions can crystallise a sense of community among people that hitherto had seen themselves as accidental fellow travellers. Melanie Hughes McDermott demonstrates through her case study in Chapter 1 how the definition of community the state adopts for funding community-based conservation can lead populations not matching this definition to reinvent themselves, at least officially, to reap the advantages from doing so. In Chapter 4, Bettina Ng’weno highlights the related phenomenon of individuals, who actually are members of multiple communities (e.g., distinguished by ethnicity, industry, geography or gender), publicly affiliating themselves with different communities at different times according to how their own interests are best served.

Given the massive allocation of conservation resources now being channeled through community-based programs in many countries including Australia and New Zealand, and the likelihood that programs of this ilk are here to stay, a valuable role for economists with new institutionalist leanings lies ahead in undertaking the rigorous empirical analysis required to discover how these programs might be reformulated in specific contexts to deliver more of the on-ground conservation gains originally expected from them. This balanced book contains many valuable insights for those prepared to take on the challenge it poses.