Recent approaches to community-based natural resource management appear as diverse as their varied implementing agencies and natural resource settings; yet they rest on a set of common assumptions about community, natural resources and the relationship between them. This paper focuses on power relations between local actors and how these set the framework for resource management in Duru-Haitemba. As one of the few remaining tracts of Miombo woodlands, the Duru-Haitemba had been targeted for gazzettment. However the exercise faced ‘local discontent’, originating in the ‘generalized narrative’. Before colonial powers the community lived in balanced harmony with nature, which when disrupted led to disequilibrium and hence degradation. A range of factors may account for this, including: technological change; breakdown of traditional authority; social change; urban aspirations and intrusion of inappropriate state policies. The community and environment should be brought back into harmony. This requires either the discovery and rebuilding of traditional collective resource management institutions or their replacement by new ones. At the local level the elites and the traditionalists compete for power: The primary concern of traditionalists is ‘ritual’. Elites tend to hijack community-based processes and forcefully occupy the political space opened by decentralisation. Besides power struggles at the micro level, another challenge is the government leadership at the macro level. Government officials usually have very mixed feelings about community actions but increasingly are realising that community action can be substituted for the expensive exercise of putting government officials in the field. The paper points out that community-based natural resource management is a plausible way to reduce public costs of managing resources. However, the power struggle between local communities, field agents and supervisors remains. This ‘triangle’ of relationships constitutes the social arena marking out the actual ‘locale’ of community based natural resource management in Duru-Haitemba.
Tag: local people
Company–community partnership outgrower schemes in forestry plantations in Indonesia: an alternative to conventional rehabilitation programmes
Indonesia has a considerable area of degraded land requiring rehabilitation. However, most rehabilitation projects in the past have been government driven, depending on public funding (ndonesian government and international donors), and have focused mainly on technical aspects. As a result people living in surrounding targeted areas are not adopting rehabilitation techniques. Innovative approcahes are necessary if the objectives of a rehabilitation programme are to be met while providing benefits to private companies and local people. The findings of a study of outgrower schemes in Indonesian timber plantations suggested that company–community partnerships could be an alternative for implementing rehabilitation programmes. The partnership arrangement over a 10- to 45- year period is based on a contract. It states the rights and duties of each party in establishing a forestry plantation and the benefit-sharing agreement at the time of harvest. The schemes take place on logged-over forests and idle lands, mostly Imperata grasslands. The partnership provides opportunities for forestry plantation companies to play a social role and rehabilitate degraded resources. It also provides job opportunities to local people and incomes from harvested timber at the end of each rotation under a long-term contract.
In search of a conservation ethic
This paper makes use of the Galileo method to compare cognitive distances between selected forest-related concepts in Brazil, Indonesia and Cameroon. The purpose is to determine whether or not there are significant differences in people’s perceptions that could reflect the concept of a conservation ethic in these locations. Specific hypotheses focus on the cognitive relationships between spirit and forest; between forest, good and future; and between forest and me. Although the method provides interesting and useful information on cognition, it is less useful in clarifying the existence or measurement of a conservation ethic.