NIFK16006U Participatory Natural Resource Governance

Despite official policies of sustainable utilisation and conservation of renewable natural resources these often end up degraded or destroyed. This happens across the world but not least in developing countries where central government departments frequently fail to prevent deforestation, forest degradation, extinction or depletion of fish and wildlife, and degradation of pasture land or fail to secure enough water for agricultural irrigation. These natural resources are often commons before they are ‘harvested’ after which they become private properties.  Another shared feature is that while they hold a specific market and/or subsistence values to people who 'harvest' them, these resources also represent wider values to society at large. Forests are, for example, habitats for a multitude of life forms and store vast amounts of carbon.

Accordingly, individuals, whose livelihoods depend on utilising common natural resources, often share an overall interest with the rest of society in sustaining these resources. Frequently, however, the combined effect of individual uses results in resource degradation. Such ‘tragedies of the commons’ have led policy analysts to conclude that privatisation or nationalisation is the only way to achieve resource conservation. However, privatising the commons is often politically impossible or dangerous because it would involve exclusion of groups who feel that their interests are as legitimate or even more legitimate as those of others.  Furthermore, a number of resources are, for biophysical reasons, inherently difficult to privatise in a meaningful way. This includes stocks of wildlife and wild fish as well as large pastures where erratic and localised rainfall makes the grazing value of a given parcel entirely unpredictable. Direct management by the state has also shown its weaknesses, perhaps most profoundly in forestry in developing countries where the reality of forest degradation and deforestation is glaringly at odds with official policies of sustainable utilisation and forest conservation for the benefit of current and future generations. Hence, the challenge is to design natural resource governance systems that simultaneously and in practice, not only in theory, cater for the economic interests of resource utilising individuals as well as the wider ecological and economic interests of society. Here, participatory governance of natural resources appears a promising option.

Governing the commons includes a myriad of scales and resources ranging from greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere to irrigation of subsistence agriculture in a remote mountain village. This course focusses on the governance of renewable natural resources in developing countries and how participatory policies and approaches may promote rural development and resource conservation in an equitable manner. Central themes are:

1.       The theoretical foundation of participatory resource governance vis á vis the tragedy of the (unmanaged) commons as developed in particular by Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Prize laureate in economics in 2009.

2.       Identification of legitimate stakeholders:

• Which stakeholders should become right-holders to specific resources and why?

3.       Institutional arrangements, policy, and legislation:

• Which kinds of policy and legislative frameworks are needed to make sustainable participatory resource governance worthwhile at the local level?

4.       Institutional choice and different models of decentralising natural resource governance:

• What kind of local-level institutions are most likely to genuinely represent the interests of all local-level stakeholders, how and to whom should such institutions be accountable?

5.       Science and power in participatory natural resource governance:

• Must decentralised natural resource governors master the techniques of scientific resource management to prevent resource degradation? 
• What should be the role of government employed technical experts in relation to decentralised natural resource governance?
• Are technical arguments used to re-centralise otherwise decentralised resource governance? If so, how, and is that good or bad? 

6.       Outcomes of participatory natural resource governance:

• What evidence is available and how to judge whether participatory natural resource governance has delivered on its ‘promise’ of resource conservation and equitable improvement of rural livelihoods?

Throughout the course, different cases will be used to illustrate theory and to evaluate practical outcomes of participatory natural resource governance.