Poor-Friendly Decentralization: Community-
Based Natural Resource Management
Improving the tenure security of the poor and their ability to
exercise property rights is only one step in the legal, economic,
and political empowerment of poor families. A second important
step is devolving management authority over ecosystems to
local institutions that are more accessible to the poor.
As detailed in Chapter 3, decentralization that actually
works for the poor is more the exception than the rule. It
requires, at a minimum, that local institutions—whether they be
official government institutions like village councils or informal
institutions such as user groups, cooperatives, or watershed
committees—are formed on democratic principles of representation,
meaning that they are accountable to their low-income
constituents. But this alone is not usually enough to overcome the
structural bias against the poor in local institutions. Special
efforts to include the poor are generally required. These can
range from reserving gender-based or income-based slots in local
institutions to insure participation; arranging for special outreach and training for members of these institutions; creating rules to
insure equitable distribution of local benefits to low-income
households; and using participatory rural appraisals and other
survey techniques to help local institutions catalogue and
quantify community needs and the potential trade-offs for any
set of management actions. Of course, this is all predicated on
the assumption that the state has granted these local institutions
some actual authority over local resources—something that is
still far from common.
Pro-Poor Decentralization: An Example
When these minimum requirements come together—true
devolution of authority, local accountability, and an effort to
acknowledge the special needs of the poor—the outlines of local
empowerment can begin to take shape. Uganda provides an
instructive example of democratic decentralization that is both
ecosystem-friendly and serves the interests of the nation’s lowincome
fishers. Until the late 1990s, management of fishing in
Lake Victoria, Lake Albert, and other inland lakes was the
province entirely of the central government. A government push
for decentralization and the creation of new fishery rules led to
the formation in 2003 of Beach Management Units (BMUs)—
local institutions charged with regulating fishing along specific
stretches of the lake and shore. Each BMU is headed by a committee with 9 to 15 democratically elected members from
each of four different stakeholder groups: 30 percent boat
owners, 30 percent fishing crew members, 10 percent fish
mongers, and 30 percent other stakeholders. In this way wage
laborers, merchants, and other low-income families associated
with local fishing can participate in the committee along with
wealthier boat owners. To address gender disparities, BMUs are
encouraged to have women make up 30 percent of the committee
“whenever possible” (Waldman et al. 2005:65-68).
The duties of the BMUs cover the daily management of
the local fishery: issuing fishing permits and limiting the size of
the fishing fleet, registering fishing gear, and working with the
government Fisheries Department to enforce regulations
against illegal fishing practices. The BMUs also collect fishing
data to help guide their management decisions. The local
committees are allowed to keep 25 percent of money generated
from licenses and landing fees to fund their operations
(Waldman et al. 2005:65-68).
Results of the decentralization have been encouraging so
far. The BMUs report better control over illegal fishing and
improved working relations with central government authorities.
The fishing statistics that BMUs have collected have brought
greater local awareness to the need to reduce fishing pressure
and fish more sustainably. On Lake Albert, BMUs have declared three non-fishing zones designed to protect known nursery areas
and thus maintain the fish stock. The committees report voluntary
reductions in the use of illegal fishing gears, indicating a
change in attitudes of the fishing community. It is too early to tell
if these improvements in management have translated into more
income for local fishers, but anecdotal reports of better daily
catches are starting to come in. Women are also beginning to
change their role. Local culture discourages women from joining
fishing crews, but some women have started fishing from the
shore; a few women have even become boat owners, hiring men
to crew their boats (Waldman et al. 2005:65-68).
The Benefits of CBNRM
Uganda’s Beach Management Units are just one example of the
broad potential for community-based natural resource management
(CBNRM)—one of the most progressive and potentially
poor-friendly manifestations of decentralization. This kind of
devolution of management authority over state-owned resources
has the potential to be both inclusive enough to involve the poor
and effective enough to generate increases in environmental
income. Well-functioning community management arrangements
have shown benefits in all three of the key areas
highlighted in this chapter: household income, local empowerment,
and ecosystem condition (Shyamsundar et al. 2004:7-13).
Income Benefits
Income benefits come from a variety of sources, including greater
access to wage employment as well as to local subsistence goods
like bushmeat and forest products (Shyamsundar et al. 2004:9).
For example, community forestry arrangements often give rise to
forest-related enterprises that can provide substantial local
employment; revenue-sharing with the government from timber
sales and the like; and greater control over sources of woodfuel
and other forest goods in daily use. The same is true of devolving
wildlife management to local communities. When the Namibian
government in the late 1990s transferred to rural communities
the authority to manage wildlife in certain demarked zones called
conservancies, it included the right to regulate the substantial
tourist trade in these zones and the right to harvest a modicum of
bushmeat as well. Conservancy-related activities have created
some 3800 jobs that did not exist before the decentralization took
place; entrance fees and trophy-hunting fees have generated
public funds for schools and other public investments, and even
for cash payouts to conservancy members. Local incomes have
risen substantially as a result. (See the Chapter 5 case study, “Nature
in Local Hands: The Case for Namibia’s Conservancies.”)
Local Empowerment
Some of the most significant benefits of community management
are in the area of empowerment. Shifting substantial
management control over ecosystems to communities gives them
a voice where often they had none. It often restores traditional
rights—such as water use rights, forest collection rights, or
fishing rights—that may have been lost as modern states centralized centralized
their authority. While these political and legal benefits are
enormous, the shift in resource control also exerts a substantial
psychological effect on communities that may be even more
important, particularly for the poor. This manifests as a new
sense of pride and control over one’s life, as well as greater confidence
in dealing with others outside the community and with
government authorities. This empowerment dividend is often
augmented as local community members gradually develop the
accounting, monitoring, planning, and dispute-resolution skills
that good resource management demands (Shyamsundar et al.
2004:11). The benefits of such new personal and group skills
spill over into domains well beyond resource management.
Ecosystem Benefits
There is also evidence that community-based resource management
can create incentives that foster good ecosystem
management and contribute to conservation goals as well as
economic development. Experiences in Africa, India, and Nepal
demonstrate that community forestry management can result in
healthier forests and improved tree cover (Shyamsundar et al.
2004:13). A notable example is the HASHI program in the
Shinyanga district of Tanzania. With help from the central
government, over 800 villages have revived a traditional conservation
practice of creating “enclosures” that foster regrowth of
the once-abundant forest by controlling grazing and harvesting
within the enclosed area.
Management decisions about the enclosures are entirely a
local matter controlled by village councils. So far, creating traditional
enclosures through the HASHI program has reforested
some 350,000 hectares of overgrazed and barren land.
Economic benefits distributed to villagers—in the form of fodder,
fuel wood, medicinal plants, and greater water availability—have
made the HASHI program a popular success. The combination
of income and ecosystem benefits made the HASHI program
a finalist for the UN’s Equator Prize in 2002, recognizing it as
prime example of the conjunction of poverty reduction and
conservation. (See the Chapter 5 case study, “Regenerating
Woodlands: Tanzania’s HASHI Project.”)
Similar ecosystem improvements have also been
documented in cases where wildlife management has been
devolved to the local level. Wildlife censuses associated with the
Selous Conservation Program in Tanzania showed increased
animal numbers, and wildlife populations have rebounded
impressively in Namibia’s conservancy areas as poaching has
fallen and conflicts with livestock have been reduced
(Shyamsundar et al. 2004:12).
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