Keeping Community-Based Management Pro-Poor

These successes show the potential for community-based management to empower and enrich local communities and still manage ecosystems well. But CBNRM is no panacea, and it is by no means always pro-poor. Both the power and benefits associated with community management tend to be directed toward higher income classes unless specific accommodations are made. In pursuing pro-poor CBNRM, communities, governments, and NGOs must keep in mind several points:

Accounting for the Costs of CBNRM

Community management of ecosystems sometimes entails substantial costs that must be accounted for and minimized. One of the major costs of many community-management schemes is the short-term loss of the use of a resource to allow it to recover or to keep its use within sustainable levels (Shyamsundar et al. 2004:10). This “opportunity cost” may manifest as a restriction in the use of common areas for grazing or firewood collection, or a limit on how many game animals or fish can be harvested—restrictions that inevitably fall hardest on the poor. The loss is usually temporary—a typical grazing ban to restore a denuded watershed slope might last for three years. In addition, if the ban is successful, the long-term benefit from the closure will soon exceed the short-term costs. Nonetheless, the short-term costs can impact poor families considerably in the interim and are a frequent source of dissatisfaction (Kerr 2002a:1397).

For example, in a study of villages participating in watershed restoration projects in western India (part of India’s Watershed Development program), nearly a fifth of the landless residents reported that the restoration projects harmed their interests because they could not graze their sheep on the commons due to grazing bans (Kerr 2002a:1396). Women too complained of their loss of access to common lands, which they used to collect grasses for brooms, tamarind pods, and tendu leaves—some of the few income sources that they controlled independent of their husbands (Kerr 2002a:1395-97).

This and other studies show that without a mechanism to compensate the poor for their short-term losses, achieving good ecosystem management and maximum benefit to the poor may be antagonistic goals, at least in the initial stages of ecosystem recovery. Offering wage labor to try to offset the income loss is one common way to avoid this trade-off. For example, watershed restoration may require seasonal labor for several years to build check dams, plant trees, install fencing, create ponds, or recontour croplands to retain water. However, this will only provide adequate support if the poor are hired preferentially for such jobs and the labor persists for as long as their access to resources is restricted. In the study of watershed restoration in western India, for example, wage labor, while helpful, was not sufficient to make up for loss of access to grazing on common lands (Kerr 2002a:1388, 1395-1396; Shyamsundar et al. 2004:17-18).

Other approaches to reducing short-term costs or providing compensation may also be useful. Staging the restoration of common areas so that they are not all closed at once, but in rotation, is one strategy to reduce the burden on the poor. Another approach is to provide extra services specifically to poor families, such as training in skills that open other employment options, or establishing credit or savings groups to help them manage household resources better and make investments in land (Kerr 2002a:1391-92).

Assuring Equity in Benefits Sharing

As has been stressed above, richer families in a rural community usually hold a structural advantage in capturing the benefits from good ecosystem management. For example, watershed restoration in arid climates will clearly advantage those with more land, especially if these are low-lying lands where the groundwater captured by the restoration is likely to accumulate most. Likewise, owners of large boats with more efficient gear will be able to harvest more of a healthy fish stock than the poorest fishers paddling small piroques. Even when local resource management projects try to make poverty reduction a goal, this natural advantage often intervenes (Kerr 2002a:1388-9, 1398; Kumar 2002:763).

Given the structural advantages of the rich, developing mechanisms to share benefits and costs equitably among all community members must be a priority when communities begin local management of common resources. But finding acceptable recipes for benefit-sharing is notoriously difficult. Successful attempts often require analyzing the benefits carefully so that they can be apportioned not just on the basis of the quantity of water, fish, or forest products produced, but on the economic value of these benefits.

The village of Sukhomajri in the Indian state of Haryana offers one famous example of the successful sharing of benefits. Watershed restoration there in the 1970s produced the same benefits seen in other successful restoration projects: revegetated upper slopes produced more fodder and more surface water in low-lying areas that could be used for irrigation and other income-producing activities.

The innovation came in giving each family an equal share of the water that collected in the village’s new catchment ponds, with the option to use it or sell it to others if they wished. Landless families could thus sell their water to farmers with greater need for irrigation, turning their share to cash, as well as benefiting from wage labor that might result from more irrigated crops. Each family also received equal shares of the watershed’s valuable bhabhar grass, which they could similarly use or sell. This arrangement resulted in considerable increases in household income throughout the community. By 1998, 70 percent of village households were earning Rs 2000 per month (US$47) (Agarwal and Narain 1999:14-17; Kerr 2002a:1390; Kerr 2002b:56).

Unfortunately, there is no easy formula for benefit-sharing arrangements, which are highly specific to both the resources being managed and the social structure of the community. In some instances, the resource is highly divisible and marketable, such as the harvest of high-priced medicinals, and sharing may be straightforward. Or community benefits may come in the form of access fees from tourists, timber revenues, or other income that can be split among community members. In Namibian conservancies, for example, revenues from tourist access, campgrounds, and the sale of game hunting licenses to foreigners generate income that in some instances has been turned into a cash payout to each conservancy household—an easy way to assure equal treatment (US AID 2004:13).

But in other instances, easy division may be impossible. For example, in many restored watersheds the increase in water will not result in accumulation of surface water in ponds where shares can be calculated. Instead, extra water may manifest as more groundwater, which is legally the property of the land owner from whose well it is pumped to the surface. This makes the community benefit difficult to calculate and hard to tap by poor families without land or wells. Addressing this would require an arrangement where groundwater is considered community property no matter where it is pumped, with users paying a fee to the community to tap it (Kerr 2002a:1391-1392, 1399).

Another approach to community equity is to grant special arrangements just to the lowest income families. For example, one Indian village in Maharashtra state granted to the village’s landless residents exclusive fishing rights in a run-off pond that the community had built (Kerr 2002a:1391-1392, 1399). Likewise, low-income families could be allowed special areas to fish, extra harvest or grazing periods, or an extra share of the resource being managed. In all cases, this requires a progressive view of benefits and a careful definition of user rights that is formalized and accepted by the community.

Acknowledging the Limits of Participation

There is a growing consensus that communities can establish functioning institutions capable of managing local resources, and that these institutions—from village councils to user groups—can function through community participation, making real the promise of local devolution. But there is also the realization that community processes are rarely egalitarian. Except in rare instances, communities are not homogeneous, and naturally break into various interest groups, making equity a challenge. Often, these are based along class, ethnic, and gender lines, with women and the poor usually being the least powerful of these groups (Kellert et al. 2000:705; Shyamsundar et al. 2004:16-17, 19; Kerr 2002a:1388-1389; Kumar 2002:765-766).

A scene several years ago from a village meeting about a new watershed restoration project in the Indian state of Karnataka illustrates the problem. At the front of the room sat the wealthiest landholders, who owned fertile, irrigated land in the valley bottom. Behind them sat middle-income farmers with less-desirable but still good land. In the back stood poor families with the least fertile land at the top of the watershed. The landless hung around the periphery; no women were present (Fernandez 2003:6-7).

In situations such as these, assuring true participation for the poor requires considerable institution-building so that mechanisms of inclusion can gradually work against ingrained social patterns. For example, one NGO in Maharashtra state that helps villages undertake watershed restoration programs insists on a consensus-based approach to all decisions about the watershed and spends a good deal of time facilitating such decisions and building the social basis necessary to foster them (Kerr et al. 2002:16, 34). Although it is more unwieldy than a majority vote, this approach offers an organic way to make sure the interests of the landless minority are not simply swept aside.

Another method that has proven effective in some situations is to encourage the poor to form a separate affinity group or self-help group—such as a credit or savings association— where they can discuss common concerns, develop skills such as bookkeeping and management of common funds, and come to common negotiating positions. One or more members of such self-help groups can then act as an official representative on the watershed committee or other local authority charged with managing the natural resource in question, insuring that the poor have an official voice and at least a modicum of representation. In Karnataka, such arrangements have, for example, resulted in better recognition of the need to provide forage to the landless during the watershed regeneration process (Fernandez 2003:5-10).

Often, these self-help and affinity groups have a high proportion of women. This points up the fact that achieving real participation of the poor inevitably means making special efforts to bring women, who head up many of the poorest households, into a greater decision-making role. Overcoming gender bias is particularly important in natural resource management because of the role women play in generating environmental income and their place in managing the household economy. They are usually the front-line users of natural resources on a day-to-day basis.

Unfortunately, there is abundant evidence that even when women are given places on village committees, they often are treated as tokens rather than full members, with their voices being lost among the male majority or their votes simply a proxy for their husbands’ opinions. Techniques to increase the influence of women include requiring parity—or close to it—of representation on such committees, as well as deliberate scheduling of meetings to accommodate women’s domestic and child-care responsibilities. Including women in technical training about managing the resource in question is also important to insure parity in skill levels and reinforce the idea of women as co-managers rather than dependents (Kerr 2002a:1398).

Nongovernmental organizations are frequently essential partners in helping communities devise decision-making processes that include the poor. Local NGOs often provide both technical help with the task of resource management, but also capacity-building in group dynamics and conflict resolution, as well as administrative capabilities such as bookkeeping, budgeting, keeping records, filing reports, and interacting with government officials. In Karnataka, the NGO MYRADA provides a series of 14 training modules for the use of local self-help groups covering topics such as crafting a common vision, developing internal rules and regulations, resolving conflicts, and maintaining proper books (Fernandez 2003:6). As with MYRADA, the involvement of local NGOs can be the catalyst for innovations in local governance that help the community reach beyond its traditional social hierarchy to recognize the need for greater equity in benefits-sharing (Kerr 2002a:1390-1392). Such groups can also bring isolated rural communities into contact with networks of similar communities to share experiences, as well as with a wider global community of ideas and funding that may offer new resources and partnerships (WRI et al. 2003:71-88).

While communities can look to civil-society groups for new approaches to local governance, they often need to revisit traditional community institutions as well. Customary sources of authority such as chiefs or village elders are frequently key players in helping communities to organize around the goal of local management. In many cases, community action could not proceed without at least the tacit blessing of the traditional leaders.

In some instances, these traditional institutions have acted in parallel with democratic institutions such as village councils, creating a synergy between new and old that has been key to the success of the management effort. In Fiji, it was the encouragement of the local district chief that led to the first experimentation with community management of a local fishery and the establishment of the no-fishing zone that helped rejuvenate it. In Tanzania’s HASHI project, protected forest enclosures are officially managed by the local village councils, but the councils are guided by the villages’ customary Council of Elders and informed by traditional village assemblies called Dagashida.

While traditional institutions generally engender the community’s respect and buy-in to local management regimes, they can also be obstacles to equity and equal participation if they simply reinforce entrenched power arrangements or provide a route for powerful families to monopolize the benefits stream (Shyamsundar et al. 2004:7).