A Continuing Role for the State

The goal of devolving control over natural resource management from the national level to the local level is to give local residents a stake in management, thus increasing its effectiveness and equity. But the state still plays an essential role in helping such local management to succeed. For example, it is the state that must put in place the policy and legal framework to allow local management to take place at all. In addition, the state has a special responsibility to look beyond the level of community management to make sure that broader environmental standards are upheld and management efforts are coordinated. The state can also help local management to become a source of substantial income through training and capacity building, as well as deploying its more traditional economic development tools of transport, marketing, and credit assistance. More specifically, the state has an important role in eight areas:

1. Defining the legal space for local management. Without official state recognition, local management regimes can never be secure. This usually requires altering the framework of national laws that define the state’s role in resource ownership and management. Many nations have made significant progress in crafting new forestry, wildlife, and fishery laws that specifically sanction local management regimes. In South Africa, for example, the 1998 Marine Living Resources Act included a provision recognizing the legitimacy of managing local fisheries for subsistence use (WRI et al. 2003:180). In Africa alone, more than 30 countries have passed new forest laws since 1990 that mandate varying levels of decentralization and new opportunities for local participation in management (Shyamsundar et al. 2004:20). However, interpreting these laws and establishing the limits of local management authority are ongoing challenges that demand continued state attention and experimentation. This includes not only the details about technical management itself, but also such institutional questions as the structure of local management committees. The state, for instance, may play a progressive role by encouraging gender balance on such committees.

2. Granting resource tenure. As stated earlier, tenure is a central requirement for real access and control of resources. As it defines the parameters of local control, perhaps the state’s most important contribution is to clearly establish the resource rights of communities in a legally unambiguous manner. This allows communities to make firm management plans and financial commitments without fear of disenfranchisement. It gives them the legal basis to seek redress through the courts if they feel their resource rights have been violated. This access to redress is essential to the exercise of true authority, and lack of this right is a frequent bugaboo of local management efforts.

3. Requiring community consent. One way that the state can safeguard local community management rights is to insist on a requirement of free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) by the community whenever large-scale economic projects like mining, energy extraction, or major timber harvests are proposed nearby. Planning for such projects often excludes effective community participation and conflicts with local priorities. FPIC is both a principle and a process that some governments and international institutions are beginning to incorporate into their policies. As a principle, FPIC is the right of local communities and indigenous peoples to participate meaningfully, through consent procedures, in decisions about how the land they occupy and the natural resources they depend on are to be utilized. As a process, FPIC enables rural communities— who are often politically weak—to present their concerns to those proposing large-scale projects, whether they are from the government or the private sector. Its intent is to promote equal bargaining power among all parties and shield communities from coercion, threat, or manipulation. Without this shield, experience shows that poor communities often lose control of local resources. (See Box 3.3.)

4. Creating local-state co-management partnerships. In many cases, local management is best pursued as a partnership between the community and the state. Comanagement regimes, as these partnerships are called, allow the state to contribute its expertise in some areas while devolving substantial control over most day-to-day management. Co-management regimes have become common in fisheries, where communities may not have the capability to take on some essential tasks such as fisheries research and stock assessment, or to manage an entire fishery. But they are also common in forests, such as India’s Joint Forestry Management agreements, where communities are granted limited management and use rights on state forest lands. The challenge for co-management regimes is to assure that the state cedes sufficient rights and authority to local communities but does not abandon them, leaving the communities without proper support.
(See Box 4.2.)

5. Accounting for the scale challenge. Inherent in the management of ecosystems is the problem of scale. Ecosystems can exist simultaneously at different scales, from a forest block in a single watershed to interconnected forest tracts extending a thousand kilometers. Sustaining ecosystems requires keeping in mind the interconnections between these scales, from micro to macro. Forest management in one community’s watershed may affect downstream communities and adjacent forests. Local communities cannot be expected to manage well at this macroscale, and thus the state retains an essential role here. This means helping to coordinate management plans in adjacent communities—and across the nation—so that they do not conflict or overemphasize a single kind of use (Shyamsundar et al. 2004:20). The state also has an oversight responsibility to make sure that local management aligns with national environmental laws, and even with international treaties such as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

6. Monitoring and enforcement. Good ecosystem management relies on keeping harvest activities, tourist use, or other impacts within the ecosystem’s tolerances. This in turn demands an attempt to monitor the state of the ecosystem or the intensity of the impacts so that management decisions can reflect conditions on the ground. It also demands enforcement of the community’s harvest or use rules and the prevention of illegal logging, fishing, or other encroachment on the resource. Communities can often develop monitoring and enforcement capabilities, and, in fact, this is one area of group participation that can become a source of empowerment, as community members develop scientific skills or volunteer as forest guards or game wardens. But for transboundary monitoring or enforcement actions where large-scale poaching or illegal activity is involved, the state can usefully intervene with personnel or funds or both.

7. Capacity-building and networking. Developing the management acumen required to effectively manage a fishery, game population, ecotourism trade, or forest concession takes time and training. While NGOs can help with much of this capacity-building and training, the state—as a repository of skills and budget in these areas—clearly has a part to play. The state, as overseer and coordinator, also has a natural role in helping communities share lessons and skills. It can also help communities participate in larger international networking efforts and partnerships, such as UNDP’s Equator Initiative, which brings together governments, NGOs, businesses, and local communities to identify and support examples of sustainable community resource management that increases rural incomes.

8. Supporting communities with transportation, credit, and market regulation. If one of the prime goals of local management is to increase income from the community resource, then the state can help by fulfilling its traditional role of supporting economic development by assisting local communities to develop their transportation and marketing infrastructure. Without an outlet to viable markets and the knowledge and funding to create demand, local communities will not be able to maximize their gain and reward good management practices. At the same time, the state must do its part to insure that competitive markets exist for the products of rural enterprise. That means regulating markets to avoid the price-fixing and monopoly control of resource markets that frequently occurs in poor nations.

When the state supports communities by playing these roles well, it can greatly increase the chances for successful local management. In turn, the state can look forward to significant returns on its investment in the form of better management results, higher tax revenues, reduced resource conflicts, and smaller outlays for monitoring and enforcement (Shyamsundar et al. 2004:13-14).