ABSTRACT. The success of long-term sustainable management of natural resources depends on local people's support. Assessing local people's attitudes, taking into account their needs, and respecting their opinions should become a management priority. In India, in the last 20 years, community needs and aspirations in forest management were handled through Joint Forest Management with varying degrees of success. Recently, the Forest Rights Act (2006) was passed to recognize and vest forest rights in forest dwelling communities. This major policy development is still in implementation, but little is known about how this devolution process will affect people's attitudes toward forests. In this paper, we analyze associations between attitudes toward state controlled forests (Reserved Forests) and (i) awareness about the Forest Right Act, (ii) attitudes toward the State Forest Department, and (iii) participation in forest management groups of mostly tribal forest dwellers in the district of Kodagu (Karnataka). We collected information with a structured questionnaire among 247 villagers living under three different land tenure and management regimes: (1) private coffee plantations, (2) Reserved Forest, and (3) National Park. The results of the multivariate analyses show that people are more likely to appreciate Reserved Forests if they have more knowledge about the Forest Rights Act and if they have positive attitudes toward the State Forest Department. A sobering result in our sample is that participation in formal forest management groups is negatively associated to attitudes toward Reserved Forests, suggesting the Joint Forest Management model doesn't necessarily help the transition from coercion to consent. Increasing local people awareness about their rights and improving their relations with the formal forest stewards remain priorities for sustainable forest management to emerge in India.
New challenges posed by global environmental change have motivated scholars to pay growing attention to historical long-term strategies to deal with climate extremes. We aim to understand long-term trends in community responses to cope with droughts, to explain how many preindustrial societies coevolved with local hydro-climatic dynamics and coped with climate extremes over time. The specific goals of this work are: (1) to analyze how local communities experienced droughts over long periods of time and (2) to document the spectrum of recorded community responses to drought. Our research covers over one century (1605-1710) of responses to drought in the community of Terrassa, Barcelona, Spain. Data were collected through archival research. We reviewed and coded 2076 village council minutes. Our results show that the local community adopted a mixture of symbolic, institutional, and infrastructural responses to drought and that drought-related decisions varied through time. We discuss adaptation strategies on the basis of the distinct physical signals of drought propagation and the role of nonclimatic historical factors, such as warfare and public debt, in shaping responses. We conclude that long-term perspectives on premodern history and comparable empirical studies are fundamental to advance our understanding of past social responses to hydro-climatic extremes.
Subjective well-being is determined by several types of sources of satisfaction, defined as forms of capitals. Most of research has been focused on the links between economic capital and well-being, neglecting the contribution of other forms of capital as source of satisfaction. Here, we bring natural capital into the equation and explore the relations between economic and natural capital and subjective well-being. We approach well-being as a multidimensional concept and then focus on three of its dimensions: subsistence, security, and reproduction and care. Working with tribal communities from Kodagu (Karnataka, India), we found positive associations between economic and natural capital and subjective well-being. Nevertheless, the two types of capitals differed on their relative contribution to (a) overall subjective well-being and (b) the three selected dimensions. Natural capital can be more important than economic capital in fulfilling human well-being. Findings support ongoing calls for explicitly incorporating ecological assets and ecosystem services in the design of policies oriented to measure and improve well-being.NSF-Cultural Anthropology Program BSC-0726612 ANR-French National Research Agency ANR-05-PADD-0XX "Presidente de la Republica" scholarship (CONICYT, Chile
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