Summary. Ð While community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) now attracts widespread international attention, its practical implementation frequently falls short of expectations. This paper contributes to emerging critiques by focusing on the implications of intracommunity dynamics and ecological heterogeneity. It builds a conceptual framework highlighting the central role of institutions Ð regularized patterns of behavior between individuals and groups in society Ð in mediating environment-society relationships. Grounded in an extended form of entitlements analysis, the framework explores how dierently positioned social actors command environmental goods and services that are instrumental to their well-being. Further insights are drawn from analyses of social dierence;``new'', dynamic ecology; new institutional economics; structuration theory, and landscape history. The theoretical argument is illustrated with case material from India, South Africa and Ghana. Ó

Summary. Ð While community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) now attracts widespread international attention, its practical implementation frequently falls short of expectations. This paper contributes to emerging critiques by focusing on the implications of intracommunity dynamics and ecological heterogeneity. It builds a conceptual framework highlighting the central role of institutions Ð regularized patterns of behavior between individuals and groups in society Ð in mediating environment-society relationships. Grounded in an extended form of entitlements analysis, the framework explores how di erently positioned social actors command environmental goods and services that are instrumental to their well-being. Further insights are drawn from analyses of social di erence;``new'', dynamic ecology; new institutional economics; structuration theory, and landscape history. The theoretical argument is illustrated with case material from India, South Africa and Ghana. Ó

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Summary Recent approaches to community‐based natural resource management frequently present ‘communities’ as consensual units, able to act collectively in restoring population‐resource imbalances or reestablishing harmonious relations between local livelihoods and stable environments. Arguing that these underlying assumptions and policy narratives are flawed as guidelines for policy, this article presents an alternative perspective which starts from the politics of resource access and control among diverse social actors, and sees patterns of environmental change as the outcomes of negotiation or contestation between their conflicting perspectives. The notion of ‘environmental entitlements’ encapsulates this shift in perspective, and provides analytical tools to specify the benefits that people gain from die environment which contribute to their well‐being. The processes by which people gain environmental endowments and entitlements are, in turn, shaped by diverse institutions, both formal and informal.

The context of famine in Turkana has changed in recent years as the role played by livestock raiding in contributing to famine has increased. External responses to famine in Turkana have largely been drought driven, for example, food assistance and livestock restocking programmers, which have failed to meet the real needs of herders. The role of armed conflict in the form of raiding has been overlooked as a common feature of societies facing famine and food insecurity. The traditional livelihood-enhancing functions of livestock raiding are contrasted with the more predatory forms common today. The direct impact of raiding on livelihood security can be devastating, while the threat of raids and measures taken to cope with this uncertainty undermine herders' livelihood strategies. Self-imposed restrictions on mobility negatively affect the vegetation of both grazed and ungrazed pastures and restrict the available survival strategies. Predatory raiding leads to a collapse in the moral economy. Some implications of this for relief and development policy are considered, including approaches to conflict resolution.

Under the socialist regime that prevailed until the start of the 1990s, Mongolia made great progress in improving human development indicators, and poverty was virtually unknown. Political and economic transition in the 1990s ushered in a rapid rise in asset and income inequality, and at least a third of the population has been living in poverty since 1995. Many workers made redundant from uneconomic state‐owned enterprises were absorbed into the extensive livestock sector in rural areas and by the growing informal economy in urban areas. The livestock sector grew dramatically, with herders accounting for over a third of the total population and half of the active labour force by the late 1990s. Three consecutive years of drought and harsh winters in 1999–2002 then drastically reduced the national herd. These trends are viewed against a backdrop of relative neglect of the livestock sector in development priorities and a concomitant decline in agricultural productivity. Pressures on common pasture have mounted, and conflict over grazing is becoming endemic. In such a context, sustainable management of Mongolia's pastoral commons should be central to the country's economic development agenda in general, and to its poverty reduction strategy in particular. This article draws on the findings of a country‐wide participatory poverty assessment conducted in 2000. Blending quantitative and qualitative data, these findings help to bring into sharper relief the broad outlines of an integrated approach to building secure and sustainable livelihoods both on and off the pastoral commons.

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