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
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.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.