A Review of Community-Based Natural Resource Management

Abstract

This paper reviews initiatives of Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) from 21 case studies in different countries. The study uses Ostrom's design principles and eight objective measures. These are empowerment, public participation, equity, conflict resolution mechanisms, similarities between misuse and establishment of rules for indigenous environments, effective monitoring, collective choice arrangements and sanctioning activities for the use of common resources to evaluate and compare the case studies to examine the cases. Based on the analyses, successes and failures of CBNRM were determined. Successes were evident in the management of water resources in Honduras, India, Kenya, Nepal and St Lucia. CBNRM was also successful in Fiji, in joint forest management in India and other instances such as in Alaska, China, Cambodia, Namibia, Malaysia, Mexico, Washington, and to a small extent in Papua New Guinea. However, CBNRM initiatives failed in managing wildlife conservation in Nepal and Kenya, and in Tanzania wildlife management, Uganda and Zimbabwe. CBNRM failure was attributed to the uneven distribution of the benefits of natural resources, lack of empowerment, low community participation, failure to resolve conflicts, among many factors. In this study, the recommendations is made that similar research should be conducted with a larger sample size and employ other techniques such as Principal Component Analysis for examining the characteristics that achieve effective and sustainable CBNRM initiatives.

Assessment of Portuguese Community Forestry using the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure and FAO Community-Based Forestry Framework

“…A literature review indicates that this type of conflict is common to CBFs regardless of the level of development of the country or community (e.g. Skutsch 2000; Bullock and Hanna 2007;FAO 2012a;Acharya and Upreti 2015;Milupi, Somers, and Ferguson 2017). In this sense, Portugal is no exception (Gomes 2017).…”

Archetypes of common village pasture problems in the South Caucasus: insights from comparative case studies in Georgia and Azerbaijan

“…Changing the situation on village pastures into a comanagement between administrations and the local population would be one crucial factor. Besides communication and rule design, as mentioned in the solution archetype, other factors might play a role to make commons management effective (Ostrom 1990, Reid et al 2014, Dörre 2015, Milupi et al 2017. We especially stress leadership and the supporting legal environment recognizing the decision rights of villagers as hampering efforts to improve the Georgian situation.…”

The Legacy of Elinor Ostrom on Common Forests Research Assessed Through Bibliometric Analysis

“…The failure of centralized approaches to natural resource management has propelled the search for a viable and sustainable alternative approach to achieving sustainable management (NABANE;MATZKE, 1997;MILUPI et al, 2017). Thus, the approach to property rights granted to local communities to manage natural resources became common in the 1960s, which was recognized as Community-based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM).…”