Challenges to Community-Based Sustainable Development: Dynamics, Entitlements, Institutions

Abstract

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.

A Framework for Understanding On-farm Environmental Degradation and Constraints to the Adoption of Soil Conservation Measures: Case Studies from Highland Tanzania and Thailand

“…The idea of capability here, resembles the notion of environmental endowments and entitlements discussed by Leach, Mearns, and Scoones (1997). It becomes clear then, that the notion of environmental entitlements alone, being only one of the four criteria, is insufficient to explain environmental degradation.…”

Capitals and Capabilities: A Framework for Analyzing Peasant Viability, Rural Livelihoods and Poverty

“…They can also lead to more e cient use of resources, through fostering coordinated action (as in the case of water: Lam, 1996). This is not to say that such relationships are always or even usually the norm in communities (Leach, Mearns and Scoones, 1998;McCay and Jentoft, 1998); their potential e ects, though make it important to understand how such relationships come into being.…”

“…By phrasing the issue in this way, we can conceptualize sustainable rural livelihoods in terms of recent debates on access to resources (Berry, 1989;Blaikie, 1989), asset vulnerability (Moser, 1998), and entitlements (Sen, 1981), and in such a way as to extend recent attempts to develop such a conception (Chambers, 1989;Moser, 1998;Leach, Mearns and Scoones, 1998). The suggestion is that one part of a useful heuristic framework (see Figure 1) would conceive of livelihoods and the enhancement of human well-being in terms of di erent types of capital (natural, produced, human, social and cultural) that are at once the resources (or inputs) that make livelihood strategies possible, the assets that give people capability, and the outputs that make livelihoods meaningful and viable.…”

“…In such cases, rather than identifying investment in migrant skills as a means of improving rural livelihoods, a mapping exercise showing the ways in which assets controlled by di erent actors undermine assets of poorer groups would instead (or also) suggest it was more important to invest in peoplesÕ capability to control and defend assets (cf. Leach, Mearns and Scoones, 1998), raising the issue of how to invest in social capital instead of human capital (cf. Bebbington, 1996).…”

“…21±24)Ðnot for reasons of linguistic tone, but rather for reasons of empirical balance, for indeed, there may be as much initiative and collaboration in widening access as there is con¯ict in the process of securing it. It is therefore important to develop frameworks that capture all these dimensions of access, and not only the con¯ictualÐthey must capture both the dynamics of con¯ict emphasized by Leach, Mearns and Scoones (1998), and those of cooperation emphasized more by authors such as Evans (1996) and Tendler (1997).…”