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NO. 41

PUBLISHED FOR THE IASCP BY THE YALE SCHOOL OF FORESTRY AND ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

APRIL 1997

A NOTE FROM THE EDITORS C P R

FORUM

Common Property Theory and Practice COMMENTARIES Scientists, Chickens, and Other Practitioners Lars Carlsson

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Rethinking Property Peter Vandergeest

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Community Based Natural Resource .:; Management in Theory and Practice in Southern Africa Ken Wilson 7 Book Review

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Recent Publications

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Announcements...

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IASCP Conference

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We have departed slightly from our usual CPR FORUM format in this issue. Instead of the single FORUM commentary and set of responses, we have asked three contributors to write commentaries on the same general topic: the relationship between theory and practice in the field of common property resource management. The result, as our readers will see, is a varied interpretation of the task by the three writers, each of whom thinks about and uses theories of property in different contexts. As always, the opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or the position of the IASCP. We expect that these pieces will generate a great deal of further thought amongst our diverse readership, given their widespread interest in and commitment to both the development of theory and the implementation of theoretical ideas in natural resource management practice. We invite you all to write us with your own thoughts and ideas about this topic. We will consider all contributions for publication in the Letters section of subsequent Digests. Enjoy.

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Scientists, Chickens, and Other Practitioners LARS CARLSSON Lulea University, Sweden

WHAT USE DO LOCAL PEOPLE IN MALI, NEPAL, OR ITALY HAVE FOR research on common-pool resources (CPR)? To put it another way, under what circumstances can the practical and the theoretical world of property studies meet? This question is relevant for all types of empirical research. Throughout the existence of the International Association for the Study of Common Property (IASCP), its annual conferences have attracted researchers as well as practitioners. The idea is that the two worlds they represent will be cross-fertilized. Supposedly this is done by enhancing applied research, and by stimulating exchange of practical experiences and more formal academic products. The conferences contain two types of contributions: case descriptions without explicit aspirations to theory making and more traditional research products with a significant level of abstraction and generalization. Can these two groups ever really meet? This article is intended to offer some tentative answers to this question. The question itself is brought about by a debate that took place during the sixth continued on page 2

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IASCP conference in Berkeley 5-8 June 1996. Michael Goldman's exciting panel "Critical Voices from the Commons" added extra fuel to the fire. The debate can be summarized as follows. One group revealed that they thought that the conference contained too many case studies without any theoretical challenges. This opinion was questioned by another group, "the practitioners," who raised fears that a development towards more theoretical contributions might lose the link to the field. They also seemed to mean that practitioners have legitimate claims on the outcomes of CPRresearch. A practitioner, for example a consultant, needs to know how to behave on site, for instance when dealing with common forests in Africa or irrigation systems in Asia. Others launched the wonderful, but unrealistic idea of assembling all scientific knowledge on the issue to develop "the" theory of common property. Presumably this theory could then be used as a guideline for practitioners all over the world! Basically this discussion boils down to a question of the general relation between something called practice and the towers of science, between the rice fields of Burma, or the forests of Nepal, and the world of science and universities. THE RELATION BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE

What is practice, and what is a practical problem? A practical problem can be understood as an issue raised by persons who have encountered some empirical puzzle. Practical problems are reflected in statements such as: "How can the devastation of forests be stopped? Why does the irrigation system have such poor capacity? Or, look at the rich farmers who empty the wells!" These translate into practical problems as they are perceived by local people or issues that in one way or another relate to specific settings. However, the definition of the problems might be formulated by people other than those who experience them. For example, social workers, consultants, or aid bureaucrats are often in positions that enable them to formulate questions which are practically relevant. When I talk about practitioners in this article, I refer to two groups of people: 1) local people and 2) consultants, bureaucrats, and other outsiders, e.g. NGOs. Scientists, on the other hand, are supposed to produce general knowledge useful and applicable outside the settings where they collect their data (Chalmers, 1990). Their primary aim is to explain, not merely to describe, why, how and under what circumstances one state of affairs caused another. This requires theory. If we aim to explain the causes of a phenomenon, we end up in theory. Theoretical as well as practical questions can be characterized by different level of relevance. Not all questions are equally relevant, either in science or practice. The discussion so far can be summarized in the following figure.

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RELEVANCE IN PRACTICE HIGH

LOW

HIGH

SCIENTIFIC VALUE LOW

Figure 1. The relation between scientific value and relevance in practice (The problematic is discussed in detail in Dahlstrom, 1980) One problem is that questions with high theoretical relevance can be of low practical importance. For example, the aid bureaucrat is probably may not be assisted in deciding whether he should support a project by reading theoretical research reports on the philosophy of decision making. These pieces might be relevant for the theory of collective action, for instance, but irrelevant for practical application. The scientist, on the other hand, earns less academic credit and theoretical sophistication by dealing with problems already "solved" on a theoretical level. Research on common property can provide us with solutions to a great number of problems that are highly relevant to various field settings. They are not used because often the solutions to these problems depend on the establishment of appropriate political and social structures. This is normally not the task for scientists, bureaucrats, or field workers. In a democracy, it is a job for the carriers of the problems, the people; this is the very idea of self governance. What types of help can the scientists give aid bureaucrats, hired consultants, or others whose jobs are to develop practical results? In fact, like chickens and other creatures in an agroecosystem, there is a strong interdependence between science and practice. The scientist committed to empirical research pecks at the grains left by practitioners with the aim of producing theory. The consultant will hopefully peck some useful products from this theory in order to fertilize the practical reality within his field of activity. It is hardly beneficial for the scientist or the practitioner, or for the general production of knowledge, if each one only pecks in his own sphere. Consulting without inflow of new ideas is bad consulting and researchers only chewing theories have lost the very source of theory building, namely contact 'with the empirical reality. It is essential to focus on this relation between empirical research, theory, and practice when discussing the activities of

IASCP, and the value of the annual conferences. The academic world is filled with meetings and conferences where famous and less famous researchers peck at each others' papers and reports, sometimes without any clear connection to the reality they try to explain. The IASCP meetings are allegedly different; they provide an arena where the two "chickens" can meet, give and take, produce and consume knowledge. One danger is that prominent researchers might stop attending the conferences because of a "lack of intellectual stimulation." Nor would it benefit the production of knowledge about common property if field people believed themselves too distant from theoretical abstractions or that their experiences have less value. On the other hand, claiming that scientists should always act like consultants is wrong, since that is not their job! In the same way, it is unfair to demand of consultants the practices appropriate to academic research. We might never develop the theory of common property, but practice will always provide fruitful topics to be studied. Independently of whether we are labeled practitioners or scientists (lots of people are both! Indeed there are examples of brilliant attempts to bridge the gap between science and the practical world of common property. (See for example, Ostrom, 1992 and Thomson, 1992) we can all deal with problems and questions that are "practice-relevant." When common property research no longer is relevant for practice, i.e., when its theories no longer fertilize the practical reality, it is sealing its own fate. This is prevented by organizing cognitive fields, literally and figuratively speaking, where researchers as well as practitioners can discuss and exchange experiences from their respective worlds. The IASCP conferences help relevant issues to be decided in open discussions, exchange of experiences, contestation, and conversation. Only in this way can we reach some mutual understanding concerning the extremely wide field called common property. An open public realm is the basis of mutual understanding. Presumably IASCP can provide such an environment. This might help us, practitioners as well as researchers, to avoid the worst of all boxes in Figure 1: the box characterized by low practical and scientific relevance. This box must be avoided. It represents the cynics' habitat. Fisheries, forests, and other common-pool resources are too important to be left to cynics playing with people's lives from offices far away from practical experience. The goal of IASCP is to provide an environment where questions characterized by a high degree of both practical and theoretical relevance can be discussed. For this endeavor, all "good chickens" are needed.

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References Chalmers, Alan F. (1990). What is This Thing Called Science? Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Dahlstrom, Edmund (1980). Samhädsvetenskap och Praktik: studier i samhälsvetenskaplig kunskapsutveckling (Social Science and Practice: Studies in the Societal Development of Knowledge). Stockholm: Liber. Gummesson, Evert (1988). Qualitative Methods in Management Research. Lund: Studentlitteratur and Chartwell-Bratt. Ostrom, Elinor (1992). Crafting institutions for Self Governing Irrigation Systems. San Francisco: ICS Press. Thomson, James T. (1992) A Framework for Analyzing Institutional Incentives in Community Forestry. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

DIGEST

course on political ecology: 1. A given item may have different resources. For example, a tree can be useful for fruit, timber, firewood, shade, regulating water flows, habitat for various animals, fixing carbon, establishing property claims on land, or tracing one's ancestry. 2. The same person does not necessarily claim rights to all uses of a given resource. 3. Property rights held by some people may have priority over others. 4. Property is not just about rights to use a resource, but may also be about responsibility. For example, the right to harvest fruit may follow from caring for a tree; right to a swidden plot may be contingent on preventing the spread of fire. 5. Among rural people, priority in rights is often structured through kin relations. 6. Rules or practices structuring priorities of different resources and who has access to them are often not clearcut. 7. Rules or practices can and do change, as conditions change. 8. There may be conflict between these different uses—for example, should cattle be killed for meat, or used for plowing?

Rethinking Properly PETER VANDERGEEST Department of Sociology York Univeristy, Ontario, Canada

MY WORK AND THAT OF MY COLLEAGUES INVOLVED in an Asian Resource Tenure Group involves both a theory of practice and an attempt to develop knowledge useful for strengthening the likelihood that local informal claims on resources might be recognized. We are developing a framework for understanding changing legal and informal tenure arrangements guiding access to forests. I will begin by outlining the framework we use for understanding property, and then discuss briefly some of the ways we have used this framework in workshops and applied research. Property minimally involves a legitimate and enforceable claim to some kind of resource. As such, property is a set of everyday practices as well as social relationships and rules. To illustrate the complexity of what this implies, I have included a partial list of some characteristics of property that I use in a PAGE

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9. Because rules or practices can change, and because of potential conflict, institutions are necessary to resolve disputes, conflicts, and making changes. 10. In order to ensure compliance with dispute resolution, there needs to be some kind of enforcement mechanism. 11. In cases of conflicting property claims, those able to have their claims enforced ill be successful. 12. In a given situation, there will be many different forms of property. Rights and responsibilities may be held by individuals, by families, by communities, or by the state. Or all of these, all at the same time. Rules may be unwritten or written. They may be enforced by pressure within the family or community, or by local gunmen, or by state police. Pauline Peters, in the January 1997 CPR Digest, suggests that we need to dislodge the conceptual hold of property as a way of avoiding the harm done by placing all forms of resource uses under the holy trinity of state, private, and common property categories. I too have been uncomfortable with the conceptual hold of terms like common property and the associated empirical search for examples of how undifferentiated

APRIL 1997

communities control and manage some resources as a group. Rather than abandon the term property, however, a more productive approach is to dislodge the holy trinity and complicate how we think about property. The importance of understanding property as practice is that it makes us more likely to see how property relations are ambiguous and constantly renegotiated. The focus on the everyday also helps us to see the overwhelming complexity of property. Everyday property practices are shaped by gender, class, kin, political, economic, legal, and many other relationships; they are ambiguous, changing, negotiated. They usually do not fit any clear-cut notion of common, state, or private property, although property practices in a particular place always display aspects of all of these. Even private property is a form of common property insofar as it requires people to get together to set up and enforce a private property regime. The notion of property as practice can be broken down somewhat. Legitimate and enforceable claims to resources imply that a number of activities are central to property: First, a property claim needs to be communicated to a relevant community (Rose, 1990). A claim that no one knows about is not property, common or otherwise. Second, some group within the relevant community needs to be convinced that the claim is legitimate. Although a thief may claim a car, as long as the relevant community—the owner, the police—do not accept the thief's claim as legitimate, the car can hardly be considered the property of the thief. Third, none of this will be very helpful to the claimant unless the claim to the resource is remembered in some way. Memory can take many forms, ranging from local knowledge about whose ancestor planted a fruit tree to cadastral maps showing land rights. Communication and memory taken together can be understood as texts, incorporated, as Rocheleau suggests in the January 1997 CPR Digest, into landscape contexts and contested subtexts about the legitimacy of property claims. The fourth activity central to property is enforcement. To make a property claim stick, those convinced of its legitimacy need to be able exercise some form of legitimate coercion to enforce the claim. The ability to enforce a property claim is what defines the relevancy of a community. Conflicts over property occur when different communities disagree about a given claim. Although these conflicts are sometimes between state agencies and local communities, they often occur among local people with different ideas about the legitimacy or justice of different claims. At different moments, community can be defined by gender, age, place of residence, occupation, or one of multiple other shifting identities. Communities, in other words, are as ambiguous, overlapping, and fluid as property.

Mention of legitimate coercion might remind many readers of the classic Weberian definition of the modern state, which I would reformulate as an institution •which has a clear priority in the use of legitimate coercion over a specific territory. Not surprisingly, states now almost always claim a clear priority in the right to administer property rights. That is, from the point of view of most states, property is not property unless it is communicated, recognized, recorded, and enforced by state agencies. Beginning at the end of the last century, states around the world began to claim not just the right to be the judge of what counted as property, but also the sole right to act on behalf of collectivities. This in turn allowed states to say that any common resource not owned by non-state but state-defined legal entities (individuals, households, corporations) under procedures specified by state laws and regulations must be the property of the state. The kinds of practices comprising state-administered property can be contrasted with what I will here label local property. In small communities, where people live for a long time, communication can take the form of oral or locally-meaningful markers; acceptance means convincing a few family or neighbors about a claim; memory is usually achieved by living in a place for a while; and enforcement is done by informal community sanctions. State officials, being unfamiliar with particular situations, rely on written forms of communication such as cadastral maps, a set of formal procedures, and state police or militaries for enforcement. NGOs, who are typically also outsiders to the places in which they get involved, have similarly gravitated to written forms of communication such as community mapping. Although I am contrasting state and local property as if they are separate, in actual property practices this contrast usually dissolves into a quagmire of competing or ambiguous claims which are the outcome of a long history of relations between state agencies and local people. Most property is neither purely state, or local, but a mix of both, just as women's informal access to edge environments is linked to men's more easily mapped and formally-recognized property claims. No state ever completely takes over the administration and enforcement of all property relations. Most property relations are too complex, too ephemeral, and too contingent for state agencies to record, recognize, remember, and enforce. For example, state agencies seldom bother with multiple and contingent claims to different parts of a tree; rather, they are more likely to assume that the owner of land on which the tree is planted also owns the entire tree. Local practices don't disappear: they just become informal. The most visible are given labels like "cusPAGE 5

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tomary law," or adat. But these local practices also change as states use their increasing technological capacity to monitor the landscape. Rural people adjust what they do to take account of a powerful state presence. For example, where I do research in Southern Thailand, tree tenure is slowly being made consistent with land tenure, and local forests are being demarcated as community forests administered by rules defined by NGOs and the Thai forest department. I should add that the state is not the only agent promoting changes in the way property is communicated and remembered. The expansion or intensification of market relations is also central, although it is important to avoid the misconception that seemingly isolated people have not been integrated into global markets for many centuries. But under market intensification, more and more land and other resources are being made into commodities available for purchase to strangers, people from outside of local knowledge. To buy land or other resources, strangers need to know •what they are buying. For this, they need clear boundaries. Strangers, because they are strangers, tend to distrust local knowledge and prefer to rely on the state to remember and enforce property rights, although they often accept local practice when there is no alternative. Because property practices are complex and change continually as people renegotiate them, we can never fully know a given set of property relations. Because property practices are a set of contingent claims and practices, some recognized, some not recognized by state agencies, a study of "rules" is a very limiting approach to understanding property. One can learn more about property by following people to see what they are doing, and asking them about it, then by asking them about rules. If we begin by understanding property as everyday practices, then the idea that common property is a clearly specified and bounded set of rules set off from the state and from private property becomes limiting. The search for clearly-defined common property can be understood as a product of the need of non-locals for defining and communicating forms of property that does not rely on long term residence in a place. It is also a result of a particular understanding of what is likely to lend legitimacy to property rights. Any argument for a broadening of our ideas of property and practice needs to address the normative dimension of property; indeed, a good reason for not abandoning the idea of property is that it is about rights and therefore about social justice. Over the last decade, environmental issues have increasingly come to dominate how states, scholar, and NGOs think about property rights. The search for common property is predicated in part on the idea that property rights can flow PAGE 6

DIGEST

from a demonstration that communities can manage resources sustainably. This contrasts with the kind of justifications for property rights expressed by people in my research sites in Southern Thailand, that reported by Rocheleau for people in Zambrana-Chacuey in the January 1997 issue of the CPR Digest, and of other researchers working in rural areas. Rural property rights involve a complex mix of moral economies, which may include, for example, an ethic of access for sharing resources (Peluso, 1996), the idea that labor confers property rights, ancestral rights, or even the legitimacy conferred by pieces of paper issued by state agencies. In opening up our idea of property, we also need to broaden how we think about the sources of legitimacy of property. Members of the Asian Resource Tenure Group have been trying to apply this approach to property in South and East Asia. The advantage of using this approach to study property in rural Asia is that it allows us to step away from looking for relatively less common cases of more narrowly defined "common property," and to step outside the increasingly ubiquitous idea that property rights should be based on criteria derived from the science of resource management. By conducting research on property in multiple sites, the group also aims to create knowledge necessary for a more informed discussion of alternatives for resource management in Asia, and to open the way for greater recognition of the diverse forms of local property.

References Peluso, Nancy (1996) Fruit Trees and Family Trees in an Anthropogenic Forest: Ethics of Access, Property Zones, and Environmental Change in Indonesia. Comparative Studies in

Society and History. 38(3):510-548 Rose, Carol (1990). Property as Storytelling. Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, 37-57.

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C O M M E N T A R Y

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Community Based Natural Resource Management in Theory and Practice in Southern Africa KEN WILSON Program Officer, Ford Foundation Johannesburg, South Africa

AMONGST THE CHALLENGES OF COMPREHENDING and strengthening common property resource management systems in Africa, none seems more pertinent than understanding the factors that make community institutions effective as resource managers. Effective, that is, in terms of elaborating and achieving uses of natural resources that are profitable AND sustainable, managerially robust, reasonably equitable, politically viable, and cost effective. This commentary focuses on the design of community institutions under the community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) programs being launched across the African continent in the wildlife, forestry, and related fields. It reviews guiding principles that have emerged in Southern Africa and especially in the pioneering CAMPFIRE program of Zimbabwe, pointing up several future challenges. These CBNRM programs in Southern Africa emerged from a coming together of a number of people and institutions with different agendas and from both the conservation and rural development fields. Not surprisingly, this was welcomed by donor agencies searching for new angles on sustainable development, on local participation, and more recently, on decentralization. They also caught African states at a time when declining capacity to actually control natural resource use was being recognized, and re-emergent democratic stirrings encouraged consideration of the devolution of certain resource rights to rural communities. It is this constellation of "external" factors that best explains the explosion of community-based natural resource management programs in Africa over the last ten years, rather than an actively articulated demand direct from rural communities themselves. The absence of community demand reflected their marginalization, a marginalization that could not simply be reversed by good will and a few community meetings. Indeed, it often took a long time to overcome the barrier of distrust, epitomized by the incredulous reaction of one villager in the

Zambezi valley who, when told that the government policy was now to grant rights to villagers over wildlife revenues, asked: "Well then, if that is true, why the hell would a government official travel all this way in this heat to tell us?!" To address this problem, a range of institutions and functions were established which could kick start and continuously react to "community participation" whilst achieving a basic legitimacy in the eyes of government. The task identified for these emergent community institutions was formidable. They should be able to assume more formal property rights, police resource access, take decisions on the harvest and distribution of benefits, and develop and deploy the necessary environmental management expertise. And, in the execution of these rights and duties, they were expected to interface effectively with the institutions who had historically held the ownership, management rights, and benefits from these natural resources, notably governments and their forest and/or wildlife departments and private sector land and concession holders. What determined the degree to which communities would be effective managers of resources under these emergent systems? As part of their research service to the CAMPFIRE process, recently retired Professor Marshall Murphree and his colleagues at the Centre for Applied Social Sciences at the University of Zimbabwe have advanced a series of "principles" that address the issue of balancing the costs and benefits of having wildlife to establish incentives, rules, and sanctions that can make communities effective managers (Murphree, 1993:6): Effective management of wildlife is best achieved by giving it focused value for those •who live with it. Differential inputs must result in differential outputs. There must be a positive correlation between the quality of management and magnitude of benefit. The unit of proprietorship should be the unit of production, management and benefit. The unit of proprietorship should be as small as practicable within ecological constraints. These principles combine insight from logic and experience. They might be summed up in two parts: first, communities need to become discrete holders and users of rights so as to facilitate effective collective action around common interest. Second, the communities and agencies that generate and control the flow of benefits need to ensure that management effort PAGE 7

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is rewarded proportionately. It will be clear to students of common property that these principles - and the more elaborate thinking that proceeds and follows them - are precisely an attempt to capture the great merits and potential weaknesses of common property systems. Thus, for Marshall Murphree, "the wildlife and sustainable development issue is about farmer motivation, rights, and organization under conditions requiring collective management of wildlife resources in defined commonages" (1996:161). This model is an interesting one for students of African societies because, whilst devised by an anthropologist deeply grounded in the region in question, it starts not from a conjuring of the particularisms of indigenous values and institutions, but from universalist economic and management logic. These principles respond to the realities of Southern Africa more in terms of political economy than local culture. They have been elaborated in recognition of the fact that wildlife are generally subject to an historically eroding common property system with state intervention tending to be large scale, authoritarian, and unconcerned with matching rights, responsibilities, and benefits with appropriate socio-ecological units. Likewise they occur in a context where novel forms of local organization are actively promoted by outsiders and do seem quite able to take root, albeit often framed differently than the outsiders had intended. CAMPFIRE started as a pragmatic effort to manoeuvre around this political economy, but once established it now confronts it. Marshall Murphree now proposes that the exploratory and experimental phase based on empowerment FOR rather than BY communities through pragmatic compromises rather than legal and political rights should now be ended. He argues that "we have now reached the stage where that experience must actively be applied in the political arena, with tenurial empowerment being the goal and the communities themselves being the principal actors" (Murphree, 1995:52). The entrenchment of communities' legal rights and political voice does indeed appear the most urgent question for CAMPFIRE in Zimbabwe, given a context where the Rural District Councils are the legal authority and considerable political pressures for re-centralization are emerging. It is also a central issue across Southern Africa where no country has yet established an effective framework for granting rural people's legal rights over land and natural resources (either within or beyond CBNRM project areas). Even in Mozambique where local government, land, and resource tenure are currently subject to sweeping revision, with the region's strongest government political support for such approaches, the proposed legislation and policy changes are still somewhat vague.

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The devolution of strong property rights to rural people whilst highly desirable - will in practice create considerable internal conflicts within rural areas because it will relocate some of the toughest and most fundamental questions to local decision-making. Three such questions well illustrate the challenges. First, will communities gain the right to refuse settlement rights to voluntary or forced migrants, and to expel existing residents? Second, will communities acquire rights to curb individual agricultural expansion and the accumulation of livestock? These two issues are already central in CAMPFIRE, because the opening up of areas through wildlife revenues and associated infrastructures is encouraging immigration of land hungry peasants from the plateau, and perhaps counter-intuitively, as James Murombedzi (1994) has shown, accumulation through agriculture and stock by the local elite, both of which threaten wildlife habitat. A third critical question is how emerging tenure units 'will avoid developing sharp artificial boundaries between people spread across the landscape. What appears necessary is an institutional arrangement enabling management of particular resources on both a smaller and larger scale than that appropriate in general for the legal definition of villages and their wildlife, not least because of the dramatic heterogeneity through space and time that typifies African savannahs, and the corresponding local strategies of using and owning different resources on different scales. Surely people need "nested" sets of institutions operating across different scales, and to have tradable rights or other complementarities that can transform differences between the resource bases of different groups of people into strengths instead of foci for conflict. Indeed, game that migrate across considerable areas - elephant for example which currently contribute over 60% of the CAMPFIRE revenue - can only be managed on this wider scale. Unfortunately, a lot of experience suggests that African rural communities are not much different from other associations of people, in that they typically gain cohesion by being nasty to one or other person or social group, and by competing with fellow groups for resources. Beyond the important issue of resource tenure, two other issues require more attention in these Southern African programs. The first is the capacity to move from effectively managing natural resources to being in a position to realize full benefits from them as ASSETS. The first generation of partnerships between communities and private sector safari companies basically saw communities earning revenues from bringing a land-based resource to the table. Currently, such

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programs are grappling with how communities can gain a real economic stake in the activities which generate value from those resources, be they safari hunting, other forms of ecotourism, or small scale industries that add value to wildlife, forestry, or other products. The second issue deserving more attention is that of "culture" and the rooting of these programs in local values and social dynamics. As noted above, CAMPFIRE pioneered the notion that NOVEL institutional arrangements and economic rights were the key to motivating and enabling community initiative. This appears to be vindicated by comparison with programs like Zambia's ADMADE, where despite some general successes, the focus on chiefs as the community's traditional resource managers - rather than elected committees - appears to have constrained popular participation in management and income distribution. CAMPFIRE's architects thus need congratulation for having avoided falling into a romantic reification of tradition and for their insistence on peasant capacities to make sound economic and management judgments on the basis of "modern" institutional frameworks. But whilst the right institutional matrix certainly encourages collective action through financial rewards, ideology and culture can often be decisive in the short or even long term in terms of which strategies are actually pursued. Furthermore, the very experience of operating community-based programs can be rooted in and transformative of these same kinds of values, and often in unpredictable ways. Thus we need a wider space for the "culture" variable both analytically and in terms of helping programs consciously deploy culture, without turning it into "Kulture," that is instrumentalized values ultimately harmful to local interests and free expression. Under CAMPFIRE, communities themselves debate values of "community" and "conservation," with spirit mediums, chiefs and churches playing considerable roles. However, in Mozambique this local cultural accommodation has been complemented through active deployment of cultural and artistic resources. Thus, dance, theater, song, video, and community radio are used to facilitate local debates that can define and build the values necessary to motivate new ways of living. Pilot programs in Mozambique also demonstrate the strength of local "conservation" ethics amongst rural people that are rooted both in long standing if ever changing "traditions" and in contemporary reactions to environmental change. Thus, in the Tchuma Tchato program area on the Zambezi not only has the program been influenced and reinforced by support from land guardianship spirit mediums with environmental concerns, but considerable local pressure has also already built up to phase out safari hunting in favor of

non-consumptive ecotourism, even if this means reduced income. As CAMPFIRE programs move from safari hunting to more holistic environmental management, an increasing use of indigenous knowledge and culturally-informed judgment would be necessary, and could be fostered through a more explicit attention to "culture." This might also further ground these programs in rural society and in turn strengthen communities' abilities to demand rights over their land and resources. References Murombedzi, J.C. (1994) The Dynamics of Conflict in Environmental Policy in the Context of the CAMPFIRE Programme. DPhil Thesis, Centre for Applied Social Sciences, University of Zimbabwe Murphree, M.W. (1993) Communities as Resource Management Institutions. London: International Institute for Environment and Development, Gatekeeper Series, No. 36. (1995) "Optimal Principles and Pragmatic Strategies: creating an enabling politico-legal environment for community based natural resource management," pp 47-52 in The Commons Without Tragedy: Strategies for Community Based Natural Resource Management in Southern Africa. Edited by E. Rihoy. Lilongwe: SADC Technical Co-ordination Unit (1996) "Approaches to Community Participation" pp 155-188 in African Wildlife Policy Consultation: Final Report of the Consultation, London: ODA

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Susan S. Hanna, Carl Folke, and Karl-Goran Mäler, eds. Rights to Nature: Ecological, Economic, Cultural, and Political Principles of Institutions for the Environment (Island Press, Washington, D.C., 1996. Pp. XV + 298. $29.95) Reviewed by Elisabeth Grinspoon Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management U.C.Berkeley, California

Rights to Nature examines human control of the natural environment through property rights. While the importance of property rights in resource allocation has been recognized for some time, its attendant environmental, social, and cultural processes have not been adequately studied. Rights to Nature aims to redress this imbalance by presenting analyses of the effects of different property rights in various natural environments. The research for Rights to Nature was undertaken as part of a program called "Property Rights and the Performance of Natural Systems" at the Beijer International Institute of Ecological Economics, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The editors, Susan Hanna, Carl Folke, and KarlGoran Mäler introduce Rights to Nature with a discussion of Garrett Hardin's famous parable, "the tragedy of the commons." They broaden the relevance of this parable applying it to both public and private ownership of natural resources. The editors link environmental problems by definition to property rights problems, both public and private. The rest of the book is built around this premise that environmental problems stem from incomplete, inconsistent, or unenforced property rights. The substance of each chapter is devoted to identifying property rights problems and to prescribing steps to ameliorate them. The first part of the book discusses the basic attributes of the human-environment interaction. Robert Costanza and Carl Folke examine current ecological theories and the means by which healthy ecosystems provide resources and services. Then they present a model for analyzing the relationship between ecosystems and human systems. The model seems to oversimplify the relationship; and the authors themselves admit that it is only applicable in three types of interactions between ecosystems and human systems: isolated systems, systems with large externalities and no higher control level, and systems with large externalities and no shared property. PAGE 10

In the following chapter, Susan Hanna and Svein Jentoft, a marine economist and sociologist, examine the effects of human social and economic behavior on the natural environment. They focus on how culture, values and social organization influence the use of natural resources. C.S. Holling and Steven Sanderson look at the similarities in natural and social systems. Through their technical analysis of a forest management system the authors show the importance of creating adaptive management systems for natural resources to accommodate the complex dynamics of ecosystems. The last chapter of this part of the book directly broaches the question of property rights for the first time in Rights to Nature. Fikret Berkes joins ideas from the classical human ecology literature and the ecological economics literature to model the linkages among natural capital, human-made capital, and cultural capital. His examination of private, communal, and state property rights all point to the need for diverse, flexible property rights regimes that link ecological and social systems. The second part of Rights to Nature focuses on the formation and costs of property rights systems. Bonnie McCay, an anthropologist, opens the section with a number of concepts related to property rights systems. She clarifies definitions and applies traditional ideas of property rights to the environmental resource base, using examples from fisheries management. Much of this chapter, like those that follow it, is prescriptive. Edella Schlanger and Elinor Ostrom, the latter being a pioneer in the study of common property, present a general theory of how property rights are established and how they are affected by social and physical factors. They also examine how property rights are organized at different scales. Thrainn Eggertsson concludes this section of the book by defending traditional economic analyses of property rights. Eggertsson presents an estimate of the costs of developing and maintaining propertyrights regimes. These costs include information gathering, developing rules of governance, and coordinating exclusion. He argues that control of resources is often insecure due to the high costs. The middle section of the book looks at the influence of cultural contexts on the functioning of a property rights system, especially the effects on economic development. Jean Ensinger, an anthropologist, applies rational choice theory to the relationship between culture and property rights in Africa. Ensinger uses examples of attempts by African governments to alter rights to land, to show that top-down approaches to property rights for natural resources regimes fail when they are ill-adapted to the cultural context of their application. In the following chapter, Narpat Jodha looks at the process of rural development and its relation to local resource practices and customary arrangements in the fragile, tropical regions of

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India. In Jodha's example, the state imposes a property rights system ill-suited to traditional practices and in this way increases environmental destruction. The final part of Rights to Nature looks at the coordination of property rights regimes across political and ecosystem boundaries. Margaret McKean presents a fascinating historical study of Japanese communities that settled their competing claims to property through the development of common property. Her case study addresses problems of scale and linkage that create potential advantages for common-property regimes over common-pool resources by lowering monitoring and enforcement costs, improved fit between institutions and ecological systems, and internalized ecosystem effects. Oran Young looks at the use of resources and ecosystems at the international level. He compares problems faced by common property regimes in small scale societies with international governance of the global commons. In the last chapter of the book, Scott Barrett, an economist, presents a mathematical analysis of the problems inherent managing resources that cross political boundaries. Barrett demonstrates that these problems are not easy to solve because the initial allocation resources is often not well defined and international agreements are difficult to enforce. While the authors present copious evidence that secure property rights do not necessarily promote biologically and economically sustainable use of resources, Rights to Nature fails to draw useful theories out of these descriptive examples of property rights problems. The many prescriptions for improving property rights that the book presents are too normative for broad application. The addition of a chapter or two to theoretically link the empirical examples in the book would have allowed Rights to Nature to offer more flexible solutions to property rights problems. On the other hand, Rights to Nature does succeed in breaking new ground in the study of property rights by presenting a truly interdisciplinary approach to the problem. The book opens the channels of communication for further interdisciplinary research by creating a lexicon for the study of property rights across disciplines. The study of property rights has long been thwarted because members of each disciplines under which related research is conducted - anthropology, economics, law, political science, and sociology — tend to see property rights through disciplinary lenses. Because each discipline has its attendant methods, theories and terminology, there were few channels for communication. By creating an interdisciplinary lexicon, Rights to Nature has advanced the search for solutions to pressing social and environmental problems an important step forward.

BOOKS

Baland, Jean-Marie, and Jean-Philippe Platteau (1996) Halting Degradation of Natural Resources: Is There A Role for Rural Communities? New York: Oxford University Press. Behrendt, Larissa (1995) Aboriginal Dispute Resolution: A Step Toward Self-Determination and Community Autonomy. Annandale, New South Wales, Australia: Federation Press. Chatty, Dawn (1996) Mobile Pastoralists: Development Planning and Social Change in Oman. New York: Columbia University Press. Clark, E. Ann, and Raymond P. Poincelot, eds. (1996) The Contribution of Managed Grasslands to Sustainable Agriculture in the Great Lakes Basin. New York: Food Products Press. Cleary, Mark, and Peter Eaton (1996) Tradition and Reform: Land Tenure and Rural Development in South-East Asia. New York: Oxford University Press. (South-East Asian Social Science Monographs). Cromwell, Elizabeth (1996) Governments, Farmers, and Seeds in a Changing Africa. Wallingford, Oxon, UK: CAB International in association with the Overseas Development Institute. Crowley, Brian Lee, ed. (1996) Taking Ownership: Property Rights and Fishery Management on the Atlantic Coast. Halifax, Nova Scotia: Atlantic Institute for Market Studies. Dasgupta, Partha, Karl-Goran Maler, and Alessandro Vercelli, eds. (1997) The Economics of Transnational Commons. New York: Clarendon Press. Dinar, Ariel, and John Letey (1996) Modeling Economic Management and Policy Issues of Water in Irrigated Agriculture. Westport, CT: Praeger. Erasmus, Zimitri (1994) Cooperative Development as Process: Four Case Studies of Producer Cooperatives in Southern Africa. Saabrucken, Germany: Verlag fur Entwicklungspolitik Breitenbach. (Nijmegen Studies in Development and Cultural Change, no. 18).

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Faure, David, and Helen F. Siu, eds. (1995) Down to Earth: The Territorial Bond in South China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gash, J. H. C. et al., eds. (1996) Amazonian Deforestation and Climate. New York: John Wiley. Hasler, Richard P. (1996) Agriculture, Foraging, and Wildlife Resource Use in Africa: Cultural and Political Dynamics in the Zambezi Valley. New York: Kegan Paul International. Henehan, Brian M., and Bruce L. Anderson (1994) Decision Making in Membership Organizations: A Study of Fourteen U.S. Cooperatives. Ithaca, NY: Department of Agricultural, Resource and Managerial Economics, New York State College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell University. Hoadley, Mason C, and Christer Gunnarsson, eds. (1996) The Village Concept in the Transformation of Rural Southeast Asia. Richmond, Surrey, UK: Curzon Press. (Studies in Asian Topics, no. 20). Humphrey, Caroline, and David Sneath, eds. (1996) Culture and Environment in Inner Asia. Cambridge, UK: White Horse Press. Jennings, Anne M. (1995) The Nubians of West Aswan: Village Women in the Midst of Change. Boulder, CO: L. Rienner. (Women and Change in the Developing World). Jing, Jun (1996) The Temple of Memories: History, Power, and Morality in a Chinese Village. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Joseph, Gilbert M., and Daniel Nugent, eds. (1994) Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kasmir, Sharryn (1996) The Myth of Mondragon: Cooperatives, Politics, and Working-Class Life in a Basque Town. Albany, NY: State University of New York. (SUNY Series in the Anthropology of Work). Kipnis, Andrew B. (1997) Producing Guanxi: Sentiment, Self, and Subculture in a North China Village. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Langworthy, Mark, and Timothy J. Finan (1997) Waiting for Rain: Agriculture and Ecological Imbalance in Cape Verde. Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner Publishers.

PAGE 12

Leach, Melissa, and Robin Mearns, eds. (1996) The Lie of the Land: Challenging Received Wisdom on the African Environment. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann in association with the International African Institute. Mas-Colell, Andreu, ed. (1996) Cooperation: Game-Theoretic Approaches. New York: Springer. (NATO ASI Series: Series F, Computer and Systems Sciences, no. 155). Morin, George Andre et al. (1996) Long-Term Historical Changes in the Forest Resource. New York: United Nations. (Geneva Timber and Forest Study Papers, no. 10). Ooms, Herman (1996) Tokugawa Village Practice: Class, Status, Power, Law. Berkeley: University of California Press. Padoch, Christine, Nancy Lee Peluso, and Cecilia Danks, eds. (1996) Borneo in Transition: People, Forests, Conservation, and Development. New York: Oxford University Press. Peters, Charles M. (1996) The Ecology and Management of Non-Timber Forest Resources. Washington, DC: World Bank. (World Bank Technical Paper, no. 322). Poffenberger, Mark, and Betsy McGean, eds. (1996) Village Voices, Forest Choices: Joint Forest Management in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Posey, Darrell A., and Graham Dutfield (1996) Beyond Intellectual Property: Toward Traditional Resource Rights for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities. Ottawa, Ontario: International Development Research Centre. Robb, Peter, Kaoru Sugihara, and Haruka Yanagisawa, eds. (1996) Local Agrarian Societies in Colonial India: Japanese Perspectives. Richmond, Surrey, UK: Curzon Press. (Collected Papers on South Asia, no. 11). Rozario, Santi (1992) Purity and Communal Boundaries: Women and Social Change in a Bangladeshi Village. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed. (Women in Asia Publication Series). Sachs, Carolyn (1996) Gendered Fields: Rural Women, Agriculture, and Environment. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. (Rural Studies Series of the Rural Sociological Society). Schofield, Norman, and Annette Milford, eds. (1996) Collective Decision-Making: Social Choice and Political Economy. Boston: Kluwer Academic. (Recent Economic Thought). Sidky, H. (1996) Irrigation and State Formation in Hunza: The Anthropology of a Hydraulic Kingdom. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

APRIL

Singerman, Diane, and Homa Hoodfar, eds. (1996) Development, Change, and Gender in Cairo: A View from the Household. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Smith, Richard Saumarez (1996) Rule by Records: Land Registration and Village Custom in Early British Punjab. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Stone, Glenn Davis (1996) Settlement Ecology: The Social and Spatial Organization of Kofyar Agriculture. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Swanson, Timothy M., ed. (1996) The Economics of Environmental Degradation: Tragedy for the Commons? Brookfield, VT: Edward Elgar. Swearingen, Will D., and Abdellatif Bencherifa, eds. (1996) The North African Environment at Risk. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Taylor, Bron Raymond (1995) "Visitors to the Commons: Approaching Thailand's 'Environmental' Struggles from a Western starting Point." In Ecological Resistance Movements: The Global emergence of Radical and Popular Environmentalism. B. R. Taylor, ed. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Taylor, J. Edward, and Irma Adelman (1996) Village Economies: The Design, Estimation, and Use of Villagewide Economic Models. New York: Cambridge University Press. Thrupp, Lori Ann (1996) New Partnerships for Sustainable Agriculture. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute. Upton, Martin (1996) The Economics of Tropical Farming Systems. New York: Cambridge University Press. (Wye Studies in Agricultural and Rural Development). Uyl, Marion den (1995) Invisible Barriers: Gender, Caste and Kinship in a Southern Indian Village. Utrecht: International Books. Weimer, David L. (1997) The Political Economy of Property Rights: Institutional Change and Credibility in the Reform of Centrally Planned Economies. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wunderlich, Gene, ed. (1995) Agricultural Landownership in Transitional Economies. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

1997

PAPERS

Aguero, Max, and Exequiel Gonzalez (1996) Managing Transboundary Stocks of Small Pelagic Fish: Problems and Options. Washington, DC: World Bank. (World Bank Discussion Papers, Fisheries Series, no. 329). Alaouze, Chris M., and Stephen P. Whelan (1996) Economic Efficiency and Property Rights Issues in the Management of Rural Water. Kensington, Australia: Dept. of Eocnomics, University of New South Wales. (School of Economics Discussion Paper, 96/6). Asenso-Okyere, W. Kwadwo, S. Y. Atsu, and Irene S. Obeng (1993) Communal Property Resources in Ghana: Policies and Prospects. Legon, Ghana: Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research, University of Ghana. (Discussion Paper, no. 27). Barnes, Jon I. (1995) The Value of Non-Agricultural Land Use in Some Namibian Communal Areas: A Data Base for Planning. Windhoek, Namibia: Directorate of Environmental Affairs, Ministry of Environment and Tourism, Namibia. (Research Discussion Paper no. 6). Caddy, J. F., ed. (1996) Resource and Environmental Issues Relevant to Mediterranean Fisheries Management. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. (General Fisheries Council for the Mediterranean, Studies and Reviews, no. 66). Cameron, Ewen A. (1996) Land for the People? The British Government and the Scottish Highlands, c. 1880-1925. East Linton: Tuckwell Press. (Scottish Historical Review Monographs Series no. 2). Carlsson, Lars (1996-97) "The Swedish Common Forests: A Common Property Resource in an Urban, Industrialized Society." In From the Field. Rural Development Forestry Network, ed. London: Overseas Development Institute. (Network Paper 20e). Centre for Economic Development and Administration (1971) Seminar on Institution Building and Development. Kathmandu: Centre for Economic Development and Administration, Tribhuvan University. (CEDA Study Series, Seminar Paper no.l). Dix, Anne (1996) CAMPFIRE, Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources: An Annotated Bibliography (1985-1996). Mount Pleasant, Harare, Zimbabwe: Centre for Applied Social Sciences, University of Zimbabwe.

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Dykstra, Dennis P., and Rudolf Heinrich (1996) FAO Model Code of Forest Harvesting Practice. Lanham, MD: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Gill, Gerard J. (1995) Major Natural Resource Management Concerns in South Asia. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. (Food, Agriculture, and the Environment Discussion Paper, no. 8). Grafton, R. Quentin, and Harry W. Nelson (1996) Fishers' Individual Salmon Harvesting Rights: An Option for Canada's Pacific Fisheries. Ottawa, Ontario: Dept. of Economics, University of Ottawa, Faculty of Social Sciences. (Dept. of Economics Working Papers, no. 9604E). Holden, Paul, and Mateen Thobani (1996) Tradable Water Rights: A Property Rights Approach to Resolving Water Shortages and Promoting Investment. Washington, DC: World Bank, Latin America and the Caribbean, Technical Department, Economic Adviser's Unit. (Policy Research Working Paper, no. 1627). Jones, Brian T. B. (1995) Wildlife Management, Utilization, and Tourism in Communal Areas: Benefits to Communities and Improved Resource Management. Windhoek, Namibia: Directorate of Environmental Affairs, Ministry of Environment and Tourism, Namibia. (Research Discussion Paper, no. 5). Scherr, Sara J., and Satya Yadav (1996) Land Degradation in the Developing World: Implications for Food, Agriculture, and the Environment to 2020. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. (Food, Agriculture and the Environment Discussion Paper, no. 14) Wang, Ching-Ming (1995) Grazing Management and Rehabilitation of Degraded Rangeland in Western Australia. Taipei, Taiwan: Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research. (Discussion Paper Series no. 9504).

ARTICLES

Acheson, James M., and James A. Wilson (1996) "Order out of Chaos: The Case for Parametric Fisheries Management." American Anthropologist 98(3):579-. Amacher, Gregory S., William F. Hyde, and Keshav R. Kanel (1996) "Household Fuelwood Demand and Supply in Nepal's Tarai and Mid-Hills: Choice between Cash Outlays and Labor Opportunity." World Development 24(11):1725-1736.

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Bebbington, Anthony (1996) "Organizations and Intensifications; Campesino Federations, Rural Livelihoods and Agricultural Technology in the Andes and Amazonia." World Development 24(7): 1161-1177. Bienenstock, Elisa Jayne, and Philip Bonacich (1997) "Network Exchange as a Cooperative Game." Rationality and Society 9(l):37-65. Blair, Harry W. (1996) "Democracy, Equity, and Common Property Resource Management in the Indian Subcontinent." Development and Change 27(3):475-499. Braden, J. B. (1995) "Changing Agricultural Property Rights for the 21st Century; Discussion." American Journal of Agricultural Economics 77(5):1204-1206. Brett, E. A. (1996) "The Participatory Principle in Development Projects: The Costs and Benefits of Cooperation." Public Administration and Development

Charny, D. (1996) "Illusions of a Spontaneous Order: Norms in Contractual Relationships." University of Pennsylvania Law Review 144(5):1841-1858. Chichilnisky, G. (1996) "The Economic Value of the Earth's Resources." Trends in Ecology and Evolution 11(3):135-14O. Dasgupta, Partha (1996) "The Economics of the Environment." Proceedings of the British Academy 90:165221. (Keynes Lecture in Economics). Dong, X. Y. (1996) "Two Tier Land Tenure System and Sustained Economic Growth in Post-1978 Rural China." World Development 24(5):915-928. Downs, George W., David M. Rocke, and P. N. Barsoon (1996) "Is the Good-News about Compliance Good-News about Cooperation." International Organization 50(3):379-. Duerden, Frank (1996) "Land Allocation in Comprehensive Land Claim Agreements: The Case of the Yukon Land claim." Applied Geography 16(4):279-288. Feeny, David, Susan Hanna, and Arthur F. McEvoy (1996) "Questioning the Assumptions of the 'Tragedy of the Commons' Model of Fisheries" Land Economics 72(2): 187205.

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Frohlich, Norman, and J. Oppenheimer (1996) "When is Universal Contribution Best for the Group: Characterizing Optimality in the Prisoners-Dilemma." Journal of Conflict Resolution 40(3):502-5l6. Getzler, J. (1996) "Theories of Property and Economic Development." Journal of Interdisciplinary History 26(4):639669. Ghirotti, M. (1995) "Farming Practices and Patterns in CoffeeGrowing Midlands of Sidama, Ethiopia." Rivista di Agricoltura Subtropicale e Tropicale 89(l):l-28. Glomm, Gerhard, and Roger D. Lagunoff (1995) "Specialization, Inequality, and the Social Stability of Economies with Collective Property Rights." Mathematical Social Sciences 30(3):245-26l. Hall, A. (1996) "Social Work or Working for Change: Action for Grassroots Sustainable Development in Amazonia." International Social Work 39(1):27-. Kerremans, B. (1996) "Do Institutions Make a Difference: Non-institutionalism, Neoinstitutionalism, and the Logic of Common Decision Making in the European Union." Governance; An International Journal of Policy and Administration 9(2):217-240. Kiesler, S., L. Sproull, and K. Waters (1996) "A Prisoner's Dilemma Experiment on Cooperation with People and Human-like Computers." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70(l):47-65. Lam, Wai Fung (1996) "Improving the Performance of Smallscale Irrigation Systems: The Effects of Technological Investments and Governance Structure on Irrigation Performance in Nepal." World Development 24(8):1301-1315. Lowndes, V. (1996) "Varieties of New Institutionalism; A Critical Appraisal." Public Administration 74(2):181-197.

Nkambwe, Musisi, and Wolter Arnberg (1996) "Monitoring Land Use Change in an African Tribal Village on the RuralUrban Fringe." Applied Geography 16(4):305-317. Norgaard, Richard B. (1996) "Rediscovering Reasonable Rationality in Institutional Analysis." European Journal of Political Research 29(l):31-57. Phillipson, J. (1996) "The Sustainable Development of UK Fisheries: Opportunities of Co-management." Sociologia Ruralis 36(2):201-. Rajaraman, I., O. P. Bohra, and V. S. Renganathan (1996) "Augmentation of Panchayat Resources." Economic and Political Weekly 31(18): 1071-1083. Rose, Carol M. (1996) "Property as the Keystone Right." Notre Dame Law Review 71(3):329-369. Scott, A., and G. Coustalin (1995) "The Evolution of Water Rights." Natural Resources Journal 35(4):821-979. Sen, S., and J. R. Nielsen (1996) "Fisheries Co-management: A Comparative Analysis." Marine Policy 20(5):405-4l8. Sened, Itai, and William H. Riker (1996) "Common Property and Private Property: The Case of Air Slots." Journal of Theoretical Politics 8(4):427-447. Snyder, Katherine A. (1996) "Agrarian Change and Land-use Strategies among Iraqw Farmers in Northern Tanzania." Human Ecology 24(3):315-340. Syme, G. J., and B. E. Nancarrow (1996) "Planning Attitudes, Lay Philosophies, and Water Allocation: A Preliminary Analysis and Research Agenda." Water Resources Research 32(6):1843-1850. Syropoulos, Constantinos, and Stergios Skaperdas (1996) "On the Effects of Insecure Property." Canadian Journal of Economics / Revue Canadienne d'Economique 26(2):135-158.

McCay, Bonnie J. (1996) "Netting, Robert McC. and Human Ecology: An Appreciation." Human Ecology 24(1): 125-135.

Thomas, David H. L. (1996) "Fisheries Tenure in an African Floodplain Village and the Implications for Management." Human Ecology 24(3):287-313.

Meinzen-Dick, Ruth, and M. Mendoza (1996) "Alternative Water Allocation Mechanisms: Indian and International Experiences." Economic and Political Weekly 31(13):A25-A30.

Weesie, J., and W. Raub (1996) "Private Ordering: A Comparative Institutional Analysis of Hostage Games." Journal of Mathematical Sociology 21(3):201-240.

Meyer, C. A. (1996) "NGOs and Environmental Public Goods: Institutional Alternatives to Property Rights." Development and Change 27(3):453-474.

NOTE: The editors wish to thank Charlotte Hess, Information Officer, IASCP, for her efforts compiling these references.

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PROPERTY

A LISTSERVE FOR THE DISCUSSION OF COMMONS ISSUES

RESOURCE

DIGEST

Centre for Management in Agriculture, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad announces

As the President of IASCP, I have the honour of introducing you to a new Listserv for discussion of commons issues. It is the brainchild of Bonnie McCay, Professor of Human Ecology at Rutgers University and the President-Elect of IASCP, and Doug Wilson, Postdoctoral Fellow, also at Rutgers. The intent of the Listserv is to continue the rich discussions many of us had at last June's commons conference at Berkeley. As IASCP, we are particularly interested in issues of global (rather than national or regional) concern, and in fostering the exchange of views across disciplines and resource types. The Listserv is an experiment in which I invite you to participate. It is an opportunity to exchange views and to contribute to a common pool! Discussion topics will emerge spontaneously as discussion proceeds. It is up to us to make the Listserv whatever we want it to be - interesting and fun as well. Bienvenue! Fikret Berkes Professor, University of Manitoba and President, IASCP After you have subscribed it would be interesting to begin the discussions with a short description of who you are, what commons-related issues you are working on, and what you would like to hear about from your colleagues around the world. HOW TO SUBSCRIBE To subscribe send message to [email protected] In the body of the message (not the subject line) type: subscribe commons. Those wishing to send mail to the subscribers of the list should send mail to [email protected]. IMPORTANT: to subscribe and unsubscribe send the commands "subscribe commons" or "unsubscribe commons" to [email protected], NOT [email protected]. A subscription request sent to [email protected] would simply go out to everyone in the list and wouldn't be acted upon as intended. A recent issue of FREE Perspectives, a free electronic journal, is devoted to Managing the Commons. The site is http://www.abic.org/free/FP/ FREE.perspectives.html PAGE

l6

THIRD SUMMER SCHOOL FOR COLLEGE TEACHERS ON

MANAGEMENT OF COMMON PROPERTY RESOURCES JUNE 4-13, 1997

A

n interdisciplinary course with special emphasis on Ecological Economics perspective is organized to equip young teachers in theory and practice of Common Property Resources. The course will also deal with special sectoral areas such as forestry, fishery, grazing lands, water, etc., apart from conceptual issues in transactional costs, political theory of institutions, organizational theory, etc.

WHO CAN APPLY College teachers with backgrounds in economics, sociology, political science, anthropology, agriculture, ecology, and related disciplines having strong interest in teaching and research in common properties with a post-graduate degree and some evidence of independent work. Preference will be given to teachers from colleges located in ecologically disadvantaged regions such as hill areas, drought prone areas, forest regions, flood prone areas, etc. International candidates are also welcome to apply. HOW TO APPLY The selected candidates will have to pay Rs. 2500 towards the cost of boarding, lodging and a set of teaching material. There is no course fee. Participants will bear their own travel expenses. Candidates may apply with a two page note on their plans to pursue research and teaching in this area, along with a) a case study of any local/indigenous institution for common property resource management, b) a copy of bio-data and, c) a list of publications. Send application to: Programme Officer, Centre for Management in Agriculture, Indian Institute of Management, Vastrapur, Ahmedabad, 380 015, Gujarat. Deadline April 15, 1997. Waiver of charges is possible for deserving candidates.

PRINTED ON RECYCLED PAPER

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THE WORLD BANK'S CPRNET The World Bank's Common Property Resource Management Network, abbreviated as "CPRNET," is a Bank-wide network for staff working on, or interested in, issues related to the management of common property resources (CPRs). CPRNET was established in early 1995 and currently has around 125 members.

BACKGROUND CPRNET is concerned with any resource management regime that requires collaborative action, as found in, for example, irrigation, watersheds, pastures and community forests. The aim of CPRNET is to bring wider recognition of the importance of the study of CPRs in the Bank's policy and operational work. A list of areas of interest includes the following: Agriculture, Agroforestry; Autonomy or Self-management Issues; Biodiversity; Collaborative Management; Community-based Development; Crop-livestock; Deforestation; Environment; Environmental Law; Equity; Ethnic minorities and the state; Fisheries; Food Security; Gender; Indigenous Peoples; Integrated Coastal Zone Management; Intellectual Property Rights; Irrigation; Land Degradation; Land Titling; Micro-environmental Issues; Natural Resource Management; NGOs; Open Access Resources; Overgrazing; Participation, Participatory Development; Poverty Alleviation; Poverty and Land Policies; Public Forests and Parks; Rangeland Management; Resettlement; Resource-centered R&D; River Basin Management; Social Assessment; Social Policy; Usergroups; Traditional / Local Knowledge; Water Resources Management and so forth.

SCOPE AND CONTENT CPRNET is designed to promote exchange of information on common property resource management through the CPRNET mailing list. Of particular importance is the emphasis given to such exchange of information between Bank staff and outside experts. The type of information to be circulated can be the following (but is not necessarily restricted to this): (1) Announcements of seminars, conferences, presentations, or meetings relevant to CPRs; (2) Relevant findings/recommendations reached at such meetings;

(3) Information available in periodicals and technical publications to which network members subscribe; (4) Pertinent information posted on relevant Internet mailing lists and the W W W ; (5) Interesting lessons of experience from particular countries, regions, sectors and projects; (6) Any other issues that may be of Bank-wide interest; and, (7) Cries for help or assistance in technical or managerial tasks.

SEMINAR SERIES CPRNET sponsors a lunch time Seminar Series, called "Common Property Resource Management and the World Bank" which invites mainly outside speakers to discuss their work on CPR issues. The topics covered range widely in terms of geographic location, type of property resource, type of intervention, and lessons learned. The speakers should be concerned with practical issues and applications. CPRNET would like to hear from CPR researchers who would be interested in participating in this seminar series. For more information contact the CPRNET Coordinator/Listowner (see below).

CPRNET MEMBERSHIP Requests to be added to, or be removed from, CPRNET should be directed at the Coordinator/Listowner (see below). CPRNET is open to IASCP members who are interested in contributing to developing the network on a voluntary basis. Requests to be added to the CPRNET mailing list should be accompanied by a brief presentation of background, institutional affiliation(s) and position, current research interest(s), current applied focus, as well as reason for wanting to become a member. Please include postal address, phone, fax and e-mail address. The Coordinator of CPRNET, as well as the owner of the CPRNET mailing list, is Lars T. Soeftestad. He can be contacted as follows: Postal address: The World Bank, 1818 H St. NW, Washington DC 20433, United States; Fax: + 1 202 522 1664; Phone: + 1 202 473 8263; E-mail address: [email protected].

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Call for Preliminary Registration and Panel Abstracts for

CROSSING

BOUNDARIES

The Seventh Common Property Conference of the INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF COMMON PROPERTY Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada 10-14 June 1998 Scholars and practitioners from all disciplines are invited to the 7th Annual IASCP conference in a spectacular setting in Vancouver, British Columbia, June 10-14, 1998. Participants from 50 countries attended the 6th IASCP conference in 1996. We encourage theoretical and empirical explorations of all aspects of common property regimes or institutions. Particularly well received are panels which cross boundaries between disciplines, between practice and theory, between resource types, between cultures, or between jurisdictions. PANELS

Participants are encouraged to submit early proposals for panels with a one paragraph panel abstract and the approximate titles of a maximum of four papers and the names and affiliations of their presenters. Each panel should have at least one paper or discussant who brings out the practical significance or theoretical importance of the panel. A discussant may replace a fourth paper in a panel. Panel organizers who wish to solicit papers on a particular topic may propose a panel abstract with no papers attached. The conference organizers will put such proposals on the conference web page (unless requested not to) and encourage creative combinations of proposed papers and/or panels. PAPERS A N D POSTERS

Abstracts for individual papers without panels should be submitted early in order to create opportunities for good combinations into panels. Final abstracts for papers and panels are due September 30, 1997. Abstracts must be 800-1000 words to help the program committee select papers. Shorter abstracts and those which do not include substantive material will not be accepted. Copies of papers will be required two months before the conference, and will be circulated to all participants in a single panel. Posters should be more oriented toward visual presentation; poster abstracts should be 300-400 words, and are subject to the same scheduling as the papers.

PRIZES

Prizes will be awarded for the best papers in several categories: best student papers, most interdisciplinary paper, best contribution to theory, best poster, etc. THE PRELIMINARY REGISTRATION FORM (SEE NEXT PAGE) AND PANEL, PAPER, OR POSTER ABSTRACTS SHOULD BE FAXED, MAILED, OR E-MAILED TO: Dr. Evelyn Pinkerton School of Resource and Environmental Management, Simon Fraser University Burnaby, British Columbia V5A 1S6, Canada Fax: 604/291-4968, e-mail: [email protected] PLEASE SUBMIT ELECTRONICALLY IF POSSIBLE, USING E-MAIL OR OUR WEBPAGE REGISTRATION FORM AT http://www.sfu.ca/~iascp98/ ACCOMMODATION, MEALS, TRANSPORTATION

Accommodation will be available in the dormitories at the conference site (University of British Columbia) for Canadian $36/night (single occupancy with bathroom shared among 6) or $65 for private bath and $110 for 1 bedroom suite/double occupancy. Three continental breakfasts and two light lunches will be covered by registration, or breakfast, lunch, and dinner can be obtained in the nearby cafeteria for Can $25/day. (Exchange rates will fluctuate). Hotels in downtown Vancouver are 15 minutes away by taxi or 30 minutes by public transportation. Vancouver is easily accessible by air, train, or bus. By road it is two and a half hours north of Seattle. The Vancouver International Airport is serviced by most major airlines, including Air China, Air France, Air India, Air New Zealand, British Airways, Cathy Pacific, El Al, Garuda Indonesia, Japan Airlines, Lan Chile, Lufthansa, Mexicana, Qantas, Royal Air Maroc, Royal Airlines, Scandinavian Airlines, Singapore Airlines, Suriman Airways, Thai Airways, Varig, and Vasp.

REGISTRATION

Please submit a preliminary registration form by September 30, 1997. This will ensure that organizers send you a registration form in late December 1 997. Pre-registration with no late fee is permitted through January 10, 1998. The registration fee will not exceed US $150. Lower fees for students will be available. Limited funds for assisting participation by citizens of countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America will be available on a competitive basis.

SPONSORED BY SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY INFORMATION ABOUT THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF COMMON PROPERTY IS AVAILABLE ON THE WEB SITE:

http://www.indiana.edu/~iascp/index.html PAGE

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CROSSING BOUNDARIES Preliminary Registration Form for the 1998 IASCP Conference

Name: _ Address:

Office Phone:

Home Phone:_

Fax:

E-mail:

Arrival date:

Departure date:

Intend to present a paper:

Yes D

No D

Yes •

No D

Yes D

No D

Title (approximate):

Intend to present a poster: Title:

Intend to organize a panel: Title:

DEADLINE FOR PANEL AND PAPER ABSTRACTS: SEPTEMBER 30, 1997 Panel abstract (200 words maximum): Paper abstract (800-1,000 words) Poster abstract (300-400 words) THIS FORM AND PANEL, PAPER, OR POSTER ABSTRACTS SHOULD BE FAXED, MAILED, OR E-MAILED TO: Dr. Evelyn Pinkerton Associate Professor School of Resource and Environmental Management, Simon Fraser University Burnaby, British Columbia V5A 1S6, Canada Fax: 604/291-4968, e-mail: [email protected] PLEASE SUBMIT ELECTRONICALLY IF POSSIBLE, USING E-MAIL OR OUR WEBPAGE REGISTRATION FORM AT http://www.sfu.ca/~iascp98/ PAGE

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