Community-Driven Development and Natural Resource Management

1. Community-Driven Development and Natural Resource Management IFAD Workshop on Community-Driven Development Casa San Bernardo, Rome : 4-5 June, 2004

2. Background • Experience in Community-Based Natural Resource Management • Philippines – coastal fisheries management • Vanuatu and Fiji – fisheries and coral reef management • Bangladesh - floodplain fisheries management • Indonesia – floodplain fisheries management • India – research on poverty in coastal areas

3. Conditions for “successful” community-based natural resource management • “Homogeneous” communities – common objectives, recognised common interests, social cohesion • Benefits exceed costs • Clearly defined boundaries to resources to be managed • Limited uses and users • Decentralised decision-making • “Simple” administrative structures • “Friendly” – or at least neutral - power structures • An “enabling” environment - institutional, political, social, cultural and economic

4. The “Enabling” Environment • Devolution of power – choice, including choice about natural resource priorities • Legal rights to natural resources • Devolution of resources (money) • Institutionalisation / mainstreaming of participatory approaches – willingness to “hand over the stick” • Flexibility – time frames, funding mechanisms • Long-term engagement • Leadership -“champions” to lead the process

5. Issues • Natural resource management is rarely a priority of the poor • Is there any such thing as a “neutral” or “friendly” power structure • The minute we intervene, power structures change • Structures/institutions invite “elite capture” – they are instruments of power • The poor are “attracted” to make use of diverse natural resource “niches” with poorly defined use-rights • Better definition invites control – control attracts those able to exert it

6. Issues • The importance of knowing: • what do we mean by “poor” ? (if the focus is poverty alleviation) • understanding who different actors are – there is no substitute for detailed stakeholder analysis down to the micro-level • understanding what the incentives of different actors are – what benefits will be generated and for whom?

7. Questions • Who sets the natural resource management “agenda” • How well do we know what a “community” really is? • If the “community” drives development, what, or who, drives the community? • Although experience indicates “best practice” in CBNRM, it is consistently ignored – why? (disbursement and activity-based monitoring & evaluation, messy, too slow) • Do “organisations” and “institutions” benefit the poor or increase their exclusion?