Changing Space and Status at Community Levels in Himalayas

This paper deals with the imperatives of nature society interaction in Himalayas seen through CPR lens. It specifically looks at the process and factors that characterize the dynamics of the above interactions, with particular reference to the changing status and governance of CPRs at community levels. The paper puts together the synthesis of observations and inferences of different studies by ICIMOD and others in mountain regions, particularly in different parts of Nepal, India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, China and Pakistan. In fact rural CPRs (providing sustenance supplies and services) as an important component of community’s natural resource base, manifest the institutional arrangements evolved by the communities to facilitate their adaptations to nature. The above process can be more clearly illustrated with reference to specific characteristics of mountain areas, called mountain specificities, such as high degrees of inaccessibility (forcing people’s crucial dependence on local resources for sustenance and hence need for their protection), fragility (favouring conservation focused, diversified and extensive type of land use practices promoting collective stakes in CPRs), marginality both physical and socio-political (promoting social cohesion for collective self help and risk sharing), diversity (making CPR as a key component of community’s diversified resource use systems). This may be added that the mountain circumstances and people’s traditional adaptations alluded to above, reflected the primacy of supply side factors in land resource allocation and usage including the provision of CPRs. However, overtime the situation of CPRs, in terms of their extent and status, governance and management as well as contributions to community sustenance has changed with the process of socio-economic and administrative as well as physical and infrastructural changes in mountain areas. These changes have made the management and usage (over-exploitation) of CPRs highly demand driven, ignoring the imperatives of mountain specificities. The major agencies contributing to this change process focused by the paper are the state, market forces, rapidly differentiated rural communities and of late the spread of economic globalization. Following the percept that problems also carry seeds of their solutions, the paper attempts to indicate potential lead lines for searching options for rehabilitation of CPRs, based on closer understanding of the factors contributing to decline of CPRs. __________________ 1) Paper for presentation at the 11 Biennial Conference of IASCP, in Bali, 19-23 June, 2006.