Devolution and Community-based Natural Resource Management: Creating Space for Local People to Participate

Introduction The last two decades have witnessed a paradigm shift in conservation and natural resource management (NRM) away from costly state-centred control towards approaches in which local people play a much more active role. These reforms purportedly aim to increase resource user participation in NRM decisions and benefits by restructuring the power relations between central state and communities through the transfer of management authority to local-level organisations. Yet, the reality rarely reflects this rhetoric. This paper examines the extent to which devolution has transferred control over NRM decision-making to local people, created the space to accommodate local interests and livelihood needs, and empowered resource users to benefit from and influence the outcomes of these new policies. In short, we ask whether devolution policies have been favourable for local people. The paper draws on the findings of two recent studies of devolution and NRM in three Asian countries (Contreras et al. forthcoming) and eight southern African countries (Shackleton and Campbell, 2001) (Box 1). The paper recognises that the state has a legitimate role in devolved NRM (Box 2), but questions whether in practice a balance has been achieved between local and ‘wider’ interests and objectives. Too often the notion of conservation as a ‘public interest’ area, or the need to achieve national economic development goals have been manipulated to serve the interests of NR departments and to legitimise their actions, usually to the detriment of local livelihood systems and the real choices available to people. This paper argues that ‘scientific management’ is often used to justify continued central control over valuable resources, when it is really about controlling profitable opportunities, often for individuals who are not entitled to them. It has also ensured a dominant role for officials in designing and approving management plans, which are often unnecessarily complex and take an unjustifiably wide interpretation of the ‘greater social good’ to the detriment of the fundamental rights of local people. Evidence indicates how starkly the rhetoric of devolution objectives and practice have diverged, and how doggedly the state has continued to direct and dominate local NRM.