Rights to Nature by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2013-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

The Necessity of Diverse Scales

Locally devised systems of property rights and rules are anchored in detailed time and place information, cultural norms, and the self-interest of the resource users. External authorities would be hard-pressed to devise such institutions because they lack the information and the understanding to devise such institutions, and because they lack the commitment to ensuring their viability and longevity. While the livelihoods of resource users depend upon such institutions, the livelihoods of external bureaucrats depend on numerous other considerations. Empirical evidence is beginning to mount that locally devised governance systems perform better in regulating small- to moderate-sized resources than systems devised by an external authority. In a recent study of more than 100 irrigation systems in Nepal, Lam (1994) found that farmer-organized irrigation systems tended to generate higher agricultural yields and more equitable outcomes than government-organized systems serving similar terrain (see also Ostrom et al. 1994b). Lansing and Kremer (1993) and Lansing (1991) reach much the same conclusion concerning Bali irrigation systems.

Just as individuals can find themselves in commons dilemmas if they fail to coordinate their use of shared resources, so too can local-level organizations, such as fishing villages whose citizens harvest from shared fish stocks, or irrigation organizations whose members use a common irrigation system. While a given community of resource users may have devised property rights and rules that reduce negative externalities among its members, the collective actions that they take, or fail to take, may have adverse consequences for adjoining communities of resource users. For instance, even though fishing villages may carefully govern the access and harvesting activities of their own grounds, all the villages together may be taking too many fish, thereby depleting the fish stock. Or, an irrigation organization situated at the head end of a canal may take as much water as its members want, leaving the irrigation organizations situated lower on the canal facing severe water shortages. Or, a common method of discouraging damaging insects is to provide adequate amounts of fallow times and areas to deprive them of food sources. If farmers in adjoining irrigation systems fail to coordinate their fallow times, they may unleash a critical pest population.19 In other words, local-level institutions are limited in their ability to address spillover effects individually.

Problems that extend beyond the boundaries of a local-level organization are extremely difficult to address by that organization. A response in the policy literature to the limits of local-level organizations and to the externalities they may create is to devise a single, comprehensive organization that can integrate and rationalize diverse, competing uses of an entire resource, particularly if the resource is located within the boundaries of a single nation. (See Dycus 1984; Dzurik 1990; Gottlieb and FitzSimmons 1991; Mallery 1983; and National Groundwater Policy Forum 1986, for managing watersheds and groundwater basins.) As discussed above, however, such a centralized management regime is likely to disrupt and destroy locally designed governance structures and is unlikely to produce the integration or rationalization so desired (Nakamura and Born 1993; Deyle 1995; Schlager 1995).

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