Looking back at the application of your ideas to conservation practice in contexts across the world- do you feel the challenges your research points to have been sufficiently addressed? Are there any success stories that you are particularly happy with? And what major gaps do you perceive?
Since the research that many colleagues have engaged in related to common-pool resources and common property regimes was looked upon by many scholars and public officials, as being a little unusual and out of the mainstream, I do not think our work has received as much attention as it could.
Now with the recent recognition by the Nobel award, there is much more attention being paid to it. I think this may be very healthy. However, there is the fear that people grab hold of simple ideas, rather than the nested complex ideas of our findings. Thank goodness, ecologists long ago recognized there was no ideal ecology, and that different ecological systems were composed of a variety of living things located in an environment related to soil type, elevation, rainfall patterns, etc., that affect that pattern over time. Obviously, when humans start to interact, patterns established over long times are disrupted. We understand the capacity of humans to disrupt. What we need is further understanding of, when and how, groups of individuals and their governments can enhance ecological systems, rather than destroy. Given the variety in the ecological system, we must assume that a variety of arrangements for governance and management is also essential, rather than one ideal form that is proposed to work everywhere.
Ruth Meinzen-Dick, who heads the CGIAR Network on Collective Action and Property Rights (CAPRi), has been one colleague, who is active in both the world of policy and the world of academia. A considerable amount of work of this network is highly consistent with our research and is outstanding.
Your research points to the dangers of ‘blueprint thinking’, and under-lines that there are no panaceas for forest management that can be applied across all contexts. Yet, governments and large NGOs continue to search for simple design principles that they can apply to conservation and forest management across multiple locations. Given the hundreds of thousands of forests and communities and social-ecological-institutional contexts in the world, how would you suggest that large organizations such as national and state governments and international NGOs deal with this challenge of balancing complexity against confusion?
Addressing complexity, in a way that we can eventually harness complexity in the field, is the biggest challenge that academics and policy-makers jointly face. We need to be thinking more like architects or doctors. A good architect tries to determine the needs that a client indicates are very important in a particular environment. So knowledge of the underlying structure for where a building will occur is essential, or the building will collapse soon after construction. An architect also tries to determine whether having a building with multiple floors is better for the users, given their site, than having a building that is spread out, and uses up all the green area. There are a large number of questions that architects are trained to ask about the users and the condition of the site, before they start designing any new building. Yes, they can sometimes use some aspects of an earlier design a second time, but no architect gains a good reputation, if all they do is redraw on the same old design, time after time after time. That seems to be what policymakers and NGOs are calling for, when it comes to the delicate task of designing institutions.
Do you think that there is a need for a fresh look at the relative role and the influence of government-protected areas vis-a-vis local institutions for forest management? If so, who would your main suggestions be?
Yes, I think there is a very substantial need for rethinking. The initial thought was that you cleared all the people out of a protected area, and then it would be “protected.” There are multiple problems with this. One, you shift people who have protected an area for a very long time, out of it. They have to resettle at great cost, and frequently, there are substantial problems of unemployment, starvation, and human suffering. The problem is not clearing everybody out, but rather finding ways of having complementary activities inside a protected area that helps protect it, so that both the humans and the ecological area can sustain themselves over the long run. In our extensive research on forests, we find that protected areas, compared to all other kinds of forests, do not show any evidence of greater forest intensity. We also find that when users monitor the conditions of a forest—regardless of the formal property rights and ownership—the forest shows signs of sustainability, if not regeneration, over time.
Thus, we need to rethink how protected areas can involve indigenous people living in or nearby. The planning efforts should involve them in activities that give them income and do not just push them aside, while simultaneously enhancing the protected area.
Based on your experiences with forest communities across the world-what do you see as the major challenges for communities to sustain collective action, cooperation and trust, both in the short term and over longer durations?
The major challenge in all groups of humans attempting to do common activities—including work teams in large private corporations—is to develop ways of meeting regularly, without making the transaction costs of such meetings unbearable. They need to get plans of action that are do-able. If relatively simple plans can be developed at the beginning of a process, then over time, people learn how to work together and what their relative skills are, and how to develop even better plans for the long run. People learn to trust one another when they all agree to undertake X activities, and they find that the others are keeping to that promise.
The biggest challenge that many communities face, is that they were evicted from local resources multiple years ago, and they find that public officials are not trustworthy, take bribes easily and do not know one another very well. Once corruption starts to become an everyday occurrence, people begin to assume that the way of getting anything accomplished is to pay for it, rather than organize a group and try to tackle that on their own. Building trust, after an era in which substantial mistrust has grown, is a very difficult problem. The challenge has to be recognized. Naively, some governments and NGOs call for participatory meetings of 1-2 hours, which do not really accomplish much, except enabling an agency to mark or that a meeting was held.
