The Commons in Transition

The paper analyses the institutional dynamics surrounding common-pool resources in postsocialist Central and Eastern Europe. It is conceived in close conjunction with the case studies reported in the four preceding papers in this series. The purpose of this paper is to frame the individual case inquiries, compare the findings from the four plus two additional case studies, and relate those to broader agrarian and environmental changes in Central and Eastern Europe. The comparative assessment suggests that resource governance has shifted from the previously dominant legal and administrative state hierarchies towards markets. In addition, state power has moved from central governments towards local authorities. The waning and decentralisation of state power has caused the emergence of significant gaps between property legislation and rights-in-practice, which have been particularly stark in weak states. The discrepancy between legal texts and rights-in-practice leads to the exclusion of public and collective interests in favour of private interests in CPR management. It finds its environmental expression in the declining use of water control systems, widespread destruction of water infrastructure, and unfettered conversion of agricultural land for urban sprawl. Thus, the findings attest to the central role of distributive issues in postsocialist privatisation and suggest an additional dimension of distributive conflict: different rights and obligations associated with resources. They also suggest the need for postsocialist governments to be actively involved in the management of common-pool resources for the protection of public and collective interests.Industrial Organization,

The commons in transition

"The paper analyses the institutional dynamics surrounding common-pool resources in post socialist Central and Eastern Europe. It is conceived in close conjunction with the case studies reported in the four preceding papers in this series. The purpose of this paper is to frame the individual case inquiries, compare the findings from the four plus two additional case studies, and relate those to broader agrarian and environmental changes in Central and Eastern Europe. The comparative assessment suggests that resource governance has shifted from the previously dominant legal and administrative state hierarchies towards markets. In addition, state power has moved from central governments towards local authorities. The waning and decentralization of state power has caused the emergence of significant gaps between property legislation and rights-in-practice, which have been particularly stark in weak states. The discrepancy between legal texts and rights-in-practice leads to the exclusion of public and collective interests in favor of private interests in CPR management. It finds its environmental expression in the declining use of water control systems, widespread destruction of water infrastructure, and unfettered conversion of agricultural land for urban sprawl. Thus, the findings attest to the central role of distributive issues in post socialist privatization and suggest an additional dimension of distributive conflict: different rights and obligations associated with resources. They also suggest the need for post socialist governments to be actively involved in the management of common-pool resources for the protection of public and collective interests." (author's abstract)Der vorliegende Beitrag analysiert die institutionelle Dynamik in Zusammenhang mit den 'common-pool resources' in den postsozialistischen Ländern Mittel- und Osteuropas. Der Beitrag steht in engem Zusammenhang mit den Fallstudien, die in den vorhergegangenen Papieren in dieser Reihe vorgestellt wurden. Der Zweck dieser Arbeit ist es, einen Rahmen für die einzelnen Untersuchungen zu bieten, die Ergebnisse der Fallstudien zu vergleichen und diese auf die landwirtschaftlichen und klimatischen Veränderungen in Zentral- und Osteuropa zu beziehen. Die vergleichende Einschätzung zeigt, dass 'resource government' sich von den vorher dominierenden legalen und administrativen staatlichen Hierarchien in Richtung zu den Märkten verschoben hat. Zusätzlich ist die staatliche Macht von der Zentralverwaltung auf die lokalen Behörden übergegangen. Das Abnehmen und die Dezentralisierung der staatlichen Macht hat das Aufkommen bedeutender Lücken zwischen Eigentumsgesetzgebung und der Rechtspraxis verursacht, die in den schwachen Staaten besonders groß sind. Die Diskrepanz zwischen den Rechtsgrundlagen und der Rechtspraxis führt zu dem Ausschluss der allgemeinen und kollektiven Interessen zugunsten der privaten Interessen im Bereich des 'common pool resource'-Management. Seinen Ausdruck findet dies etwa im sinkenden Gebrauch von Wasserkontrollsystemen, in der weitverbreiteten Zerstörung der Wasserinfrastruktur und in der ungehinderten Umwandlung des Ackerlandes für die Ausbreitung der Städte. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, wie notwendig es für die postsozialistischen Regierungen ist, sich aktiv in das Management der 'common pool resources' einzumischen, um so einen Beitrag zum Schutz öffentlicher und kollektiver Interessen zu leisten. (ICDÜbers

Institutional options for the protection of open space: evidence from Poland

"This paper seeks to contribute to the development of institutional options for the management of public goods in Central and Eastern Europe. It assesses the potential of different governance structures, including administrative hierarchies, market approaches, and efforts at local non-market co-ordination. The paper examines the management of public goods in Central and Eastern Europe through a study of open space management and urban sprawl in a semi-urban county near Warsaw, Poland. The protection of open space poses significant challenges to semi-urban land management, as its benefits cannot be captured by individual entities and accrue as much to urban residents as to local people. The concrete institutional options investigated comprehend the use of land registers for monitoring land conversion, establishment of land trusts in part financed by a development gains tax, and technical and organisational support for local environmental organisations. The evaluation of options builds on an analysis of causes underlying rapid land conversion in the past decade. The causal analysis demonstrates that privatisation and decentralisation have evoked the radical changes in land use. The demand for housing land motivated farmers to sell semi-urban land, as the state could not enforce its legal oversight over land use. Land conversion was driven by local alliances of farmers eager to "cash in" on their newly acquired rights of alienation, a broader rural society primarily interested in economic development, and local authorities lured by increasing tax revenues." [author's abstract

REDD+ on the rocks? Conflict over forest and politics of justice in Vietnam

In Vietnam, villagers involved in a REDD+ (reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) pilot protect areas with rocks which have barely a tree on them. The apparent paradox indicates how actual practices differ from general ideas about REDD+ due to ongoing conflict over forest, and how contestations over the meaning of justice are a core element in negotiations over REDD+. We explore these politics of justice by examining how the actors involved in the REDD+ pilot negotiate the particular subjects, dimensions, and authority of justice considered relevant, and show how politics of justice are implicit to practical decisions in project implementation. Contestations over the meaning of justice are an important element in the practices and processes constituting REDD+ at global, national and local levels, challenging uniform definitions of forest justice and how forests ought to be managed

Land system science and sustainable development of the earth system: A global land project perspective

Land systems are the result of human interactions with the natural environment. Understanding the drivers, state, trends and impacts of different land systems on social and natural processes helps to reveal how changes in the land system affect the functioning of the socio-ecological system as a whole and the tradeoff these changes may represent. The Global Land Project has led advances by synthesizing land systems research across different scales and providing concepts to further understand the feedbacks between social-and environmental systems, between urban and rural environments and between distant world regions. Land system science has moved from a focus on observation of change and understanding the drivers of these changes to a focus on using this understanding to design sustainable transformations through stakeholder engagement and through the concept of land governance. As land use can be seen as the largest geo-engineering project in which mankind has engaged, land system science can act as a platform for integration of insights from different disciplines and for translation of knowledge into action

Property rights regimes and natural resources: A conceptual analysis revisited

More than two decades ago, Schlager and Ostrom (1992) developed ‘a conceptual schema for arraying property-rights regimes that distinguishes among diverse bundles of rights’. The conceptual framework has profoundly influenced research on natural resource governance, common property, and community resource management. However, currently natural resource governance has changed dramatically, challenging the applicability of the conceptual schema. There are now many more social actors involved in resource management than the local communities at the focus of original analysis. Additionally, resource management increasingly provides access to various kinds of benefits from outside the immediate context, including indirect benefits such as payments for environmental services and results-based payments for REDD+. These changes demand addition of new property rights to the original framework. Those changes of governance process demand addition of property right to original framework. This paper updates the conceptual schema in reaction to changes in natural resource governance, proposing three specific modifications on the focus of use rights, control rights and authoritative rights to come up with a framework that distinguishes eight types of property rights. We apply the framework to three purposefully selected governance interventions in China and Laos that include the provision of indirect benefits in addition to the direct benefits derived by local people from natural resources. The empirical application shows how contemporary governance changes may not lead to local people’s outright dispossession, since they continue to possess direct use rights to natural resources. However, local people may be excluded from control and authoritative rights, which are exercised exclusively by state agencies and international actors. The latter make available indirect benefits to local people, which may or may not translate into use rights in the sense of policy-based entitlements. The empirical insights suggest the possibility of a wider trend of ‘compensated exclusions’ in natural resource governance

Green revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa: Implications of imposed innovation for the wellbeing of rural smallholders

Green Revolution policies are again being pursued to drive agricultural growth and reduce poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. However conditions have changed since the well-documented successes of the 1960s and 1970s benefited smallholders in southern Asia and beyond. We argue that under contemporary constraints the mechanisms for achieving improvements in the lives of smallholder farmers through such policies are unclear and that both policy rationale and means of governing agricultural innovation are crucial for pro-poor impacts. To critically analyze Rwanda’s Green Revolution policies and impacts from a local perspective, a mixed methods, multidimensional wellbeing approach is applied in rural areas in mountainous western Rwanda. Here Malthusian policy framing has been used to justify imposed rather than ‘‘induced innovation”. The policies involve a substantial transformation for rural farmers from a traditional polyculture system supporting subsistence and local trade to the adoption of modern seed varieties, inputs, and credit in order to specialize in marketable crops and achieve increased production and income. Although policies have been deemed successful in raising yields and conventionally measured poverty rates have fallen over the same period, such trends were found to be quite incongruous with local experiences. Disaggregated results reveal that only a relatively wealthy minority were able to adhere to the enforced modernization and policies appear to be exacerbating landlessness and inequality for poorer rural inhabitants. Negative impacts were evident for the majority of households as subsistence practices were disrupted, poverty exacerbated, local systems of knowledge, trade, and labor were impaired, and land tenure security and autonomy were curtailed. In order to mitigate the effects we recommend that inventive pro-poor forms of tenure and cooperation (none of which preclude improvements to input availability, market linkages, and infrastructure) may provide positive outcomes for rural people, and importantly in Rwanda, for those who have become landless in recent years. We conclude that policies promoting a Green Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa should not all be considered to be pro-poor or even to be of a similar type, but rather should be the subject of rigorous impact assessment. Such assessment should be based not only on consistent, objective indicators but pay attention to localized impacts on land tenure, agricultural practices, and the wellbeing of socially differentiated people

Carbon forestry in West Africa: The politics of models, measures and verification processes

Pre-print.In a context of neo-liberal environmental governance, imperatives for global climate change mitigation are motivating a new round of policy initiatives and projects aimed at carbon forestry: conserving and enhancing forest carbon stocks, and trading these values in emerging carbon markets. In this context modelling and measurement, always significant in framing and justifying forest policy initiatives, are of renewed importance, with a growing array of protocols focused on counting and accounting for forest carbon as a commodity. This article draws on perspectives from science and technology studies and environmental discourse analysis to explore how these modelling and measurement processes are being co-constructed with forest carbon policies and political economies, and applied in project design in local settings. Document analysis and key informant interviews are used to track and illustrate these processes in a pair of case studies of forest carbon projects in Sierra Leone and Ghana. These are chosen to highlight different project types – focused respectively on forest reserve and farm-forestry – in settings with multi-layered histories of people-forest relations, landscape change and prior project intervention. The analysis shows how longer established framings and assessments of deforestation are being re-invoked and re-worked amidst current carbon concerns. We demonstrate that measurement processes are not just technical but social and political, carrying and thus cementing particular views of landscape and social relations that in turn make likely particular kinds of intervention pathway, with fortress style conservation or plantations becoming the dominant approach. In the process, other possibilities – including alternative pathways that might treat and value carbon as part of complex, lived-in landscapes, or respond more adaptively to less equilibrial people–forest relations, are occluded.ESR

Forest Voices: Competing Narratives over REDD+

The Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (known collectively as REDD+) initiative has emerged as a means through which individuals, projects and communities in developing countries can be financially rewarded for reducing emissions from deforestation, forest degradation and enhancement of carbon stock. In this article, we analyse the various framings and actor coalitions around REDD+ and institutional dynamics within the conceptualisation and development of REDD+. We conclude with a reflection on the key aspects for the political economy of REDD+ under a post‐Kyoto agreement, arguing that increased institutional recognition and support to less powerful forest voices is needed if equity rights as social justice are to be considered as key aspects of the future global climate change regime

From food to pest: Conversion factors determine switches between ecosystem services and disservices

Ecosystem research focuses on goods and services, thereby ascribing beneficial values to the ecosystems. Depending on the context, however, outputs from ecosystems can be both positive and negative. We examined how provisioning services of wild animals and plants can switch between being services and disservices. We studied agricultural communities in Laos to illustrate when and why these switches take place. Government restrictions on land use combined with economic and cultural changes have created perceptions of rodents and plants as problem species in some communities. In other communities that are maintaining shifting cultivation practices, the very same taxa were perceived as beneficial. We propose conversion factors that in a given context can determine where an individual taxon is located along a spectrum from ecosystem service to disservice, when, and for whom. We argue that the omission of disservices in ecosystem service accounts may lead governments to direct investments at inappropriate targets