Comanagement of natural resources: Local learning for poverty reduction

In the past two decades we have seen dramatic developments in the understanding of equitable and sustainable natural resource management. These have been informed and backed by innovation and research, not least that supported by IDRC, Canada's International Development Research Centre. The old ideas of command and control, of blaming poor people for mismanagement of their resources, have been overturned. As this book shows, the results can be truly remarkable. Researchers and other outsiders change their mindsets, behaviours, attitudes, and ideas about their roles. They become convenors, facilitators, negotiators, and supporters. Local people become the main actors, learners, managers, and owners of the process of change. The goals of equity for people who live at the margins, and of sustainable management, are approached and achieved by starting not with natural resources but with people, enabling them to empower themselves, and by coevolving systems of comanagement. The evidence that such approaches work stands out from the cases reported in this book. The practical lessons are empirically based. These are not the fond imaginings of idealists but the hard findings of experience. And the outcomes, lessons, and practical implications are clearly and succinctly summarized. The findings raise a challenge that must not be underestimated. They upend the beliefs and reverse the reflexes of many surviving and powerful professionals. The danger is that these insights will be rejected by a rearguard of some who are well-intentioned but out of touch and out of date. For they contradict the seductive lure of earlier approaches, which were simpler, more standard, and top-down. Control-oriented custodial management was simple and direct, and proved a local lose?lose solution. In contrast, the comanagement analyzed here is complex, evolutionary, and win?win for local people, with losers the would-be extractive exploiters from outside. Comanagement combines policy reforms, new institutions for local resource tenure and management, secure and equitable access to resources, and technological innovation to increase productivity. Comanagement works because it puts people at the centre, is emergent, is locally adapted and owned. It has no one blueprint but differs in each case and context, manifesting a creative diversity fitting local conditions.