Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-grxwn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-13T14:24:18.436Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

From hope to crisis and back again? A critical history of the global CBNRM narrative

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 June 2010

WOLFRAM DRESSLER ,
BRAM BÜSCHER ,
MICHAEL SCHOON ,
DAN BROCKINGTON ,
TANYA HAYES ,
CHRISTIAN A. KULL ,
JAMES MCCARTHY  and
KRISHNA SHRESTHA
WOLFRAM DRESSLER*
Affiliation:
School of Social Sciences, University of Queensland, Australia
BRAM BÜSCHER
Affiliation:
Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands Department of Geography, Environmental Management & Energy Studies, University of Johannesburg, South Africa
MICHAEL SCHOON
Affiliation:
Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity, Arizona State University, USA
DAN BROCKINGTON
Affiliation:
Institute for Development Management and Policy, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
TANYA HAYES
Affiliation:
Institute for Public Service, Seattle University, Seattle, WA, USA
CHRISTIAN A. KULL
Affiliation:
School of Geography and Environmental Science, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
JAMES MCCARTHY
Affiliation:
Department of Geography, Pennsylvania State University, USA
KRISHNA SHRESTHA
Affiliation:
Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
*
*Correspondence: Dr Wolfram Dressler e-mail: w.dressler@uq.edu.au
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Summary

Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) has been on the ascendancy for several decades and plays a leading role in conservation strategies worldwide. Arriving out of a desire to rectify the human costs associated with coercive conservation, CBNRM sought to return the stewardship of biodiversity and natural resources to local communities through participation, empowerment and decentralization. Today, however, scholars and practitioners suggest that CBNRM is experiencing a crisis of identity and purpose, with even the most positive examples experiencing only fleeting success due to major deficiencies. Six case studies from around the world offer a history of how and why the global CBNRM narrative has unfolded over time and space. While CBNRM emerged with promise and hope, it often ended in less than ideal outcomes when institutionalized and reconfigured in design and practice. Nevertheless, despite the current crisis, there is scope for refocusing on the original ideals of CBNRM: ensuring social justice, material well-being and environmental integrity.

Keywords

biodiversity conservationCBNRMneoliberalismsocial justice
Type
THEMATIC SECTION: Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM): designing the next generation (Part 1)
Information
Environmental Conservation , Volume 37 , Issue 1: Thematic section. Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM): designing the next generation (Part 1) , March 2010 , pp. 5 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © Foundation for Environmental Conservation 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Antona, M., Biénabe, E.M., Salles, J.-M., Péchard, G., Aubert, S. & Ratsimbarison, R. (2004) Rights transfers in Madagascar biodiversity policies: achievements and significance. Environment and Development Economics 9: 825–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baker, M. & Kusel, J. (2003). Community Forestry in the United States: Learning from the Past, Crafting the Future. Washington, DC, USA: Island Press.Google Scholar
Barnes, J.I. & Macgregor, J. (2002) Economic efficiency and incentives for change within Namibia's community wildlife use initiatives. World Development 30: 667–681.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berkes, F. (1989) Common-property Resources. Ecology and Community-Based Sustainable Development. London, UK: Belhaven Press.Google Scholar
Berkes, F. (2004) Rethinking Community-based Conservation. Conservation Biology. 18 (3): 621–630CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berkes, F. (2007) Community-based conservation in a globalized world. PNAS 104 (39): 15188–15193.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blaikie, P. (2006) Is small really beautiful? Community-based natural resource management in Malawi and Botswana. World Development 34: 1942–1957.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brandon, K.E. & Wells, M. (1992) Planning for people and parks: design dilemmas. World Development 20: 557–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bray, D., Merino-Perez, L. & Barry, D., eds (2005) The Community Forests of Mexico. Austin, TX, USA: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Brechin, S., Wilshusen, P., Fortwangler, C. & West, P. (2002) Beyond the square wheel: toward a more comprehensive understanding of biodiversity conservation as a social and political process. Society and Natural Resources 15: 41–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brockington, D., Duffy, D. & Igoe, J. (2008) Nature Unbound. Conservation, Capitalism and the Future of Protected Areas. London, UK: Earthscan.Google Scholar
Brockington, D. & Igoe, J. (2006) Eviction for conservation. Conservation and Society 4: 424–70.Google Scholar
Brokensha, D., Warren, D.M. & Werner, O., eds (1980) African Rural Development: Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Development. Lanham, USA: University Press of America.Google Scholar
Brosius, P. (1999) Analyses and interventions: anthropological engagements with environmentalism. Current Anthropology 40: 277–309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brosius, P., Tsing, A, & Zerner, C. (1998) Representing communities: histories and politics of community-based natural resource management. Society and Natural Resources 11: 157–168.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brosius, P., Tsing, A. & Zerner, C. (2005) Communities and Conservation: Histories and Politics of Community-Based Natural Resource Management. New York, NY, USA: Altamira Press.Google Scholar
Bullock, R. & Hanna, K. (2008) Community forestry: creating or mitigating conflict in British Columbia? Society and Natural Resources 21: 71–85.Google Scholar
Campbell, L. & Vainio-Mattila, A. (2003) Participatory development and community-based conservation: opportunities missed for lessons learned? Human Ecology 31: 417–437.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carson, R. (1962) Silent Spring. Boston, MA, USA: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Chambers, R. (1983) Rural Development: Putting the Last First. London, UK: Longman.Google Scholar
Cocks, M., Dold, A. & Grundy, I. (2001) Challenges facing a community structure to implement CBNRM in the Eastern Cape South Africa. African Studies Quarterly 5 [www document]. URL http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v5/v5i3a4.htmGoogle Scholar
Conklin, B. & Graham, L. (1995) The shifting middle ground: Amazonian Indians and ecopolitics. American Anthropologist 97: 695–709.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cooke, B. & Kothari, U. (2001) Participation: The New Tyranny? London, UK: Zed Books.Google Scholar
Corson, C.A. (2008) Mapping the development machine: the US Agency for International Development's biodiversity conservation agenda in Madagascar. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA.Google Scholar
Cronon, W. (1995) The trouble with wilderness; or, getting back to the wrong nature. In: Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. Cronon, W., pp. 69–90. New York, NY, USA: W. W. Norton & Co.Google Scholar
Davis, E.J. (2008). New promises, new possibilities? Comparing community forestry in Canada and Mexico. BC Journal of Ecosystems and Management 9 (2): 11–25.Google Scholar
Dowie, M. (2009) Conservation Refugees. The Hundred-Year Conflict between Global Conservation and Native Peoples. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dressler, W. (2006) Co-opting conservation: migrant resource control and access to national park management in the Philippine uplands. Development and Change 37: 401–426.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Duffy, R. (2006) Non-governmental organisations and governance states: the impact of transnational environmental management networks in Madagascar. Environmental Politics 15: 731–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Escobar, A. (1998) Whose knowledge, whose nature? Biodiversity, conservation, and the political ecology of social movements. Journal of Political Ecology 5: 53–82.Google Scholar
Fabricius, C. & de Wet, C. (2002) The influence of forced removals and land restitution on conservation in South Africa. In: Conservation and Mobile Indigenous Peoples. Displacement, Forced Settlement, and Sustainable Development, ed. Chatty, D. & Colchester, M., pp. ?–?. New York, NY, USA: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Fabricius, C., Koch, E., Magome, H. & Turner, S., eds (2004) Rights Resources and Rural Development. Community-based Natural Resource Management in Southern Africa. London, UK: Earthscan.Google Scholar
Fals-Borda, O. (1987) The application of participatory research in Latin America. International Sociology 2 (4): 329–347.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilmour, D.A & Fisher, R.J. (1991) Villagers, Forests and Foresters: The Philosophy, Process and Practice of Community Forestry in Nepal. Kathmandu, Nepal: Sahayogi Press.Google Scholar
Hall, B. (1981) Participatory research, popular knowledge and power: a personal reflection. Convergence: An International Journal of Adult Education 14: 6–19.Google Scholar
Hayes, T.M. (2007) Does tenure matter? A comparative analysis of agricultural expansion in the Mosquitia forest corridor. Human Ecology 35: 733–747.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hayes, T.M. (2008) The robustness of indigenous common-property systems to frontier expansion: institutional interplay in the Mosquitia. Conservation and Society 6: 117–129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hilhorst, D. (2003) The Real World of NGOs: Discourses, Diversity and Development. London, UK & New York, NY, USA: Zed Books.Google Scholar
Horowitz, L. (1998) Integrating indigenous resource management with wildlife conservation: a case-study of Batang Ai National Park, Sarawak, Malaysia. Human Ecology 26: 371–403.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hufty, M. & Muttenzer, F. (2002) Devoted friends: the implementation of the convention on biological diversity in Madagascar. In: Governing Global Biodiversity, ed. Le Prestre, P. G., pp. 285–314. London, UK: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Hutton, J., Adams, W.M. & Murombedzi, J.C. (2005). Back to the barriers? Changing narratives in biodiversity conservation. Forum for Development Studies 2: 341–370.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Igoe, J. (2005) Global indigenism and Spaceship Earth. Globalization 2 (3): 377–390.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Igoe, J. & Brockington, D. (2007) Neoliberal conservation: a brief introduction. Conservation and Society 5 (4): 432–449.Google Scholar
Johnson, C. & Forsyth, T. (2002) In the eyes of the state: negotiating a rights-based approach to forest conservation in Thailand. World Development 30: 1591–1605.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kellert, S., Mehta, J., Ebbin, S. & Lichtenfeld, L. (2000) Community natural resources management: promise, rhetoric and reality. Society and Natural Resources 13: 705–715.Google Scholar
Le Roy, E., Bertrand, A. & Montagne, P. (2006) Gestion locale des ressources renouvelables et sécurisation foncière à Madagascar. In: L'Etat et la gestion locale durable des forêts en Afrique francophone et à Madagascar, ed. Bertrand, A., Montagne, P. & Karsenty, A., pp. 368–96. Paris, France: L'Harmattan.Google Scholar
Lewis, D. & Mosse, D. (2006) Encountering order and disjuncture: contemporary anthropological perspectives on the organization of development. Oxford Development Studies 34: 1–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Li, T. (2002) Engaging simplifications: community based resource management, market processes and state agendas in upland Southeast Asia. World Development 30 (2): 265–283.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Li, T. (2007) The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics. Durham, NC, USA: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
MacKenzie, J.M. (1988) The Empire of Nature. Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Marcus, R. (2001) Seeing the forest for the trees: integrated conservation and development projects and local perceptions of conservation in Madagascar. Human Ecology 29: 381–397.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marie, C.N., Sibelet, N., Dulcire, M., Rafalimaro, M., Danthu, P. & Carrière, S. (2009) Taking into account local practices and indigenous knowledge in an emergency conservation context in Madagascar. Biodiversity Conservation 18: 2759–2777.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marks, S. (2008) On the ground and in the villages: a cacophony of voices assessing a ’community-based’ wildlife program after 18 years. Munyamadzi Game Management Area Central Luangwa Valley Zambia. Unpublished Report for Mipashi Associates. Sand County Foundation/Bradley Fund for the Environment.Google Scholar
McCarthy, J. (2005) Devolution in the woods: community forestry as hybrid neoliberalism. Environment and Planning A 37: 99–1014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCarthy, J. (2006) Neoliberalism and the politics of alternatives: community forestry in British Columbia and the United States. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96: 84–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Montagne, P. & Ramamonjisoa, B. (2006) Politiques forestières à Madagascar: entre répression et autonomie des acteurs. Économie Rurale 294–295: 9–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Montagne, P., Razanamaharo, Z. & Cooke, A., eds (2007) Le Transfert de Gestion à Madagascar; dix ans d'efforts: Tanteza. Montpellier, France: CIRAD.Google Scholar
Mosse, D. (2005) Cultivating Development. An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice. London, UK: Pluto Press.Google Scholar
Murphree, M. (2004) Resource management in Africa: from whence to where? Keynote address to Breslauer Graduate Student Symposium, Berkeley, California, 5 March 2004 [www document]. URL http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/3mw325brGoogle Scholar
Nash, R. (1967) Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven, CT, USA: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Neumann, R. (1998) Imposing Wilderness. Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Neumann, R. (2001) Africa's ‘last wilderness’ reordering space for political and economic control in colonial Tanzania. Africa 71: 641–665.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Neumann, R. (2002) The postwar conservation boom in British Colonial Africa. Environmental History 7 (1): 22–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Neumann, R. (2004) Moral and discursive geographies in the war for biodiversity in Africa. Political Geography 23: 813–837.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ostrom, E. (1990) Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pagiola, S., Arcenas, A. & Platais, G. (2005) Can payments for environmental services help reduce poverty? An exploration of the issues and the evidence to date from Latin America. World Development 33 (2): 237–253.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peluso, N. (1993) Coercing conservation? The politics of state resource control. Global Environmental Change 3: 199–218.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pollini, J. (2007) Slash-and-burn cultivation and deforestation in the Malagasy rain forests: representations and realities. Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA.Google Scholar
Quarles van Ufford, P., Kumar, A. & Mosse, D. (2003) Interventions in development: towards a new moral understanding of our experiences and an agenda for the future. In: A Moral Critique of Development: In Search of Global Responsibilities, ed. van Ufford, P. Quarles & Giri, A., pp. 3–43. London, UK: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ryan, J. & Robinson, M. (1990) Implementing participatory action research in the Canadian north: a case study of the Gwich'n in language and cultural project. Culture 10: 57–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schroeder, R. (1999) Community, forestry and conditionality in the Gambia. Africa 69: 1–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shrestha, K.K. & McManus, P. (2007) The embeddedness of community forestry in Nepal. Journal of Smallscale Forestry 6: 273–290.Google Scholar
Shrestha, K. K. & McManus, P. (2008) The politics of community participation in natural resource management: lessons from community forestry in Nepal. Australian Forestry 71: 135–146.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simpson, L. (2001) Aboriginal peoples and knowledge: decolonizing our processes. The Canadian Journal of Native Studies 21: 137–148.Google Scholar
Soule, M. & Lease, G. (1995) Reinventing Nature? Responses to Post-modernism. Washington, DC, USA: Island Press.Google Scholar
Stevens, S. (1997) Conservation through Cultural Survival: Indigenous Peoples and Protected Areas. Washington, DC, USA: Island Press.Google Scholar
Stocks, A. (1996) The Bosawas Natural Reserve and the Mayangna of Nicaragua. In Traditional Peoples and Biodiversity Conservation in Large Tropical Landscapes, ed. Redford, K. & Mansour, J., pp. 1–30. Washington, DC, USA: America Verde Publications.Google Scholar
Stocks, A. (2003) Mapping dreams in Nicaragua's Bosawas Reserve. Human Organization 62: 344–356.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stocks, A., McMahan, B. & Taber, P. (2007) Indigenous, colonist and government impacts on Nicaragua's Bosawas Reserve. Conservation Biology 21: 1495–1505.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Toillier, A., Lardon, S. & Hervé, D. (2008) An environmental governance support tool: community-based forest management contracts (Madagascar). International Journal of Sustainable Development 11: 187–205.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vitug, M. (2000) Forest policy and national politics. In: Forest Policy and Politics in the Philippines. The Dynamic of Participatory Conservation. ed. Utting, P., pp. 11–40. Quezon City, Philippines: Anteneo De Manila University Press.Google Scholar
WCED (1987) Our Common Future. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Weber, J. (1995) L'occupation humaine des aires protégées à Madagascar: diagnostic et éléments pour une gestion viable. Natures Sciences Sociétés 3: 157–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
West, P. (2007) Conservation is our Government. The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea. Durham, NC, USA: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
West, P. & Brechin, S. (1991) Resident Peoples and National Parks: Social Dilemmas and Strategies in International Conservation. Tuscon, AZ, USA: University of Arizona Press.Google Scholar
Western, D. & Wright, M. (1994) Natural Connections: Perspectives in Community-based Conservation. Washington, DC, USA: Island Press.Google Scholar
Wilshusen, P., Brechin, S., Fortwangler, C. & West, P. (2002) Reinventing a square wheel: critique of a resurgent ‘protection paradigm’ in international biodiversity conservation. Society and Natural Resources 15: 17–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wittayapak, C. & Dearden, P. (1999) Decision-making arrangements in community-based watershed management in northern Thailand. Society and Natural Resources 12 (7): 673–691.Google Scholar