Abstract
When we speak of long-term community resource management, it is necessary to qualify our terms. How is the community enacting resource management defined? How are communities practicing collective resource management relate to others in the commons, such as international development organizations and states? How do community practices shift in and out of focus as resource management strategies change over time? The chapter addresses these thematic questions through a series of case studies spanning continents and centuries. To understand participation in community resource management projects, we describe women-focused mangrove reforestation program in Madagascar alongside the management of bison-kin by the Salish and Kootenai on the National Bison Range in the USA. These cases extend the community into relations with state and non-state actors. Such dimension becomes the center of attention in examples from forest conservation in the Congo Basin and step-well water management in colonial India. The practices valued as community resource management today were not always thought well of and may be dismissed in the future. Changing public attitudes toward swidden agriculture is a case in point. Through the temporality of swidden, we conclude that changing attitudes reflect the confrontation between local and metropolitan visions of proper relations between society and environment. What is asked of community resource management is to determine these relationships through the promotion of specific practices, we are mindful who participates in decision-making and what is asked in every encounter.
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Notes
- 1.
The island’s largest mangrove forest; it measures at over 45,000 ha.
- 2.
Interview with Anja on June 23, 2017.
- 3.
Interview with Antsa on June 21, 2017.
- 4.
Interview with Mialy on June 24, 2017.
- 5.
Interview with Anja on June 18, 2017.
- 6.
See Charles Aubrey, “The Edmonton Buffalo Herd,” Forest and Stream, Vol. 59, July 5, 1902, p. 6; D.J. Benham; see Charles Aubrey, “The Edmonton Buffalo Herd,” Forest and Stream, Vol. 59, July 5, 1902, p. 6; D.J. Benham, “The Round-up of the Second Herd of Pablo’s Buffalo.” Edmonton Bulletin, November 8, 1907, pp. 9–11; W.A. Bartlett, Bon I. Whealdon, “I Will Be Meat for My Salish.” Salish Kootenai College Press, 2001, p. 69–82; John Kidder “Montana Miracle: It Saved the Buffalo,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, 15(2):52–67, Spring, 1965; see letter from Malcolm McLeod to Martin S. Garretson dated May 12, 1926, in American Bison Society Papers, Collection 1010, Wildlife Conservation Society Archives, New York.
- 7.
Whealdon, 2001; Letters between William T. Hornaday and Dr. Morton J. Elrod, American Bison Society Papers. Collection 1010. Wildlife Conservation Society Archives, New York; Daily Missoulian, May 29, 1907.
- 8.
Fourth Annual Report of the American Bison Society, 1991, pp. 1–8.
- 9.
Interview, Makokou, August 2, 2017.
- 10.
Interview, Libreville, July 4, 2017.
- 11.
Over ground rainwater ducts.
- 12.
Title translation, “The Ponds are Still Relevant”.
- 13.
The Central Public Works Department of India was instituted in 1854 CE. The Karnataka (erstwhile Mysore) PWD came into being in 1856 CE, although Mishra writes that it came into being in 1863 CE. However, the exact year of the PWD’s creation is not, from our perspective, as important as the historical trend it represents.
- 14.
See, for example, http://indiaifa.org/grants-projects/bhagwati-prasad.html (accessed: October 27, 2018). Bhagwati Prasad has recently published an incredibly graphic account of water-related conflict in contemporary peri-urban Delhi, The Water Cookbook Prasad (2011), http://sarai.net/the-water-cookbook/ (accessed: October 10, 2018).
- 15.
Historical-ecological studies of swidden agriculture communities have been rare, but when carried out, they have documented the practice of this system of agriculture for decades, even centuries, with no noticeable degradation of the environment (Lawrence and Schlesinger 2001).
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Dove, M.R., Johnson, A., Lefebvre, M., Burow, P., Zhou, W., Kanoi, L. (2019). Who Is in the Commons: Defining Community, Commons, and Time in Long-Term Natural Resource Management. In: Lozny, L.R., McGovern, T.H. (eds) Global Perspectives on Long Term Community Resource Management. Studies in Human Ecology and Adaptation, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15800-2_3
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