Ecological Literacy - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 168

even national bodies. This can open up economies of scale, thus bringing
about greater economic and ecological benefits. The emergence of such
federated groups with strong leadership also makes it easier for govern-
ment and non-governmental organizations to develop direct links with
poor and formerly excluded groups - although, if these groups were
dominated by the wealthy, the opposite would be true. This could result
in greater empowerment of poor households, as they better draw on public
services. Such interconnectedness between groups is more likely to lead
to improvements in natural resources than regulatory schemes alone. 41
But this raises further questions. How can policy-makers protect
existing programmes in the face of new threats? What will happen to
state-community relations when social capital in the form of local
associations and their federated bodies spreads to very large numbers of
people? Will the state colonize these groups, or will new broad-based
forms of democratic governance emerge? Important questions also relate
to the groups themselves. Good programmes may falter if individuals start
to 'burn out', feeling that investments in social capital are no longer paying.
It is vitally important that policy-makers and practitioners continue to
seek ways in which to provide support for the processes that both help
groups to form, and help them to mature along the lines that local people
desire and need, and from which natural environments will benefit.
There are also persistent concerns that the establishment of new
community institutions and users' groups may not always benefit the poor.
There are signs that these groups can all too easily become part of a new
rhetoric, without fundamentally improving equity and natural resources.
If, for example, joint forest management becomes the new order of the
day for foresters, then there is a very real danger that some will coerce local
people into externally run groups so that targets and quotas are met. This
is an inevitable part of any transformation process. The old guard adopts
the new language, implies that they were doing it all the time, and nothing
really changes. But this is not a reason for abandoning the new. Just because
some groups are captured by the wealthy, or are run by government staff
with little real local participation, does not mean that all are fatally flawed.
What it clearly shows is that the critical frontiers are inside of us.
Transformations must occur in the way we all think if there are to be real
and large-scale transformations in the land and the lives of people.
Concluding Comments
In Chapter 1, I wrote of the losses of knowledge about land and nature.
If we are to develop sustainable agricultural and food systems - even