Notes - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 217

24 See D Bromley, 1992.
25 On the hierarchy of the commons, see Johnson and Duchin, 2000; Buck,
1998. Two things are important about this hierarchy of commons. Firstly, actions
at the lower levels influence the state and health of higher-level systems. Secondly,
it is easier to take collective action at lower levels. The number of stakeholders with
competing interests increases as we go up the hierarchy, which makes it more
difficult to achieve collective action. But agreements at the higher levels can filter
down to bring great changes. Ronald Oakerson has used a range of attributes
to differentiate commons. The first is the degree of jointness , which refers to
whether one person's use of the resource subtracts from its value for others. Such
'subtractability' may simply reduce the flow of benefits at one time, such as water
or fish; or it may reduce the total yield of the common, perhaps changing it
forever. The second is the degree of exclusion : how much access to the resource
is controlled or restricted. If there is no exclusion, the resource is open access. If
use is restricted to a defined group, then it is closed access. What is important
is the system through which conditions for exclusion are applied. The third is
the degree of divisibility of the commons: can the resource be divided among
private property holders? Where should boundaries be drawn in order to define
the resource and its users? The fourth is the rules and decision-making arrangements
specified by a group of people. These include operational rules - how much
should be taken or used, at what time and by whom, and the generalized norms
by which individuals limit their actions in favour of the collective benefit. See
Oakerson, 1992, p46
26 Singh and Bhattacharya, 1996.
27 This was predicted two decades ago by Olson, 1982.
28 For watershed groups, see Pretty, 1995b; IATP, 1998; Bunch, 2000;
Hinchcliffe et al, 1999; F Shaxson, S Hocombe, A Mascaretti, pers comm, 1999;
National Landcare Programme, 2000; Pretty and Frank, 2000.
29 For water users' groups, see de los Reyes and Jopillo, 1986; Bagadion and
Korten, 1992; Ostrom, 1990; Uphoff, 1992; Cernea, 1993; Singh and Ballabh,
1997; Uphoff, 1998; Shah, 1998.
30 For microcredit groups, see Fernandez, 1992; Gibbons, 1996; Grameen
Trust, passim .
31 For joint forest management, see Malla, 1997; Shrestha, 1997, 1998;
SPWD, 1998; Raju, 1998; Poffenberger and McGean, 1998. Note than in
India, the 25,000 joint forest management groups are managing 2.5 million
hectares of forest, but the total amount of forest listed in gazetteers is 80 million
hectares. There has been much progress, but still a long way to go.
32 Not every case of joint forest management (JFM) results in benefits for
all local people, particularly if the forest department simply uses the name of
JFM to exert control over local communities. Madhu Sarin recently documented
the case of the village of Pakhi in Uttar Pradesh, where a women's group had
sustainably managed a 240-hectare forest since the 1950s. But when the JFM
programme was initiated in 1999, the local men formed the joint management
group and ousted the women. Conflicts arose, and the forest department stepped