Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
group's social, cultural and political aspects, which can have an impact on the way people
behave in terms of the decision to comply with institutional arrangements and contribute
in collective action (Smajgl
et al.
, 2003).
Wendel (2004) performed a study on institutions and common pool resources in Botswana
and used IAD analysis to examine how institutional arrangements affected the probability
of cattle owners to govern successfully the grazing land of Matsheng village in Kgalgadi
district of Botswana. The results showed that rangeland management in this village is
not sustainable. This is because of ongoing degradation of water and land, which hinders
cattle owners from investing in resource management. In terms of defined boundaries
in Matsheng, about 10% of the communal grazing land has been lost and this worsened
grazing pressures on communal land because of dual grazing rights, which allowed everyone
to use the rangeland. Monitoring and enforcements in this village does not involve the
resource users. Resource users are also not involved in the decision-making process and are
not consulted about decision planning.
10.8 Institutional arrangements and institutional performance
In order to find the correlations between the institutional arrangements and institutional
performance, Ostrom's (1990) correlation pattern was used. Thus, a qualitative assessment
was carried out to determine the strength of institutional arrangements on the management
of communal rangelands. Institutional performance helped in determining the effectiveness
of institutional arrangements. Each institutional arrangement was classified as strong, weak or
absent and the management of communal rangelands was considered strong, weak or absent
based on how many design principles were identified and how well they appeared to operate,
hence based on institutional performance. The management was considered strong where
all the institutional arrangements were strong, weak if between one and three institutional
arrangements were weak or absent. With more than three institutional arrangements being
weak or absent then management was considered absent (Quinn
et al.
, 2007)
Physical attributes of the resources as well as the perception of the community towards
a particular institutional arrangement were used to measure how strong or weak the
institutional arrangements were. That is, the strength of institutional arrangements was
evaluated based on how the respondents spoke about them. For example, for graduated
sanctions, the researcher asked if there were any fines or punishment given to violators of
rules. If there was evidence that this rule was present but not fixed, or there was a conflict
over it, then the sanctions as a rule was ranked weak. On the other hand, if there was
no evidence of conflict and these sanctions were clearly present, then the principle was
considered strong. In many cases therefore, conflict was regarded as the determining
factor over a principle, or evidence that the rule was regularly broken was used as a sign to
determine weakness of that rule.
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