Implementing management for long-term sustainability - Conservation and Sustainable Use - page 256

Table 7.2 Decision-making under different institutional structures.
Note: Those who make the decisions do not necessarily map either to those who own the
resource or to those who use the resource. Common property, traditional use rights and
community management overlap to some extent.

Institutional Decision Issues

structure makers

Open access Individual Prone to over-exploitation, users have no

users incentive to conserve.

Private property Owner Inequity of distribution, lack of social control

over treatment of the resource. State may
legislate to prevent particularly damaging uses.

State-controlled State Potentially a lack of accountability so local

people have no say over use. Alternatively, lack
of enforcement (hence state may not control
use in practice, leading to de facto open access).

Common Collective, by Not always robust to external influences, such as

property a self-defined human population growth, market forces or

group imposition of other institutional structures

on top.

Traditional/ Traditional Ownership can be unenforceable, prone to

customary users alienation of rights, often unacknowledged by

use rights outsiders.

Community Community, Definition of community members and

management usually institutions often problematic, management

externally may override rather than legalise customary

defined rights.

Co-management State Degree of community involvement can be

community questionable, complexity of institutional

arrangement, definition of community.

management is collective—when some group of people together makes decisions
about management (Ostrom 1990). In a well-functioning democracy, there
should not in theory be a line between state and collective decision-making—the
state should be accountable to its people, and local concerns should feed up to
national decision-makers. But in practice the difference is clear. There are a range
of collective decision-making structures, which can crudely be categorised into
common property resources (where the resource is held by a group of people),
traditional or customary use rights (where use is regulated by local customs
which may be unwritten and hard to codify), and community management
(which is often relatively recent and has been set up with the involvement of the
state). A new approach to natural resource management is co-management . This
is where there is an explicit attempt to manage the resource as a joint venture